[QoL] Screen location queues; quickly jump to alerts and pings

Suggestions that have been added to the game.

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Kerfaigar
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[QoL] Screen location queues; quickly jump to alerts and pings

Post by Kerfaigar »

TL;DR
Quick navigation between alerts and map pings with hotkeys.
What?
Quick screen jump queues: a set of shortcuts to jump between tags and alerts.

Problem
Currently, navigating the base involves a lot of mouse dragging and manually searching for the place you want to look at. It's of course made easier with map tags and pings, but when building something it's easy to get distracted by a biter attack or another player-created alert. It takes a while to zoom out and find the spot you were building in after tending to the emergency. Also, multiple emergencies erupt, it's uncomfortable to manually click through each of them. There's of course the preview on hover, but there's a better way.

Solution
There's a queue of map locations that allow you to jump between recently visited locations with mouse button 4 and mouse button 5. However, it could be significantly enhanced. My proposition is to add 2 additional screen location queues: alerts and tags and allow jumping between them by pressing CTRL+MB4 and CTRL+MB5 for alerts and ALT+MB4 and ALT+MB5 for pings.

The above bindings are just an example, but I think they are consistent with current control scheme (ALT-MB2 for creating pings).

Here's an example of similar functionality in StarCraft 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_VRcrtor-8
The above example only allows for one screen per button, however there's another key-binding, which allows to use a single button to jump to the next command center.

Why?
With this functionality you could quickly jump between alerts and assess damage during attacks, as well as create a list of locations you're currently working on.
In order to synergize with this, alerts created by speakers should have a checkbox for including them in the alert screen queue.
Likewise, in order to avoid an overgrowth of pings-defined screens, pings should have an identical checkbox to allow keeping them, but not including them in the quick jump queue.

WHY do you think it increases the value of Factorio as a game?
It elevates the QoL, makes the human-computer gap shorter by reducing the visual navigation user has to perform.

Further possibilities
It might be viable to give players a possibility of creating multiple lists of screen locations and make them active or inactive in the queue (something like request groups). I am also not sure what the consequences of this feature would be in multiplayer mode, since I've never tried it. I imagine pings are quite useful there, it's probably a good idea to allow players to control whether pings created by another person should be included in the queue or not.
Kerfaigar
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Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Jul 02, 2025 4:51 pm
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Re: [QoL] Screen location queues; quickly jump to alerts and pings

Post by Kerfaigar »

Oh, I am so sorry; looks like I posted in the "implemented suggestions". It does not look like I have the ability to move the thread. Hopefully a moderator can help with that. If that's not possible, please tell me, I'll remove the thread and post again in a proper space.

Edit: I can't remove the thread either. I am not a forum person, have mercy.
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