Factorio Forums

Strange. I'm sure I requested this in ~2023 but can't find any -- not by just me, by anybody. Feel free to merge/reference topics if needed.

TL;DR

Remove or drastically increase limits on the description for blueprints & combinators.

Why?

Currently, the limits are quite hard if you start using rich texts, severely limiting the information you can put in the description. I assume the initial reason this limit exists is pure-C null-terminated strings those require buffer beforehand. But since all strings come from either user input from GUI element (string length known), Lua API (string length known), or JSON decoding (library returns strings with properly allocated memory) I see no actual reasons for that limit to exist.

This, for example, is almost the max # of characters I can put: Typical use case for blueprints descriptions are:

• Technical details how this setup works (could require many words)
• Description of parameters for the combinators setup (i.e., parameterized train stop controller -- requires even more words)
• Description of input/output items with numbers of the given production setup (especially when modded -- requires many, many words)

When I designed my setups for Space Exploration playthrough, it was annoying to remove words, add abbreviations, etc to fit the description of production block in/out materials into the given limits.