Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Expand the Quality selection menu on signals with additional non-Quality 'modifiers'/'tags' for player use when making combinator logic.

Bonus points: Allow the Selector combinator to assign these modifiers/tags to incoming signals.

What?

Currently, when selecting signal icons, you can choose a number of helpful icons, and then you can "modify" them with a Quality tier.
It would be useful to expand this "modification" to allow non-Quality modifiers. That way, the amount of signals available to players would expand dramatically.

Example signals:

• Iron plate (Normal)
• Iron plate (Uncommon)
• NEW: Iron plate (1)
• NEW: Iron plate (5)
• NEW: Iron plate (A)
• NEW: Iron plate (E)
• NEW: Iron plate (Green)
• NEW: Iron plate (Purple)

The Selector combinator can currently assign Quality to inbound signals. Expanding that function to these custom tags would be very useful as well.

Why?

It is currently incredibly helpful to be able to declare the Quality of any given signal, including signals that aren't items that can have quality.

This essentially multiplies the amount of available signals by quite a lot.

If this were further expanded by some dummies such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then certain item signals, such as lower or upper limits required for some combinator setups, could be declared with fitting item icons without clashing with existing signals communicated by the logistic network, chests, belts, assemblers etc.

It would essentially allow certain item signals to always be "player-made" and never mistaken for anything else, keeping logic cleaner.

+1. love the idea. think i'd call them signal tags.

"Tags" is a great name, I swear it was on the tip of my tongue. Sprinkled a few instances of that term around the OP.

An extra idea I just had is that the "tag" could just be another signal icon. So, essentially, signals would now all be two-dimensional, having an assigned "main icon" and a "tag icon". Quality signals would then be converted into a "main icon" item with one of the quality icons as its tag.