[0.17.25] Wrong status of entities

[MoeGraph]

Multiple entities/structures are displaying the wrong status on that mouseover window/tooltip window:

(Non electric) Furnace: "No power" means no electric power, right? How about "No fuel" (like boilers)? (Same with burner inserter and mining drill)

(all) Furnaces: Status when out of components: "No recipe" is wrong since the don't require one. "Item ingredient shortage" is more fitting and also available.

Pumpjack: "Working" when standing still because of full pipes.

Inserters: Sometimes they stop before picking up something and wait for space at the destination. See Picture for the wrong status. But it could be right if there would be a filtered slot in the chest...

Nuclear reactor: Missing status?

Pump: Missing status?

Heat exchanger: "No fuel" when below 500°C. Even while heating up.

Thanks

[Rseding91]

The "no power" one is accurate. It has no power because it lacks fuel. The source of power is irrelevant - just that it doesn't have any. The others are nit-picking so if someone else wants to go mess with them they can but I'm going to put this into minor issues.

[Ultros]

I'd argue that a number of these go beyond nitpicking, since they have a material impact on how one troubleshoots a bottleneck in production.

For furnaces, a beginner may be confused and attempt to set a recipe on the furnace.

For pumpjacks, the production error message should be unified with other fluid producers such as oil refineries and chemical factories to show that they are not producing due to a fluid production overflow.

The inserter issue actually confused me a number of times while trying to troubleshoot a train with reserved slots. The source items were clearly there, but the inserter still had a held item which was above the reserved slots limit and it displayed that error. Improving the error message would aid troubleshooting in those cases.

The heat exchanger error message is also confusing. I believe that the message is due to it being a reskin of the boiler, which does take in fuel, but the heat exchanger uses "heat" as fuel through the heat pipes, and as a result the error message should clarify that it's because the heat pipe is not at a sufficient temperature, since it would otherwise point incorrectly towards the reactor being at fault.

[m44v]

Heat exchanger: "No fuel"

I going to second this, I spent a significant time trying to figure out why not all my heat exchangers were working, but in the end they were generating steam just fine, is just that the status message is unreliable.

Either fix the status or remove it.

[Rseding91]

Heat exchanger: "No fuel"

I going to second this, I spent a significant time trying to figure out why not all my heat exchangers were working, but in the end they were generating steam just fine, is just that the status message is unreliable.

Either fix the status or remove it.

I'm sorry you feel that way but for the majority of the players the status seems to be helpful so it's going to be staying. it solves 90%+ of the confusion for new players that don't get how the game mechanics work. Removing it wouldn't make the game better. Spending weeks speghetifying the code to try to account for all of the edge cases will still lead to some players not understanding what some of the cases are and in the end not everyone will understand everything and we still won't have made the game better.

[Therenas]

I'd like to argue for improving this status display, even though Rseding said it wasn't worth it.

Now it is true that the minor flaws are not super important for players. However, you can read the status through the API. This is really great for making a mod that uses this status to analyse certain entities and make statistics and the like. Well, it would be if the output is completely reliable, which it isn't at the moment. There are several of these cases that are a bit wonky, and it would be great if they could be addressed, because I think you could make some great mods using it.

You can probably imitate/correct some of these in script yourself by looking at the inserters/boilers/etc and the entities around it, but that would be much worse for performance and pretty janky. So a built-in solution would be great, especially since we're so close already. I noticed several of these oddities, I'll try to compile a list of them, so a dev that would want to address this won't have to do all the legwork.

[Thousand1k]

Just a little bump to this.

I recall in a previous version that inserters would say "Disabled by controller" when wired to something that controls it. The past month or two the inserters now only either say "Waiting for space in destination" or "Waiting for " something else I forget.

The "Disabled by controller" is a good check to see if the logic controlling the arm is working or not. I can still visually watch the machine work, but I feel like the status was working great before. Hopefully this gets a tweak one day!

[ickputzdirwech]

Just to let people know the following issues are fixed:

Inserters: Sometimes they stop before picking up something and wait for space at the destination. See Picture for the wrong status. But it could be right if there would be a filtered slot in the chest...

This was fixed in 1.1.7 (see 93188)

(Non electric) Furnace: "No power" means no electric power, right? How about "No fuel" (like boilers)? (Same with burner inserter and mining drill)

(all) Furnaces: Status when out of components: "No recipe" is wrong since the don't require one. "Item ingredient shortage" is more fitting and also available.

Furnaces have the status "No fuel" instead of "No power" and "No ingredient" instead of "No recipe" now.

Nuclear reactor: Missing status?
[...]
Heat exchanger: "No fuel" when below 500°C. Even while heating up.

Nuclear reactors have statuses like "Working" and "No fuel" now and heat exchangers have status "Low temperature" when below 500°C.


The following things are still an issue:

Pumpjack: "Working" when standing still because of full pipes.
[...]
Pump: Missing status?

Pumps got the status "Working" but will show it regardless if they are actually pumping or not. Same applies to offshore pumps.