Items per minute under second to help with values

[erkki772]

Items per second is pretty cool, so why not having minutes too? That would help a lot of end tier items needs

[BlueTemplar]

What do you mean by "end tier item needs", and why would minutes be more convenient than seconds ?

But then, it would be nice if the player could pick one or the other, and everywhere displays in the game to follow that setting :

For instance, annoyingly the Production values are currently still in /minute
(and wrongly abbreviated as /m rather than /min — /m means 'per meter'),
while almost everything else in the game is in /second
(including power, since Watts are Joules / second — so Watts should be replaced by Joules / minute there too).

[Koub]

why would minutes be more convenient than seconds ?

I get a better eyeballing of how much of an item I get over time when I have it in items/minute.
Visualising 0.16 items per second isn't straightforward to me. Yeah, I know that 0.16 is 1/6th, so it's 1/6th of an item every second, so 1 item per 6 seconds, so around 10 items per second, but that's quite a lot of mental gymnastic, and it it easy, because I know 0.16 is around 1/6th.

Whereas 9.6 items/minute, I can picture it clearly.

[BlueTemplar]

I guess that for this specific case, having both wouldn't be too much clutter ?
Or allowing the player to configure it to display one, the other, or both ?

( Per-second values are also important for inserter ratios, see also :
[0.17.79] Change tooltips units for inserter rotation speeds from °/s to turns/s
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=80162 )

[ncc1702]

Interface option in settings would be the best solution for this imo

[P.E.T.A.R.]

Yes please!

I end up calculating myself anyways instead of using the tooltip.
The issue with items per second is a lack of precision as you would need 3 decimal points for such productions that make/consume an item in 0.625/s, or even 4 digits for 0.3125/s, and etc. Inevitably it gets rounded up or down and errors accumulate a lot when you have a lot of machines.

Either both i/s and i/min in the tooltip or an option to choose one or the other.

[BlueTemplar]

Ah, this is a consequence of significant figures having more inaccuracy around 1 compared to 9 ?

In OP's example, 0.16 is often assumed (incorrectly in practice IRL, but that's a whole other discussion) to have an inaccuracy of ±0.01, which is a whopping -6.66..% to +6.25% of inaccuracy,
while 9.6 with the same ±0.1 (same because it's also of 2 significant figures) is only a -1.05...% to +1.04...% of inaccuracy !

Still, doesn't this call more for a separate suggestion to add a 3rd significant figure to these numbers ?

[dialer]

I think displaying the reciprocal (seconds/item instead of items/second), perhaps while holding down a modifier such as shift, could help alleviate precision issues because the resulting numbers tend to... "behave" better in practice.

[BlueTemplar]

You kind of get these on a recipe...

but I guess with an extra step, so not really (for this discussion).

And Factorio, after all these years still, is wrong/bugged/misleading on recipes, and confuses work units with time units :

you need X work units per recipe, and an assembler has a working speed of Y work units / second.

(IRL work units are called Joules, but it might not be the best unit for Factorio, because of efficiency considerations, and Factorio already decided to simplify things by for instance making boilers and/or steam engines 100% efficient in vanilla ?
Not to mention that the current balance might result in very non-round work units if directly in (k)J ?
I think there used to be references to this in how these work units or assembler's working speed are defined in Factorio's Lua scripts ?)

[Néomorphos]

If it was per minute you would end up with numbers being less precise i think, as some recipe output a lot of items, going in the hundreds or even thousands

[BlueTemplar]

As long as the significant figures are kept, there's no reason for that
(aside from the lower digits and higher digits digits distinction that I pointed out, but that could have gone the reverse way with another example)

[GinjaNinja32]

+1 for an interface setting switching between per-sec and per-min, but IMO keeping power as W rather than kJ/min makes more sense.

Most of the reason I want per-min is to make the numbers more reasonably scaled (1-999) and more likely to terminate in a reasonable number of decimal places. The factory planning mod I'm using has buttons for per-sec/per-min/yellow-belts, and a lot of quantities in its display become integers in per-min where they're rounded decimals in the other two modes. For example, a chemical science assembler running at a crafting speed of 1 produces 0.0833... items/sec, or 5 items/min.

Power already scales to reasonable display values due to using SI prefixes, so you don't get solar panels producing "0.06MW", you instead get "60kW".

[Rykuta]

I feel like having both at once would clutter the UI abit too much for comfort.

Though having a toggle seems to be an simple enough solution; can't think of a reason not to have something like this if players really want to see things in items/minute instead of items/second.

Could also maybe make it so holding shift changes the display from /s to /m too which might allow you to see both as needed without needing the config toggle.