Search, especially with angel+bob mods, is frustrating

[wheezil]

Please forgive if this is already fixed, or I am missing something obvious. I posted this as a "gameplay help" but received no reply.

I love playing the angel+bob mod packs, but I find the item search to be incredibly frustrating. At this point I can't remember if vanilla has similar issues or if they are worse with the mods. The main problem is, the search often makes me type a near-exact match of the item name, along the way producing results that are ... baffling. For example, from crafting menu I type "iron". I'd kind of expect to see iron pipe, iron pipe-to-ground, and so on. Instead, what I get are two advanced crafting menus for making iron ore. On the logistics menu I type "titanium" and get a lot of answers but no "titanium plate". This behavior evolves during the game, presumably depending on what has been researched. Checking the "fuzzy search" UI option doesn't help.

If it would help track the issue, I can produce a list of searches that yield unhelpful and counter-intuitive results, but I'm hoping that someone already has seen this and knows what I mean. I've read in other posts about the game trying to keep from spamming the result list, but this seems to have gone too far the other direction. FWIW, FNEI and "what's it really used for" searches are much better, but they have their own quirks.

PS: Still playing v1.0 with 1.0. I'll upgrade if that helps!

Thanks
john

[ptx0]

Please forgive if this is already fixed, or I am missing something obvious. I posted this as a "gameplay help" but received no reply.

I love playing the angel+bob mod packs, but I find the item search to be incredibly frustrating. At this point I can't remember if vanilla has similar issues or if they are worse with the mods. The main problem is, the search often makes me type a near-exact match of the item name, along the way producing results that are ... baffling. For example, from crafting menu I type "iron". I'd kind of expect to see iron pipe, iron pipe-to-ground, and so on. Instead, what I get are two advanced crafting menus for making iron ore. On the logistics menu I type "titanium" and get a lot of answers but no "titanium plate". This behavior evolves during the game, presumably depending on what has been researched. Checking the "fuzzy search" UI option doesn't help.

If it would help track the issue, I can produce a list of searches that yield unhelpful and counter-intuitive results, but I'm hoping that someone already has seen this and knows what I mean. I've read in other posts about the game trying to keep from spamming the result list, but this seems to have gone too far the other direction. FWIW, FNEI and "what's it really used for" searches are much better, but they have their own quirks.

PS: Still playing v1.0 with 1.0. I'll upgrade if that helps!

Thanks
john

well, firstly v1.1 is stable and Angels and Bobs mods are not getting updates for v1.0

secondly, I either don't have this problem, or I don't understand what you're asking about. are you sure titanium is researched? if I type "titanium" it pulls up all sorts of titanium related items. how is the game supposed to know if you want to find a titanium chest or a titanium plate?

[kirazy]

I would suggest disabling fuzzy search. It can return some very unintuitive results if you don't understand how fuzzy search works, especially with A+B where many items have long descriptions which increases the probability of your search phrase existing in some form.

To recap how fuzzy search works: In Factorio, fuzzy search looks for every character in your search term, in order, in a given item/tech, etc.

So if you search for "circuit", it looks for if the letters c, i, r, c, u, i, t, in that order, existing at any point. For example, the description for one of angel's ore intermediates:

Can be refined and sorted for smeltable ores:

Lead ore
Nickel ore
Aluminium ore
Gold ore
Titanium ore
Tungsten Ore

As such, you get a lot of unrelated results with fuzzy search. Turning it off improves this, but then you have to be very on-point with what you're looking for. There's no inbetween.

[wheezil]

Let me give a concrete example (fuzzy search off). I want to logistic request "chemical furnace 4". So I bring up the logistic tab and start typing. I can get all the way through "chemical furnace" and not see it:

only after adding the space at the end do I see what I want:

Strangely, once the search works as expected, I can start over and now I see the chemical furnaces 1-4, but not the other furnace types.

The search must be keeping "selected category" in the search context, which influences what is visible. The category persists until it has no results, when another category is selected instead. Indeed, if I select the proper category, I see the result I want. But why, given all of the space in the search results, do I need to walk through the categories? Just show me all (or at least more) of the results at once. Is there an option for that?

[Klonan]

I don't really see anything here that is a bug,
The search seems to be working as expected

[wheezil]

the search seems to be working here as expected

One man's bug is another's missing feature is another's treasured behavior, and these things can be a matter of opinion.

I call it a bug because the interface makes me take the additional steps of clicking around the potentially numerous result categories to find the thing I am searching for. You see in one of the images above where I've typed "chem" there are six categories in the result. This is pointless, because the result grid has so much space and it could just show me all of the results at once, ranked by quality of match (presumably, quality of match is already available, because it is used currently to select the "best category"). Or call it an enhancement request, which I would title as "(option to) display all search results instead of hiding them behind categories". Or perhaps the behavior of showing all results until I select a specific category, at which point results are limited to that category.

It is true that someone more intimately familiar with the categories would not find this hard at all -- just pick the correct category. For me, in angel+bob I find that categories to be somewhat artificial along mod boundaries rather than function boundaries, so I've never internalized what they all mean.

Unless I am missing something? Is there a way to show all of the results at once? I swear I have seen what I am looking for in some youtube videos, so perhaps it once worked this way and was rescinded, or there is some mod that augments the search?

Thanks,
john

[Bilka]

I swear I have seen what I am looking for in some youtube videos, so perhaps it once worked this way and was rescinded, or there is some mod that augments the search?

You can turn off item groups/subgroups. In the main menu hold Ctrl + Alt and click on Settings, then click "The rest", uncheck use-item-groups to turn off the tabs (and use-item-subgroups if you don't want the row divisions either). Then confirm the change, go back into game and you'll be able to see all items in one tab instead of "somewhat artificial" item categories.

I play with both subgroups and groups disabled for speedruns, my inventory looks like this at the end of a run.

[wheezil]

Thanks, that's almost exactly what I was wanting
Perhaps these options could be more discoverable? I would have never found it on my own.
The hidden hotkey access is ... unexpected.
Cheers
john