Request: a quick way to determine the named content of a belt.

[rorybecker]

TL;DR

Some way to click / hover or otherwise interact with a belt tile and have factorio list the names of things on it.

What ?

Possibly augment the right hand panel or tooltip to add the named content of a belt.

Why ?

When playing with an unfamiliar mod, it can be hard to determine what is on a belt.
Many resources often look very similar. Indeed in some cases icons are reused with very subtle differences like shades of color.

These ccolor changes are particularly hard for me to see since I am Red/Green color-blind.
It would be very helpful if there was a way to see all of the names of the resources on a belt.

I appreciate that there is an issue in that the belts, and more specifically their contents, are always moving. FWIW I'm typically trying to do this on a belt which only has 1 or 2 different types of things on it.

My best workaround, when playing with dyworld (my current mod of choice), is to have the following sequence.

Belt -> Loader -> Box -> Loader -> Belt. This allows me to open the box and examine the transient contents.

However this is rather clunky and I would prefer something which was more ad-hoc.

[eradicator]

+10

When playing with an unfamiliar mod, it can be hard to determine what is on a belt.
Many resources often look very similar.

I normally play fully zoomed out. Often i then have to zoom fully in to even get a chance at guessing what those tiny icons are. Sometimes i have to pick items up and check them in my inventory. For example Industrial Revolution was particularly bad with "plate" vs "reinforced plate" vs some other things.

Personally i think the belt tooltip could just show the average amount of items transported during the time the player "hovers" over the belt. This would have the additional benefit of showing belt throughput and make the feature work for any belt regardless if it's both-sides-ore or sushi or whatever. (Tried to mod that once but reading belt-content is really hacky without circuits.)

Mockup:

belttooltip.png (40.42 KiB) Viewed 1331 times

[posila]

Personally i think the belt tooltip could just show the average amount of items transported ...

I don't like where this is going.

... transported during the time the player "hovers" over the belt.

Hmm ... I don't dislike that.

[eradicator]

Personally i think the belt tooltip could just show the average amount of items transported ...

I don't like where this is going.

... transported during the time the player "hovers" over the belt.

Hmm ... I don't dislike that.

We both know that belts aren't gonna start storing life time statistics (and they wouldn't even be useful for debugging the factory "right now").

[planetmaker]

I believe items as on a belt are clearly visible and distinguishable when zoomed-in. Making statistics like total amount passed for longer time is easily possible by means of a small circuit network setup.

A brief short-time statistics as shown by eradicator certainly would be nice... but definitely on the side of nice-to-have and not anywhere near must-have.