Factorio Forums

TL;DR: There is this machine that sends you messages based on wire and logistic inputs. The message can have variables such as %red_wire% to express the value of the red wire inside the message;
You know how when a building gets damaged, you get a little warning that that happened. What would be really nice is if there was a machine that when sent a signal, it would send you a message. Some message types could be:

• Square icons
  Pop-down things from the upper right hand corner

This could be useful for say, putting on the input of raw materials into your base so when not enough materials are coming though, you will get a message saying:
Warning, not enough iron throughput!
Then you would go out and get another iron patch.

The GUI I was thinking would have red, green, and logistic network things similar to the smart inserter. Then there would be a text box to type your message. An icon picker that would allow you to pick from one of the all the icons.

What also might be good for the text field would be variables, now it might not be intuitive for many players, but if this was the message:
Hello %player%, your iron production is now at %green_wire%. You should go get another patch so you can make up for the %10000-green_wire% iron.
Which would output:
Hello Chris, your iron production is now a 50. You should go get another patch so you can make up for the 9950 iron.
So as shown above, math could be applied to these variables so some cool things could be done.

• %player% - the player that the message is being sent to
  %day% - the day you are on
  %hours% - the number of hours played
  %time% - the time of day
  %green_wire% - the value of the green wire
  %red_wire% - the value of the red wire
  %logistic(item_name)% - the count of 'item_name' in the logistic network