Factorio Forums

Request that the item group prototype is extended to allowing hiding categories from the player but not from assembling machines.

e.g.
This has been asked for many times before without a clear "No we'll never do that" answer, e.g.

viewtopic.php?f=93&t=31692&start=80#p344109
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=26005
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=26030
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=8712
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=14844

The current supported way to do that is to put the recipes in a category that the player can't craft but machines can. Like recipes with fluids.

Rseding91 wrote:The current supported way to do that is to put the recipes in a category that the player can't craft but machines can. Like recipes with fluids.

That doesn't hide the crafting tab at all. It "reds out" the recipe. I want an entire tab to be hidden.

Deadlock989 wrote:

Rseding91 wrote:The current supported way to do that is to put the recipes in a category that the player can't craft but machines can. Like recipes with fluids.

That doesn't hide the crafting tab at all. It "reds out" the recipe. I want an entire tab to be hidden.

Why? The point of showing them in the GUI is so the player can see what machine crafts that item. Without them in the player GUI the player has no way to know what machine can craft that recipe.

Again, it's disassembly/recycling scenarios. If you have 100 item types disassembleable (if that's a word), and none of them are player recipes, you essentially have a large amount of screen space taken up by things that you cannot click on and, to be honest, are not terribly helpful as a guide to what item is usable in what machine. Essentially you have an entire useless crafting tab filled with dim red icons that you have hunt through with your mouse pointer or starting typing in names. There are other ways to indicate how the item can be treated on the original item, - for example, I'm using embedded localised strings which suffix "Can be disassembled" onto the item description.

However, there's no pressing need for this now that you looked at my other request (stopping the use of intermediates for a given recipe). If I can make these recipes player craftable without going in circles, it means there is a use for the crafting tab after all.

Rseding91 wrote:

Deadlock989 wrote:

Rseding91 wrote:The current supported way to do that is to put the recipes in a category that the player can't craft but machines can. Like recipes with fluids.

That doesn't hide the crafting tab at all. It "reds out" the recipe. I want an entire tab to be hidden.

Why? The point of showing them in the GUI is so the player can see what machine crafts that item. Without them in the player GUI the player has no way to know what machine can craft that recipe.

Just as a thought: Modded games often have so many fluids that each generate two un-/barreling recipes that those recipes are pretty pointless to show in the gui. If it's a fluid the player already knows it can be barreled and never looks it up in the gui.

hidden = true

Arch666Angel wrote:hidden = true

Then no-one can select it in assembling machines. I literally said "allowing hiding categories from the player but not from assembling machines".

Could a forum moderator close this thread please, it's no longer required, as another more useful feature was added instead.

Deadlock989 wrote:Could a forum moderator close this thread please, it's no longer required, as another more useful feature was added instead.

What other feature? I was going to implement this (and still will if it's still wanted) - I simply want to make sure that a feature actually solves a problem and not a symptom of a problem.

For example: "let me have no sprites for an entity" when the real problem is they want to not show the "missing electric network" icon for the entity.

Rseding91 wrote:What other feature? I was going to implement this (and still will if it's still wanted) - I simply want to make sure that a feature actually solves a problem and not a symptom of a problem.

For example: "let me have no sprites for an entity" when the real problem is they want to not show the "missing electric network" icon for the entity.

The general problem is GUI clutter, and the way that the inventory screen expands to its maximum available size when a crafting tab exists that is chock full of things, even if you never look at it. If the player can't craft any of them and it's a wall of red icons, it's an annoyance - it makes actually craftable things harder to pick out and can put craftable things out of view. But you kindly arranged this. I made that thread as an alternative solution, but in fact it's a better solution, in a recycling scenario - now the icons aren't red because the player can recycle things by hand without fear of circular "craft it to break it" situations. So I'm not particularly bothered about this request any more.

However, since other people wanted it too, to illustrate the case with a non-recycling scenario, I have another mod which under certain circumstances produces a crafting tab like this:



The three machines at the bottom could easily (and should) go in the Production tab, so everything else is pretty much useless. This is not an efficient way of being able to tell what machine these recipes can be used in because they're all the same machine and all the same class of recipe and there's no need to be told fifty or a hundred times. You can also find out exactly what that machine does when you open its recipe selection gui and get the same recipes but not "redded out", and furthermore you can indicate it with description text or a corner icon overlay on other recipes, e.g. "This item is crateable" or "Can be recycled" and in the description text of the technology that unlocks the machine, e.g. "Unlocks the Crating Machine, which can package basic resources and intermediate products yada yada". I can't have these recipes "hidden = true", because an assembling-machine type machine is absolutely required for them (they all have more than one ingredient so it can't be a furnace-type) - "hidden" on a recipe stops you even selecting it from a machine gui. So I have no choice but to expand the entire inventory GUI by a large factor. This doesn't bother everyone - there are mods out there with ten tabs and scrollbars going three times the screen height on half of them in a sea of red icons - so maybe this is a bother for a minority. But it bothers me (mildly) and I get feedback from people that used this mod who seem bothered as well.

Mind you, now that we have much more control over the auto-queuing of intermediates, I can probably look at making the crates player-craftable, so again, maybe this isn't needed after all.

I know you guys are working on a GUI re-write so maybe this can wait until then, or feed into that process somehow.

Deadlock989 wrote:This doesn't bother everyone

I'll lend my voice to the silent crowd: does bother me too. Even more so because i play with groups disabled (makes search easier) so i constantly see all those red things that are all the same. (Also i have a faint memory of being able to hide a recipe group but still being able to select recipes in a machine. I.e. the individual recipes are not hidden, but because the group is hidden they don't show up in the players inventory anyway. Is that just an illusionary memory?)

In fact the same other feature fixes the same problem.



Before allow_intermediates = false was possible, this would have been a mess. Now it's lovely and tidy. Looking at all the other times people asked for this "hide a whole tab" feature, several of them were also because they wanted to hide things that created ugly circular recipes from the player, but not from machines, which don't have the same issue (they only work with what they're given).