Friday Facts #426 - Resource search & Assembler GUI improvements

[Agamemnon]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

Do you have any particular IP in mind here? Only thing I can think of atm is Iron Harvest and I am sure their mechs run on oil.

Yes I do indeed, its called real life! The biggest Mechs that currently exist on Earth are German Coal Excavators, that harvest the shittiest Lignite Coal that you could possibly burn in a Coal Power Plant, in order to irradiate the surroundings with radioactive Carbon Isotopes that are much more potent than any Nuclear Waste!

Argh... while the sentiment is agreeable, this is layers over layers of gross misinformation which would take several paragraphs to unpack! But I'll restrain myself from peeling this onion.

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Back to the QoL improvements: While on the topic of recipe tooltips - would it be possible to have an option to show rates in multiples of [color]-beltlanes or cargowagons/minute instead of items/second?

[Rebmes]

Why u guys keep saying "running around"? That tight ring of turrets says flyers, to me. Maybe a dragon xD

Anyway, gorgeous FFF post, interesting comments, thanks all ^^

[BattleFluffy]

What happens to that resources menu if there is a patch of mixed ores?

[Ranakastrasz]

What happens to that resources menu if there is a patch of mixed ores?

Comma sperated list?
Better test it with dangerorus or chaos ores or whatever mod it was where absolute everything is a shallow, random ore patch.

In the base game it is fine, as the numbers are normally nice and round

And what do you call 0.5, 0.75, and 1.25?

Sure, there is technically a 1 in there, but that is chemical plant crafting speed, and refinery, lab rocket silo. And player naturally, which explains why you don't just double or quadruple the values.

As for recipe work costs, 0.5 is the default, with an integer, usually even, for everything else.

In all seriousness, the inability to quickly eyeball rough ratios, to make sure you don't have a 10:1 bottleneck or something ridiculous like that, is annoying, so I use factory planning mods. I am glad for this change.

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Hoping on combat rebalance news. Something like useful shotguns, nerfed flamethrower turrets(maybe gun filter option that checks for target time and count nearby, so we can make it cost more oil) and removing double turret scaling.

[Terrahertz]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

Do you have any particular IP in mind here? Only thing I can think of atm is Iron Harvest and I am sure their mechs run on oil.

Yes I do indeed, its called real life! The biggest Mechs that currently exist on Earth are German Coal Excavators, that harvest the shittiest Lignite Coal that you could possibly burn in a Coal Power Plant, in order to irradiate the surroundings with radioactive Carbon Isotopes that are much more potent than any Nuclear Waste!

Ok, when I hear the term Mech I always imagine a walker type vehicle, not chain tracks.
As far as I know old industrial coal boilers, are treated like nuclear waste when the powerplant is decommissioned, so at least the authorities are somewhat aware of the problem.

[GhostPirate]

Can you merge patches in the search if they're close enough together, say, less than 5 tiles? Not sure how much harder this makes your "connected blobs" algorithm, but it would be nice not to see fragments of patches clutter the view as we mine out the middle of a bigger patch.

[Saphira123456]

EPIC update, this is some SOLID Quality of Life stuff. I still say a lot of this stuff belonged in 1.0 because of just how much easier it would make the base game. Can't wait to play vanilla with the new buildings and quality of life - I'll be able to eliminate the biggest mods I currently play with like the flare stacks mod and the recycler mod.

Why u guys keep saying "running around"? That tight ring of turrets says flyers, to me. Maybe a dragon xD

Did someone say dragons?

If there's dragons, please let enemies be tameable/friendly. (I know there are mods that give you a pet Biter even when enemies are disabled. Space Exploration is one of these.)

Side note: I would absolutely love a "Friendly NPC" mod that gives you some extremely early NPC friends or the ability to make them. It's lonely out there in space, especially when you have no one to play with, so a class in How To Train Your Alien (HTTYA) would be a good thing for us soloists.

[hoho]

Would be nice to be able to sort the search results by size of resource patch and distance to current player/viewport

[Usul]

On another note: Yummy Value? Really? Is there a competition within Wube to see whether someone can get more name related complaints than quality generated or something?

Yeah. And though Kovarex wrote that, due to the amount of criticism, they "would reconcider the quality names if good alternative suggestions were provided", they never did, nor follow up on that statement, allthough plenty of good suggestions where made back in September. They just kept showing the RPG fantasy names in FFF screenshots, making it clear that they don't care and the silly names are staying.

[rifton007]

It is true that it is very difficult to find your way on the map with current Factorio, especially at the end of the game.
Would it be possible to provide a toggle to change the theme of the map between colored map or shade of gray.

• Only display the players and our infrastructure in color.
• Grayscale terrain.
• Trees may not be displayed as they are not very useful on the map.

I quickly made a prototype of the map theme for you.

What do you think?

[numzero]

I just noticed something, whatever creatures run around on Vulcanus are probably quite terrifying, otherwise how would you justify that packed ring of turrets around the coal patch:

how would you justify not protecting the mine to the top right at all whatsoever if they were truly terrifying? xD

The one surrounded with lava?

[Pegu_pls]

I could Imagine that the search function might impact the performance, if a lot of the map is revealed and if the function needs to scan the whole revealed part every time.

I don't know anything about programming or how the search function is coded, but I had an idea for optimization, if needed.

After doing the first search, the game remembers which chunks had ore inside them and only checks those in future searches, so it doesn't need to check the whole map again, because ore obviously doesn't suddenly respawn.
If another search is started the game only checks the newly revealed chunks and the already known 'orechunks'.

Maybe something like that is already implemented or isn't needed, but I wanted to share my thoughts anyway.

[yngndrw]

Loving all of the QoL improvements.

I'd like to see some extra info on inserters, such as the estimated maximum throughput in their current configuration and a visual indication as to which side of the belt they will insert onto.

[Loewchen]

I could Imagine that the search function might impact the performance, if a lot of the map is revealed and if the function needs to scan the whole revealed part every time.

The search does not scan the surface. The map tags will be created when the part of the map is created and the search just looks for your string in a list containing the tags.

[Pegu_pls]

I could Imagine that the search function might impact the performance, if a lot of the map is revealed and if the function needs to scan the whole revealed part every time.

The search does not scan the surface. The map tags will be created when the part of the map is created and the search just looks for your string in a list containing the tags.

Thanks for clarification :)
It seems I misunderstood the FFFs description.

[malecord]

I just noticed something, whatever creatures run around on Vulcanus are probably quite terrifying, otherwise how would you justify that packed ring of turrets around the coal patch:

how would you justify not protecting the mine to the top right at all whatsoever if they were truly terrifying? xD

The one surrounded with lava?

Why should it be a continuous line of turrets and not some kind of laser fences or equivalent?

[GregoriusT]

I could Imagine that the search function might impact the performance, if a lot of the map is revealed and if the function needs to scan the whole revealed part every time.

The search does not scan the surface. The map tags will be created when the part of the map is created and the search just looks for your string in a list containing the tags.

follow up question that will probably be answered with "surely the devs thought of that", but multi-chunk ore vein size, how is that handled if it is "on creation" and the ores are a noise function.

[Loewchen]

follow up question that will probably be answered with "surely the devs thought of that", but multi-chunk ore vein size, how is that handled if it is "on creation" and the ores are a noise function.

It updates the values when resources are extracted, so it should just as easily update when resources are "added", or it just creates resource neighboring chunks right away. Mods already create tags for resources (and with Factory Search you can even search for them) so I have no doubt the vanilla integration will be at least on par.

[bmmtstb]

Defending coal-patches

For the question about the Defenses around the coal and none around the "new stuff" (is it tungsten from fff#387 ?), these are my ideas:

• the new stuff seems to be more or less submerged in a lava lake, maybe its not possible to build walls there?
• maybe the "biters" don't care about the new stuff and just don't like getting their coal eaten because it produces more pollution. And here pollution can again be sth completely new as learned in last fff. Maybe its CO2 again, but maybe its pure carbon or sth completely different

Ressource Search
I guess its just not mentioned, but are the patches ordered by distance to the current position?

Pinning Resource Patches
It was written, that one can pin resource patches, but I don't think I want to "always" pin patches. I think it would be better for me to have conditions till they get displayed. E.g. display only if amount of coal in coal-patch-1 < 100k. This could reduce the number of things on screen that aren't really necessary...

The other thing would be, now that ore-patches can be occupied, to get alerts like "one coal-patch that is occupied is depleted"

Recipe crafting throughput tooltip
I really appreciate it, thanks! In the last year(s) I have been playing modded factorio and I always needed FNEI or similar just to check whether the stuff I just build made sense.

Is it possible to get the production per second of multiple machines easily? If you have all the necessary components that would be a nice feature to have, at least for me.

Assembler recipe info
I always found the large empty space in the crafting info of an assembling machine disturbing. It was so wasted. Nice that you found a useful thing to put there.
Did someone test, whether the machine tooltip could fit there too? It still looks like there is some empty space there...

[georgejohn12]

I do like the resource search function, and the pin function. There is one use case that I'm relying on, where I have a pin in my resources, all of them, with the INITIAL resource value. So now, when I mouse over a resource patch, it lists the current amount, and I can see the max amount it used to be and make decisions based on that.
Would it be possible to have the automated pin add a max value at the end? Something like "Copper Ore 125K/324K" or similar? Maybe have this as a toggleable setting for anyone who doesn't want to see max values?
Thank you!