Recent "Inventory" Change

[FluidNatalie]

Recently, 29th of May 2026, the "inventory" template was changed to include alternate recipes. I think this should not be the case as they get redirected to the main page most of the time. The most egregious example is that there are 6 ways to get to the nutrients page (with the runner up being solid fuel with 5). It also led to Flouroketone (hot) to be on the page twice? It also makes the intermediates section, which is already quite large, much much larger and just hard to read. Thanks for your attention.

[Bilka]

The change was based on the feedback here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Talk:Material ... _to_change?

I generally agree with the problem of linking to the same page many times, plus the bloat, that's why the template initially didn't have those recipes. And why it still doesn't have the casting recipes.

But on the other hand people still need to be able to find recipes like asteroid reprocessing, or the various biological recipes to create items that are used on Gleba. It's not immediately obvious on which other pages those recipes would be located, so we need some kind of solution that links them clearly.

Right now I don't have a good solution for this - we already made a jank solution back when 0.15 added alternative recipes for uranium and with Space Age that jank just falls apart because there is no good heuristic for when a recipe should be listed in the template or even for when it should have a separate page (like coal synthesis for example, which currently has a separate page but is also listed on coal's page. It should be one or the other). There were some debates around this during the initial Space Age release, but I don't think there was any proper conclusion/decision for individual pages made or a heuristic decided.

I'm happy to restart this discussion and get more input. Maybe some kind of in-between solution with some recipes in the template but not all is the way to go, but deciding it per recipe sounds difficult unless we can come up with good guidelines for it. Especially because this also affects the navboxes at the bottom of pages, which typically mirror the Template:Inventory for navigational consistency.

[FluidNatalie]

Yeah, it definatly isn't easy but the current style is too crowded, at least so on the materials page. I do think the space page benefits from showing all the asteroid recipes though. For the future should discussion be held here on the forum or on talk pages?

[Bilka]

I find the forum simpler for long form discussion that spans over larger topics (e.g. multiple wiki pages), so I'm happy to continue here. But the talk pages are also fine if you prefer them.