A Resource Scanner

[Peter34]

I think the best way to enable players to keep track of how much ore is left in an ore patch, or how much oil flow is left in a cluster of Oil patches, is to add an Ore Scanner to the game.

It's one building, 1x1 or 2x2 footprint (it needs to be able to fit in between 2 Electric Mining Drills spaced 2 tiles apart - you could make it 2x3 tiles but it's my understanding that the devs have come to dislike non-square buildings), and when you plonk it down, it has a default range, 15 tiles.

You need to open its interface and tell it which resource to scan for, out of Iron Ore, Copper Ore, Stone, Coal or Crude Oil, or of course any resources added by mods (Uraninite and Flourite from the Atomic Power mod, e.g.). In this interface you can also change the range, in increments of 5, from as low as 5 to as high as 25, 30 or even 35, depending on what the game engine can support without lag.

The Resource Scanner then keeps an internal list of each tile with resources on it, and runs through a few of them every 1/60s "tick", and when it's done it totals up the count and outputs it to the Wire system, where the number can then be processed further in Combinators and used for other things, as desired.

The limited range is to make sure that each Scanner scans only one ore patch, so that you simply plonk down one per patch you're exploiting.

I think this should be fairly early game, costing red/green potions to invent, and require nothing fancier than Green Circuits to build. It could require a Radar as one of its components.

The main problem is with how it can/should report oil. I mea, total percentage of all patches within range? Or total percentage divided by number-of-patches to get an average? It's a lot less clear-cut than when dealing with ore.

Or, in fact, a better solution to the oil issue might be a "Flow-Meter" device attached to a Pipe or replacing a Pipe, and measuring the average amount of Oil that flows through. As this value gradually drops, the player becomes alerted to his cluster of Crude Oil patches running out.

So in this way, the Resource Scanner becomes an Ore Scanner, which should be much simpler to implement.

[Vin]

Oil has a non-percentage richness value. It's just not displayed to the player through normal gameplay.

As far as the feature goes, I think an ore scanner as an upgrade for a radar would be a great addition. You should need one for each ore patch and placing it down will total the richness of all ore tiles that are connected by shared borders with the tile(s) that the scanner is placed on. Then the scanner would show how much ore is left in the patch as an "Expected Resources" the same way each individual miner will.

Bonus Round: Make the scanner connectable to the circuit network with remaining resources as an output. That would open up a ton of different possibilities.

For anyone who wants a similar feature right now, there is a fan update of the Resource Monitor mod over in the unofficial updates section of the mods subforum. I think it should be a base game feature that flows more seamlessly with gameplay rather than the mod's implementation, but it does exist.

[ssilk]

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 20&t=13809 [0.12.0]Resource Monitor Mod unofficial update 0.5.4(Fix 1)