Factorio Forums

Add a momentary input to hide items on belts.
While held (or toggled) this key would temporarily hide the display of all items on belts.

This would be a godsend when upgrading older belt systems before the blueprint slash and burn phase of the game. It's especially egregious with items like green circuits which completely obscure a loaded belt. An alternative solution might be to add a direction and color (belt quality) indicator to belts when the standard "show info" mode is active, though I present this one as an alternate as making it informative but not overly noisy is more problematic.

Couldn't find anything on this in a search but I'm new to the game so please forgive if it has been covered.

the 'upgrade planner' mod would address this need.

Sort of, the issue I'm attempting to highlight is the player knowing they need to upgrade (that is having visibility that there's a single yellow belt somewhere in a sea of red or blue) rather than the process of upgrading itself.

Upgrade planner does address the latter, as does slapping down a new blueprint or just hand tweaking the belts. But in all cases the player needs to see there's a problem in the first place. That some items obscure the identity of the belt underneath and others don't may be the design issue.

if a belt is backed up it's backed up, yellow red or blue it'll stay backed up if it managed to get backed up, in all other cases you can see it because before the offending belt there's a backup that is moving at a constant but slow speed and after it's free flowing.

Perhaps in the case of a long stretch of belt. But as a new player every time it's caught me out it's been something like a little right angle before an underground or a few blocks before a balancer. Less immediately apparent.

There are other suggestion (which I don't want to dig out yet), that suggest to make belts more visible - for example by adding a line of the belt color at the belt-sides.