Factorio Forums

I am often frustrated when my factory has cascading failures because I missed an important situation, such as a coal mining drill depleting, boilers deactivating, and my entire factory going dark.

I wish I could built a Smart Notifier machine, and have it display an arbitrary message in my game UI when my coal buffer boxes have less than 100 coal in them.

This would also be useful for notifying me when my crude oil production finally tapers away, or when my copper and iron supply lanes are failing to keep up with demand, or at any level of intermediate goods production.

I like this idea because:
* It helps avoid frustration from overwhelming attentional demands in big factories
* It uses existing game concepts (conditional behavior based upon logistic network counts)
* Is a new way to automate new aspects of my existing factory
* Is a small amount of new "stuff" on the map that has to be built and managed
* I only get notifications on what is important to me

I think sslik already made some suggestions in that area, but yeah -- generally, it would be cool to implement some "purely visual" indicators that can work with logistic networks.

The most simple idea is -- make a "smart lamp" (probably also a colored one), that can be wired to logistic networks. Voila, you can now have visual indicators across your base!
Having UI notifications could be an "advanced tech" of those indicators, as with it you can receive information wherever you are.

This is on our list. Together with expanding the signal system (more inputs, better recombination).