Agricultural Tower sector indicators need improvements

redrook · Post by **redrook** » Tue Jun 30, 2026 12:52 pm

Agricultural Tower sector indicators can be confusing seemingly needlessly even in the base game, things get worse with mods.

: 20260630052614_1.jpg (360.67 KiB) Viewed 95 times

1. K2SO-compatible Particle Physics https://mods.factorio.com/mod/particle-physics mod adds Slipstalk cultivation to the game with a research. Suitable soil for it - the marsh - starts showing up green in tower's overview even before that research is done, when there is no way to produce seeds and actually plant them.

2. Because marsh is not commonly disjoint on the map from types of soil suitable for other plants, but rather commonly interleaved with them, almost everything almost everywhere shows up green even though it can be very hard to tell that none of the main plants of the game can be planted there. There is an inversion effect with yellow at the beginning of the game on Gleba where on average the more green the display is the less interesting the 7x7 grid actually is. It's very confusing, especially given that the coloring is not explained in the tips and the player at the beginning is trying to indirectly derive what the colors even mean, and they appear inverted from what they actually are.

3. This bit of behavior (quoting Factorio wiki): "if a sector includes different types of soil, it will show up as green despite not being suitable for planting." - seems needlessly problematic. Stands to reason if there is no plant for which the entire sector is suitable it can be determined and the sector not shown green. That would be an issue even in the base game, with the mod in question it becomes even more confusing - on the screenshot above the sector in which the player character is standing has its one tile - in the top left - as "marsh", which is suitable for Slipstalk, and every other tile suitable for a base game plant. One tile only shows partial tile graphic due to tile blending, and its very low contrast difference with the other tile, it's very hard to tell that that sector is not suitable for the standard game plant.

Suggestions are 3:
I) Treat plants seeds for which are impossible to acquire due to current state of research as not possible to plant by the tower for the purposes of sector classification of suitability in tower's overlay.

II) If the sector is fully suitable for planting for a plant X, show a translucent icon of plant X in the sector's overlay.

III) if there is no plant that is possible to plant in a sector due to it being composed of a mixture of tiles by their suitability for different plants, show it as not suitable even if every tile is suitable for some plant individually.