Factorio Forums

TL;DR

It should be possible to hit a back button on the Trains interface when you click a specific station.

What ?

When I need to bulk edit trains or stations, I open the Trains interface, click a station/route, then click one of the Trains/Station. When I'm done editing, it would be really useful to go back to the previous view. At the moment, hitting ESC or E will close the window and you have to open the Trains interface again, find the Station/Route you want again, then click the next train.

Alternatively, bulk editing would be quite useful, but it's a bigger undertaking and seems like a sharper edge.

Why ?

This will improve the management on big train networks at a relatively low introduction to complexity.

I have the same complaint – doing anything related to multiple trains or stations with the same schedule/name through the Trains interface takes a lot of extra time because of the necessity of having to re-navigate to the same part of the UI over and over.

A back button would help, but the minor improvement that I had in mind is that the Trains view should re-open to the same selection that it previously had: same tab (Trains / Stations), with the same entry selected from the panel on the left, if possible. This would be helpful in more situations than a back button, for example when jumping to the location of multiple stations in the map view.

mwls wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 6:35 am I have the same complaint – doing anything related to multiple trains or stations with the same schedule/name through the Trains interface takes a lot of extra time because of the necessity of having to re-navigate to the same part of the UI over and over.

A back button would help, but the minor improvement that I had in mind is that the Trains view should re-open to the same selection that it previously had: same tab (Trains / Stations), with the same entry selected from the panel on the left, if possible. This would be helpful in more situations than a back button, for example when jumping to the location of multiple stations in the map view.

Totally agree, so +1 from me. This will help us not to waste time on this and just use the Back button.

Oh yes, this is one of the most tedious things for me right now. It would be good to support mouse button 4 and 5 to go back/forward between screens as well. If it could be implemented for other things like technology, a mod manager page, options, settings page, BLUEPRINT BOOK NAVIGATION(!), it would be a godsent! Recipe Book mod has the back/forward button and it's one of those things that make you wonder why it's missing from the base game.

In my opinion this should be a standalone "support back/forward and mouse 4, 5 across game UIs" suggestion.

Agreed, I would like that as well.

mwls wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 6:35 am I have the same complaint – doing anything related to multiple trains or stations with the same schedule/name through the Trains interface takes a lot of extra time because of the necessity of having to re-navigate to the same part of the UI over and over.

Yes: the need for repeated navigation is the key issue with the current behaviour. Likewise, retaining the UI state of the train overview as far as possible, as you suggested, seems the key to avoiding this. For example, this would mean clicking the train overview button with the train window open would have the same effect as the suggested back button; it would basically make the train overview button/shortcut key more like "show/hide" than "open/close".

With retained state, I think it would also feel very natural (familiar) if closing the train window after opening it from the train overview showed the train overview again, meaning the train window behaves like a dialog box. But this might be an unwelcome change for some as it is "must go back" instead of "can go back".

Use of the blueprint library in particular can also lead to the same repeated navigation issue, though in that case there is a workaround of using quickbar slots.

Editing lots of trains that use the same route can be a slow undertaking right now, especially if it would take too long to wait for all of them to run through a full loop for manual copy-pasting. Being able to open the train menu, edit a train, and then immediately go back to the menu again -- preferably by tying this behavior to the back button on a mouse by default -- would be very helpful.