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I like how the atomic bomb makes a big dead spot on the ground when it's fired, as if to emphasize that such brutal destruction ought not be forgotten.

But why, oh why, does it also make a big dead spot on the map?

The problem is the map renders the ground material, which is what the nuke changes (hence you can make an island when firing it in a lake).
To change this, the nuke would need to either use a different method of changing the impact point material (very hard in Factorio, although maybe lots of decoratives) or to somehow not render that material on the map (also kind of hard).
I personally find I like the craters in map view - it makes an area look really destroyed, but that might just be me.

The nuke trigger effect permanently changes the affected ground tiles to a different tile called "nuclear-ground" as well as lot of other temporary decorative effects. You can change the map colour of that tile extremely easily, but the question is, to what? If you make it green on the map like grass tiles it will be green in the middle of deserts, if you make it yellow-beige like deserts it will look yellow in the middle of grass fields, etc. etc.

Kyralessa wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 12, 2021 3:18 pm

I like how the atomic bomb makes a big dead spot on the ground when it's fired, as if to emphasize that such brutal destruction ought not be forgotten.

But why, oh why, does it also make a big dead spot on the map?

I agree that the spots look really bad on the map, but I acknowledge that it would be tricky to fix from a technical point of view.

I agree. I don't like these spots, they look like .

Thanks, BicycleEater and Deadlock989; that makes sense as to why it's like this.

Still, I imagine the Factorio team has tackled much more difficult technical challenges than having nuked ground not look like nuked ground on the map.

Poking around in data\base\prototypes\entity\atomic-bomb.lua

Looks like all you need to do is snip / mod the following out of prototype "atomic-rocket" ( right under comment -- Rocket PROJECTILE )
{
type = "set-tile",
tile_name = "nuclear-ground",
radius = 12,
apply_projection = true,
tile_collision_mask = { "water-tile" },
},

The problem with making to look different on the map and in the game is that it introduces large inconsistencies in the game's model, it would have to have a special system for tracking what to put there, e.g. if an assembling machine is placed on the crater, the game needs to render it in the map view, but know what to put there when it is removed. This is also difficult if the tile is covered with another, then uncovered (e.g. if the player concreted, then cleared the crater). It might be possible to manage all of this, but it would introduce loads of weird potential bugs around how this gets stored, particularly as it is a relatively small feature (at least in the grand scheme of things).
This is particularly relevant as there is almost nothing (if not actually nothing) specific to the nuke in the game engine. If there was nuke specific code in the game engine, then making that mod accessible would be hard, it might have issues, and might be surprisingly hard to implement, as the game engine might have no concept of colouring a tile differently.
The best bet would be to make several different tiles for nuke-crater, one for each base tile, with the same map colour as that tile, and use them for whatever tile was there originally. The problem is that this would not work for modded tiles, and there is a limit to the number of tile types the game supports, and this would use a lot of that limit.
It also raises a few questions:
- What to do in the case of hand-laid tiles: use the tile underneath, or the one on top?
- What to do about water: use the nuclear-crater, or leave it as is? If it is left as-is, then a lake could be filled in with nukes, but not look like it is.

I am almost certain that the devs will not implement something like this, as (as I said before) it would not be a huge feature, and not that many people are that annoyed by it - if you really don't like it, then place stone brick over the hole.
The different tiles approach could work as a mod, and shouldn't be that hard to do (I probably won't make it, as I don't care about the issue at hand, but you could put in a mod request), give or take weird issues about other mods, water tiles, and hand laid tiles. Beyond this, the craters can be removed entirely with a mod, which also wouldn't be that hard to make (in fact it would be a one-liner).

EDIT:
In fact there is already a request to remove the whole crater:
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=93383&p=531748#p531748

Maybe the spot would look better if it were somewhat more nuanced. Right now it's basically a perfect oval and it's all the same color, or at least it seems to be.

If it had more ragged edges and more color variation, maybe it'd be easier to accept as a new permanent part of the landscape?

I'm not saying it shouldn't look like a bomb hit it, but maybe it's a little too geometric right now.

Why not fix the land with some landfill? Bulldoze the waste, replace with good land. It'd be a simple and handy mod.

place concrete over it