Friday Facts #426 - Resource search & Assembler GUI improvements

[herrkocur]

Lovely changes.
Map resource markers I used to do manually, great that I can skip that mundane work and just use built-in.
Throughput calc at first I read as "crafting through recipe tooltip" and I was like "wtf does it do?????" but now I know and again – I love it!
I mostly play without beacons and that's exactly for this reason. Now that I'll be able to get a rough idea without establishing perfect ratio with a dedicated calc it will unblock me from my fear of being too far from perfection.

Why is it still almost 2 months? I have some ideas about it already and I'd like to verify what works well and what needs some rethinking ;______;

[FutureSpec]

This was a boring update. There's only 7 blogs left until release and still no reveal of final planet nor the rest of the enemies.

[aka13]

Klonan I love you. Thank you for doing it, it was missing for years.
Now please, please do an estimation on inserters, how many items/s they will transfer

[Agamemnon]

These will make playing soo much nicer. Especially when doing overhaul mods!

[BEEFE]

Yummy value, best name ever \o/. Hope it's not a placeholder.
Nice to have more QoL. The more time flies, the more I appreciate QoL.

Echoing both these sentiments. Nothing exciting, but very very welcome nonetheless.

[jgilmore42]

I just noticed something, whatever creatures run around on Vulcanus are probably quite terrifying, otherwise how would you justify that packed ring of turrets around the coal patch:

Uhm, maybe somebody else is like me and just throws a big ring up just because? Or even a double row?

Though I guess that I usually just double (or x10) the density of turrets every time the wall is breached, so your point kinda still stands.

[GregoriusT]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

[jgilmore42]

TLDR: Ability to search for items based on their color

+1 !!!

I don't even know how many times this has tripped me up. Adding invisible search terms sounds like a GREAT idea to me.

They're green circuits, dagnabit! Having to remember the "official" names of things really sucks sometimes.

Better yet would be to auto-scan the icon to add the color search terms. Prevent mod authors from inevitably screwing things up. But that would require a fuzzy definition of "green" and "purple" and such, AND maybe adding two terms if an icon is about evenly split between two colors. So that'd be a no.

[Terrahertz]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

Do you have any particular IP in mind here? Only thing I can think of atm is Iron Harvest and I am sure their mechs run on oil.

[ChefOfRamen]

Shouldn't yummy values be measured in kcal instead of MJ?

[Tertius]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

Only after you signed 100 papers and endure 20 years of planning before the construction order for the mech is given. And of course you can prove there live no rare beetles or protected species in your coal mine, which must be relocated before exploiting the mine, which takes another 20 years at minimum and doubles the cost (or you just wait until they're extinct on their own).

[Molay]

Much appreciated QOL features, the expanded tooltip that gives an idea of consumption/production speed with the various productivity/speed modifiers is truly a godsend.

I haven't played vanilla in years (plenty of modded though), so I thought I'd reset all my achievements and earn them all again, to get in the vanilla rhythm. One thing above all else - the only thing really - that I was REALLY missing was Helmod. It was fine for pretty much all achievements except the 20M green circuits. But even with the simpler modules/beacons of vanilla factorio, not having a planner was a huge PITA. Too few machines, belts too slow, etc. Took forever to get this stuff going.

While the new improved tooltip goes a really long way, I still hope there might be something like Helmod in vanilla, something just as simple as Helmod, nothing too complex, just pick a recipe you want to produce, then click it's ingredients to pick a recipe for those, modules for the machines etc... After years of using Helmod with big complex modpacks, I felt myself struggling severely in vanilla without it, despite vanilla being a magnitude or two simpler than the mods I played^^ Now SA is looking to gain a lot of complexity, which might warrant some Helmod-like tool?

Any chance we might see something like that?

[GregoriusT]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

Do you have any particular IP in mind here? Only thing I can think of atm is Iron Harvest and I am sure their mechs run on oil.

Yes I do indeed, its called real life! The biggest Mechs that currently exist on Earth are German Coal Excavators, that harvest the shittiest Lignite Coal that you could possibly burn in a Coal Power Plant, in order to irradiate the surroundings with radioactive Carbon Isotopes that are much more potent than any Nuclear Waste!

[malecord]

OR Whatever is running around there, has just a taste for coal

Must be Germans then. We will attack with the biggest Mechs you can imagine and dig your Coal!

Do you have any particular IP in mind here? Only thing I can think of atm is Iron Harvest and I am sure their mechs run on oil.

Yes I do indeed, its called real life! The biggest Mechs that currently exist on Earth are German Coal Excavators, that harvest the shittiest Lignite Coal that you could possibly burn in a Coal Power Plant, in order to irradiate the surroundings with radioactive Carbon Isotopes that are much more potent than any Nuclear Waste!

One image is worth thousands words... though for the nasty side effects of lignite power plants there aren't images that can effectively impress the viewer...

[RodrigoCns]

Has any update said anything about the greenbelts that I just saw?

[seePyou]

[...] the shittiest Lignite Coal that you could possibly burn in a Coal Power Plant, in order to irradiate the surroundings with radioactive Carbon Isotopes that are much more potent than any Nuclear Waste!

Source?

[againey]

Has any update said anything about the greenbelts that I just saw?

Friday Facts #393: Putting things on top of other things, at the end.

[Koub]

[...] the shittiest Lignite Coal that you could possibly burn in a Coal Power Plant, in order to irradiate the surroundings with radioactive Carbon Isotopes that are much more potent than any Nuclear Waste!

Source?

Depending on the source, various toxic heavy metals, including naturally occurring radioactive materials, may be present in lignite and left over in the coal fly ash produced from its combustion, further increasing health risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite

[Now moderator-me here] I'd rather refocus on the FFF's contents, instead of going off topic about the lignite Germany uses to top off its power needs.

[RocketManChronicles]

Has any update said anything about the greenbelts that I just saw?

Dude.... where have you been? Green belts are old news lol

Friday Facts #393: Putting things on top of other things, at the end.

[Shingen]

In the base game it is fine, as the numbers are normally nice and round.

um, the assembler speeds being 0.5, 0.75, and 1.25, as well as units changing between "X s crafting time" in machines and "X items/s" on belts, beg to differ.
of course it's not an issue when you're just directly feeding stuff from one assembler to another of the same type, but anything else, like if it's a "take/produce a whole belt of resources" kind of thing, it is annoying to have to work with (or rather against) from the very start of the game. :/