Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Factoriopedia should allow pinning currently selected tab, or the entire window, from closing.

What?

THIS button. Screensot from raiguard's Recipe Book

Why?

One common use-case of Factoriopedia-like mods is to put the new recipe somewhere on your screen and use it as a guideline when you building a sub-factory or collecting items you would need. For example, if you want to select combinator signals for optimized belt stacking of scrap recycling output, you will need to select 12 signals in the constant combinator. Remembering every one of them might be tricky.
A side note
Just FYI.
I used a screenshot posted abovr (scrap recycling output) as a reference instead of a Factoriopedia page because it's just easier. But I have two monitors and not everybody do. We need pin button.

See Also

• Mod Portal: Recipe Book
• Mod Portal: Factorio Not Enough Items (FNEI)
• 123887: Don't close factoriopedia window by off-clicking -- Similar request

Changelog
Minor edits & typos not mentioned.

1. Edit 2025-05-03: Added "A side note" paragraph

I prefer this suggestion than the similar one linked at the end. I would use the "pin" , but i'd prefer it opt-in and not the default.

Recently I made the mod Compact Recipe Pins as an attempt to make a "Favourites" system for Factoriopedia.

You press Z when hovering over icons in Factoriopedia (or anywhere else, even Recipe Book!), and it creates GUI pins that link back to Factoriopedia.

If it were implemented into the base game, I'd like it to be a relative GUI that appears on the left-hand side of Factoriopedia. You'd be able to "undock" it to appear in the HUD, then you get the behaviour from the mod.

I suspect the reason Factoriopedia doesn't have a "Stay open" button is because of how large it is; it assumes a modal functionality. Being able to collapse it into a minimised form that shows only the current recipe would be cool.

Having more control over the Factoriopedia GUI from the mod API (such as being able to attach relative GUIs) would also be nice.

+1 for this idea