Factorio Forums

Add a toggle in the "toggle bar" (heck, I hate not having/knowing proper terminology: the bar under the minimap in map view where you switch electric grid and logistics network?)

Call it… "satellite view". One, people expect (as soon as they learn that those are toggles and what they do) stuff there, and second, and very importantly, pretty much everyone knows "satellite view" from Google Maps. And then you can and *SHOULD* do away with any switchover nonsense completely. And yes, let users zoom out in satellite view as far as they want/their eyes or monitor can bear. Have it moddable to add a limit if people want to limit themselves. Make that of course read/write so mods can also up it based on satellite launches and/or research) if people want to limit themselves.

Yeah it is kind of annoying you can zoom out and see more in as a player in a location than you can from CIA mode (my name)/Goddess mode (KoS's name) for plopping excessively large blueprints it would make sense. Or at least being able to see Blueprints in the zoomed out mode

A simple switch to go between 'road map' and 'satellite' like Google maps makes sense, sure satellite on Google maps becomes useless at seeing more than terrain and concrete jungle sprawls if you're zoomed too far out in that mode but it might have its place in factorio too. And the maps wouldn't need to be active with biter activity. And seeing active trains after a certain zoom out so the generation of the terrain maps could be done out of tick time whenever the map is loaded with the train and biter overlay added from the other veiw

This was changed in Version 0.15.11

[*]The zoom level at which the map switches from 'map view' to 'world view' was increased.

But this feature could be back someday if they decide to go the STR direction and use a satellite view.

In "sattelite view" the game has to render every building, belt, etcpp. The further you zoom out the more things have to be rendered, and the slower it becomes. Trying to render the actual factory at map scale would be far too slow.

Go ahead and try it yourself:

For extreme zoom out satellite view in map (which I'd use for placing blueprints) it wouldn't necessarily need to be a live picture. While in map view and zoomed out beyond player rendering distance the map can be rendered just once per few seconds when zoomed out because you only really need to see the buildings and building plans (static) and biters as Red dots and players as yellow (live overlay) not all the moving parts like belts, bots and items, this would allow the plopping or capture of massive blueprints