Factorio Forums

TL;DR

During miner placement, highlight resource tiles touched by the miner

What?

While hovering with a miner that you are about to place, its coverage area is already shown by the game... my suggestion is to also highlight any resource tiles within that coverage area.

Why?

With all the lovely new artwork on all the new planets, it can be hard at times to see where resource tiles are in a patch (eg if they blend into the landscape, are obfuscated by decoratives or are entirely obscured by trees). If miners highlighted covered resource tiles during placement, it would make it much easier to plan miner layout, to ensure no resource tiles get missed. Obviously this is more of an early game thing, before you get cliff explosives and when you want to make the most of your starter patches.

+1

That would be especially useful for those coal patches on Vulcanus.

iestynne wrote: Thu Apr 17, 2025 2:03 am With all the lovely new artwork on all the new planets, it can be hard at times to see where resource tiles are in a patch

Yeah...

+1. It's nigh impossible to see if ore patch was under the biters nests

+1. I'll add that trees and some of the decoratives also obscure mineral boundaries.

And your own buildings.

Yes please. Especially with the deco ores that are not true ores (scrap has it especially bad) it's not as easy as it could be to place miners.

Incidentally, I think it would be even better if you could highlight the boundary of a whole contiguous mineral patch rather than just the coverage area of a miner.

Another thing that highlights can help with -- when multiple minerals are mixed together it can sometimes be hard to see when you're mixed mining or not. Highlighting borders could help make this more clear.