"Fog of War" for unresearched technologies

[JekoRhino]

TL;DR

"Fog of War" in the technology tree to add a layer of discovery/mystery to the game
and make the technology tree less imposing/overwhelming.

What?

When opening the Tech Tree, everything is in front of you. That can be a little bit overwhelming especially for new players.
It also removes the some mystery from the Alien Planet and spoils the fun of discovery!

It would be nice if the list was shorter and technologies with red boxes that are no where near to be
researched would slowly disappear to indicate that they are "beyond your imagination".

• Step 1: red box (same as ingame now)
• Step 2: light grey box with Icon (or less saturated one), a name and research effects that are less saturated icons or black silhouettes
• Step 3: dark grey box with a black silhouette for the icon, blanked out or obfuscated name, research effects that are less saturated icons or black silhouettes
• Step 4: no box on the left screen, black or grey box on the Tree side (if necessary because some get already hidden)

Additionally unresearched science pack icons would be turned into black silhouettes.
Only when the corresponding pack is researched it would be visible.

It would be nice if it was the same across all saves where it's like Achievements
and if needed you could enable it on save creation or options to play it "blind".

A Achievements Tab in the main menu could be beneficial to see unlocked Achievements and Technologies.
As a way to browse your unlocks.

Why?

Because new Players will be more exited to find technologies and unlocking them would be more fun.
It would add a new layer of discovery and mystery. As a bonus new players get less overwhelmed by the sheer amount of technologies.

[quineotio]

As a setting I'd be ok with this, but as an experienced player it would be annoying for me. I like being able to examine future tech to plan ahead. If it wasn't in game I could still theoretically look online, but having the resource in game is useful.

So +1 as an optional setting (that is disabled by default), -1 otherwise.

[Panzerknacker]

I understand your idea but the devs already stated they explicitly chose to make it as it is. If you think about it, this is how the game works; when you start a new game you get the objective to build a rocket silo right from the start. How can you know what the path is to researching the rocket silo if the tech tree is all blurred out?

So i like your idea but with the change that the essential technologies of the current objective are visible.

[Zaspar]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/discovery_tree

[JekoRhino]

As a setting I'd be ok with this, but as an experienced player it would be annoying for me. I like being able to examine future tech to plan ahead. If it wasn't in game I could still theoretically look online, but having the resource in game is useful.

So +1 as an optional setting (that is disabled by default), -1 otherwise.

Yes 100%. That's why I thought about the Achievement part. If you have a save with unlocks you could open it and it would automatically
give you all of them. That way you would regain your progress and if you really want to play "blind" you would enable it when creating the save
or if you never reopen old saves there could be an option to disable it.

It reminds me of the time when they changed a bunch of things in the Tech-tree and it pretty much "killed" my save.
There was no easy way to progress for me, other than rebuilding a bunch of things and I think that made me quit the game so I really want to prevent that.
This wouldn't interfere with your current save file since it would unlock everything you already know on load.

I understand your idea but the devs already stated they explicitly chose to make it as it is. If you think about it, this is how the game works; when you start a new game you get the objective to build a rocket silo right from the start. How can you know what the path is to researching the rocket silo if the tech tree is all blurred out?

So i like your idea but with the change that the essential technologies of the current objective are visible.

Yes I see what you mean. This is no way near a finished idea. I thought about this too but I wanted to present the basic idea first.

My Solution to this would be select technologies that would be highlighted, even if they are in the "Fog of War".
For example the Rocket Silo could always be in the Style of Step 2. Maybe even have a different colour to signify that.

This would guild the player a bit similar to how some technology is unlocked right now.
Where you "stumble" across some of them, like collecting 10 copper, 50 iron or pumping Oil.
The first two teach you to open the Tech-tree but there is no clear path to progress from that point forward.


I finished the game once, like 6 years ago.
A bunch of things changed, especially with the Space Age DLC, but I knew the main Idea is to launch the Rocket.

I was really lost in that Tree at first. A different display style could also be beneficial.
Because it took me some time to simply find the Rocket Silo technology.

This idea would be my solution to help with that.
The Devs probably have some even better ideas!

A different Idea I had could be grouping/collapsing some technologies into a placeholder
to simplify the whole Tree into an easily digestible format.