Factorio Forums

The list of stations is needlessly small, showing only 5 stations.

What do you think it should be? You can use the little search box to find any station in the list instantly if you so want. Ctrl + F focuses it so you don't even need to click the button to find the station you want.

The size currently matches the "wait condition" GUI so they don't jump around when your adding stations one after the next.

Search is not always solution. It's useless if we make mistake in name or just don't remember how we named particular station. We have to find that station manually and higher window (it could be 3xhigher) would help a lot.

I'm not the average player, cause I have had maps with nearly 1000 stations, but perhaps from my experiences:

Make it so like the train-stop chooser in Fat Controller mod.

That is also the TL;DR from below. Cause for 0.14 I would like to have it like so:

Region and Purpose

I always name stations like
Main Base - Copper
Main Base - Iron
...
Mermaid Bay - Circuits IN
Mermaid Bay - Advanced Circuits OUT
Mermaid Bay - Plastic IN
...

That is a pattern like

REGION/NAME - PURPOSE/DUTY

This idea is lent from OpenTTD; there they have station names like "Hampton - Main Station", "Hampton - Wood" (if the station is near a saw-mill), "Hampton - Whatever". And I really think this is also very, very useful for Factorio, too. (Indeed the stops should have not each individual names, but that's a completely different suggestion, see viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1528&p=11103#p11103 )

It can be assumed, that as a player I should know the region OR the purpose (or parts of that) to find the right station.

What does this help?

Assumed we (players/devs) can arrange with this (a station name contains region and purpose), then it follows:

We have three views to the list of train stops: Like current (all stations), Region and Purpose.
(It could be tabs or buttons to switch between these views. Not so important here.)

The All-view (like current)
- The scroll-bar is useless, if more than - hm - 20 stations found. I suggest instead a page, which displays me in a table-format the stations (e.g. 5 in a row and 10 in column, so it displays 50 stations per page) and I can switch between the pages by an alphabet-chooser and/or a pager. See Fat Controller's station select. Like so. This is also small in the beginning and will get bigger with adding more stations.
- See also other search options of the station selector in Fat Controller.

The Region view
- I want to have a selectable list of regions (here "Main Base" and "Mermaid Bay"). If I choose one, it opens all stations in that region.
- So this view is basically split in two parts: left is the list of regions, right is the found stops of that region.
- Now I also want to search my station on map. Open some map-view, type in first letters OR select from the found region-names and it zooms to the area, that matches my station names. I see then just the purposes.

The Purpose view
- This view is simply the same as the region view: List of purposes left, found stations right. Regions and purpose are just strings.
- A map view makes sense: Find all stations handling copper-purposes.

And with time I think into this direction: If the idea of regions/purpose works really good, then the game can replace text with icons. Instead of "copper" it can display the copper item. Instead of "IN" it can display an icon that displays a station with an in-arrow. The same with regions, instead of "MainBase it can display a part of map that is centered to then center of all "MainBase" stops.

I would be happy with the window showing 10-15 stations or ideally be resizable.
The keyword filter on top helps a lot, but here again only 5 results if i filter for iron with station names Iron Mine 1-5 and Iron Unload I have to scroll again.
Scrolling is faster than clicking pages for around 20 stations. Neither scrolling nor fat pages would help organizing your 1k stations though

Optera wrote:Scrolling is faster than clicking pages for around 20 stations. Neither scrolling nor fat pages would help organizing your 1k stations though

Well I admit I made a stupid error: there are not 1000 stops, it's more like 300. But that is still much more, than usual. I think handling 1000 stations with this small window is just not possible.

Look, what I mean: You can see 60 stations alphabetically sorted per page. Finding the right is way much faster, than with any scroller. Think also: nearly no player will need more than one page. Think also: If you display only 30 per page you will have space to show a small map-icon, that displays the place around of the station.


From experience with those 300 stops I can say: scrolling isn't really that fast. I would say if you have more than 20 stations, then a page oriented design becomes always much faster.

I did use Fat Controller myself until 13.0 brought a better train interface.
Personally the 3-5 clicks to find one train and odd sorting, by time the train was registered instead of station/train name, annoyed me to no end.

Your screenshot from fat controller is a good example of too much information crammed in. You have to read every row to find a station while in a single scroll list you find it more intuitively.
For the majority of players i know a scrolling window showing 10-15 stations would have the best usability. Most wont even need a filter for their 20ish stations. For edge cases like you and me the filter along with a bigger list would be still be faster than fat controller.

They just need to make the list a bit longer, 10-15 entries is ideal to grasp a list, any more and we reduce usability again (you can read up on the ~8 information chunks the average short term memory can hold)
The filter should be smart enough to find "Juni Bay AdvCirctuits IN" when you filter "Juni Circuits".

Optera wrote:Your screenshot from fat controller is a good example of too much information crammed in. You have to read every row to find a station while in a single scroll list you find it more intuitively.

That's clear. That was the reason to suggest the two other views above. posting.php?mode=quote&f=6&p=177374#pr176917

If that "region view" would be implemented for example, it would make things much, much simpler. I won't use then the "All view" normally. But it is still needed to get an fast overview over all your stations. But I admit: This is really a bit oversized...

For the majority of players i know a scrolling window showing 10-15 stations would have the best usability.
They just need to make the list a bit longer, 10-15 entries is ideal to grasp a list, any more and we reduce usability again (you can read up on the ~8 information chunks the average short term memory can hold)
The filter should be smart enough to find "Juni Bay AdvCirctuits IN" when you filter "Juni Circuits".

You are eventually right. Just try simple changes and if that doesn't work, we can still complain.


PS: I still find this systematic of naming stations useful, cause it would enable "automated logistic rail transport". Some kind of limited but useful transport.