Friday Facts #400 - Chart search and Pins

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-400

[aka13]

I love it, that's just so great! All of it, every part. Thank you guys, that was a cherry missing on top the user-configurable alerts all the time.

[kinnom]

For map search: please also add options for resource patches (especially in modded can some of the rarer resources be easy to overlook)

[RocketManChronicles]

I love having more to do with the map. Being able to search for locations is helpful, especially when with megabases! I also like that the tags are universal, and pins are unique to the player, good job with that!

[husnikadam]

FFF number 400! I was hoping for some kind of special, as episode number 500 will come in two years the soonest. (maybe an ambiguous easter egg on episode 404? )

Anyway, I will CTRL F the heck out of the game once I get the chance! <3

[Ghoulish]

Another neat addition!

[toprakkoyun]

When you search for things in Remote View, items' highlights can be better. I think it looks somewhat not pleasant to look at but very good feature. Overall all the features are very good thank you. Can't wait for 2.0

[Justderpingalong]

First of all: Oh my GOD searching the map is something I didn't know I needed.

Secondly:
What the heck are these trains doing here?!


Thirdly:
SPIDERTRON REMOTE IS NO LONGER AN ITEM CONFIRMED?!

[Jan5366x]

Search upgrades are very helpful

[Gergely]

Next on the list of features that make Factorio feel like an Integrated Development Environment. Absolutely fantastic.

[Terrahertz]

Great feature as always.

You might want to add a keyboard shortcut to open a cheat-sheet of all keyboard shortcuts, because I start to loose track of them and going into the options all the time might get annoying after a while, especially for new players.


Why are there 4 different instances of X entities missing the material for construction.?
Are they in different clusters on the map? Or is this one instance for every type? Or are the separated by the time they came up?

[Terrahertz]

Thirdly:
SPIDERTRON REMOTE IS NO LONGER AN ITEM CONFIRMED?!

FFF-379 You're welcome.

[Tooster]

Search:

- yeeey, at least! this was much needed
- I use FactorySearch mod all the time and I can't live without the other modes for searching, especially looking for things in inventories or entities. The "logistics" and "storage" are super useful when I search for an item I know I have but lost it somewhere in my base (e.g. it got taken by my bots). Sometimes I want to search EQ of trains or a grid of spidertrons as well. "Ground" is surprisingly often used when something breaks and items spill. Modes like "product" and "ingredient" are also very helpful. "Entity" is essential when I know I placed something somewhere but can't remember where, or simply want to find parts of base I forgot to upgrade. "Request" helps me in debugging logistic networks.
- I also very like how it draws in-world temporary boxes around each entity it found. It really helps if you for example misconfigurate one machine in a unit.

As for the Pins, Tags and Pings: I like the pins, but I don't like it that pins, pings and tags are three different things representing essentially the same thing — a location on the map — just with different options. It is similar to how confusing "game" and "player" (?) blueprints currently work. I think that those three should be unified and reworked. Conceptually, the tags and pins, just like you wrote, differ only in their visibility for others. I think that you missed the mark in thinking that Tags have to be something different than Pins and why do they have to be shared by everyone on the map. I would much rather prefer just Pins for all of the three, with the following settings:
- category: player/force/global. It should be easy to change an existing pin's "shared" status without recreating between tag and pin. Also, It wouldn't hurt for tags to have names. Global tags are also something that shouldn't really be managed by anyone else than someone with permissions. The pins under certain categories should also be grouped by player/force/global category and foldable. With buttons for hiding a certain group of tags, you could also make it more readable — a player could click one button for the whole group to quickly hide and show pins, just like layers in the graphical program.
- visibility: disabled/map-only/compass, where only "compass" shows indicator with direction on the edge of screen
- temporary pins: just like pins, but they would benefit from all the futures of pins, i.e. displaying on the edge of the screen or current settings for choosing force they are visible to (set in player settings for example?). They would be temporary and in similar way to how temporary train stations are added.

Additionally, it should be also possible to ping an already existing pin - this would make it easier to ping some place without having to open the map view on it, and it would also print additional informations for others — they could add pinged pin to their own list if they want to, print icon,world and name of the location.

As for the alerts — please, make the planet "headers" more distinguished from the entries, and make it possible to collapse the group of alerts from a planet.

[Terrahertz]

Secondly:
What the heck are these trains doing here?!

Good eye!

I could think of a couple of things:

• Hovertrains, obviously thats the correct one

• Unfinished construction, altough the bottom one is pointing directly into a drone port

• The devs are messing with us

• This is part of some weird circuit logic thing

[AntiElitz]

The map search is amazing. I also want that for my local supermarket when I look for that ONE product I just cannot find.

[Justderpingalong]

Thirdly:
SPIDERTRON REMOTE IS NO LONGER AN ITEM CONFIRMED?!

FFF-379 You're welcome.

D'oh... I had already forgotten about that...

[Klonan]

Why are there 4 different instances of X entities missing the material for construction.?
Are they in different clusters on the map? Or is this one instance for every type? Or are the separated by the time they came up?

Oh right I forgot to mention it, the alerts are grouped by position, so 20 damage alerts for 1 wall being attacked don't spam up the list

[nixxquality]

On the subject of map pins and such, I am reminded of a often ignored "feature" in Victoria 2. It would let you draw little arrows and text on the map and they could be visible to players you shared it with. You could even save and load different plans. Now, the arrows themselves did absolutely nothing at all, but it might be nice to have something like this in Factorio. Random markers only get you so far.

42960_20240301135229_1.png (2.16 MiB) Viewed 8474 times

[Tooster]

On the subject of map pins and such, I am reminded of a often ignored "feature" in Victoria 2. It would let you draw little arrows and text on the map and they could be visible to players you shared it with. You could even save and load different plans. Now, the arrows themselves did absolutely nothing at all, but it might be nice to have something like this in Factorio. Random markers only get you so far.

It could be nice to be able to draw over the map and share it with others. We could draw sketches of factory plans this way and cooperate more easily. We could even plan the shape of factory ahead on single, which would be nice.

[mmmPI]

Nice ! the alert category is the one i think i will use the most.

Searching the factory for buildings producing X or Y i find appealing too, but it's going to be dificult to follow/locate the assemblies that can change receipes from combinators.

Searching for spidertron and pinning it, is great ! space platform or vehicule in general, map tags , but also a one time "player" search could be interesting, in public multiplayer to locate someone else that would be not familiar with the game pings, so you can know what this player is seeing/ where it is. You may not want to have every other player pinned all the time in public server.

Searching for a planet by its name to see the landing pad might sound silly when you have 5 planets, but ctrl+F plus a few letters then press enter is something that i would use to avoid scrolling a list that would also contain the different spaceplatform and that could be quite long ( like list including trains). Not sure if spaceplatform are more like train, or more like planet or none of that, if naming them is allowed. But i imagine i would often be willing to check if one or another platform that is travelling is doing well, has arrived yet, and if it actually contain the thing i'm waiting for or if i forgot something still. Same i could be doing for trains.

I don't think it's confusing to have map tags, pins and pings as they serve different purpose, but i wanted to say that even after thousands of hours there is still 50% risk that i take my armor away and drop half my inventory when i try to ping it in the chat to show the grid. The 50% when i don't are because i try to link another item first to make sure muscle memory is not betraying me.

I'm not sure i understood correctly if you can "pin" a "ping", if a player put a location in the chat say "let's meet here", you could [alt] right click and it would become a pinned location and you'd be indicated its position relative to you. That is a nice feature if that is the case, if not it's a suggestion inspired by my misunderstanding