No more Plain Spaghetti Circuit Hell / Paint and name those damn combinators, silly

[EditorRUS]

Combinators are basic. Not only that, but they are also pretty bulky and take lots of space. And they are extremely homogeneous in more advanced builds.
And it only gets worse.

It should be no surprise to you that over time you accumulate so many blueprints of combinator elements that you forget some details about them. Some even try to cram as much combinatoring goodness in as little space as possible creating some truly beautiful unholy abominations that are incredibly complicated to understand for someone else.

And why? Because the damn thing is too plain for the eyes and you don't see where the inputs or outputs are.

Hence I propose a simple solution to this: an ability to color code and name important combinators. Now aside from it being amusing to paint elements to make a rainbow and write or even draw obscenities on a field of combinators (of course it will happen), you also get an ability to highlight the inputs and the outputs in your builds and probably even some inner elements such as OR/AND gates or pulsers or clocks or anything you want.

Naming should be used to, well, name inputs and outputs and describe their function in general.

Also, you can already paint trains however color you want, so probably reusing this interface is a good idea.

[Yoyobuae]

I like.

When posting a combinator circuit and I find myself having to explain how it works I end up having to use a paint program to put labels on top of the screenshot and color coding it to maybe help someone understand.

Having it in-game would be very helpful, for the circuit creator and others as well. Right now it's just not possible to get an idea "at a glance" about what a circuit does (unlike other factorio contraptions).

[loganb]

Have you tried the Sticknotes mod?

[Deadly-Bagel]

The vanilla alternative is you could have something like bricks around the input combinator(s), hazard concrete around the output(s).

[Yoyobuae]

The vanilla alternative is you could have something like bricks around the input combinator(s), hazard concrete around the output(s).

Circuits can be more complex (way more complex) than simple input and output. So unless colored concrete is added to vanilla...