Factorio Forums

When a building with a recipe has a shortage, it says "item ingredient shortage" or "fluid ingredient shortage" in the panel on right when the mouse is hovered. This message is vague; it does not specify which ingredients are short.

In order to determine which are short, you can:
1) Click on the machine, then hover the recipe icon for a clear indication (such as a greyed out text saying "4/5 whatever")
2) Try to use clues from which belts are empty
3) If you memorized the recipe, you can look at the number of ingredients in the panel on the right under "Contents" and see which is low.

Since fixing item shortages is a core gameplay element, I think there should be a more convenient way. Why not, for example, highlight in some color the ingredients in the panel on the right that are short? I'm imagining by default a red background or border for ingredients that are short (but as someone with color blindness I will probably need a different color). This way, the item that is short will be indicated right alongside the "item ingredient shortage" message.

This bugged me enough that I even created a circuit network with displays indicating which items are short. It was fun and it worked, but in reality I don't see why this can't be in the hover panel.

The GUI already does this? The red ones are the shortage.

That's only on clicking the building right? Not on hovering it?

I can just barely make out the red with my color blindness (not enough for it to be very helpful), and I'm pretty sure it's not in the panel on the right when you hover the building.

I have to agree with that. On one hand, the red background in the open machine GUI is barely visible for me, with or without the colour filter enabled. On another, I don't think there's any indication in the tooltip. It's easy to see if you have none of an ingredient, but if it's partially filled it can be difficult to notice if you don't remember the recipe amounts:


While adding some colour indicator to the tooltip would probably work, I think the best solution would be to copy the way the recipe tooltip does it:


... and doing something similar in the machine tooltip:

Thank you both for the helpful images, LCStark especially your mockup for how this could look. That is sort of what I imagined too.

I really like the idea of showing a fraction only for the items that are deficient and not for the ones that are full. This avoids any color-blindness issues because we can just see which ones are fractions.