Friday Facts #404 - Frustration not found

[Brambor]

QOLs are nice, but aren't exciting. I just hope that the devs are pushing out all QOL stuff first and once they run out of them they will post content FFFs (rather than the update and expansion being mostly about QOLs)

To me, QoL are the most exciting thing! I loved the last FFFs! Namely: 397, 400, 402, 403, 404

[bluerock]

Hitting Q the first time on an entity will give you a copy of the entity in hand, but what might be cool is hitting Q a second or third time on the same entity could give you different colored wires (if it supports being wired).

[Merssedes]

I've usually have one problem with grid alignments: when I need to put blueprint on the edge of the grid (for example, rails), I end up having to put marker half-alignment away from actual blueprint center. Negative side effects of this are:

1) blueprint is visually bigger than it should be (38x30 or 38x32 for rails depending on power pole positioning);

2) it does not visually align with cursor;

3) even if it's internals are symmectical, blueprint itself is not (usually vertical/horisontal rail segments: double rotation of it is symmetrical with respect with what will be built, but not with how it positioned relative to cursor).

[Agamemnon]

Pipette all things? Pipette ALL the things!

Okay, maybe only 1% of users would ever use it, but... hear me out:
Pipette decorations! Pipette ruins! Pipette resource patches themselves! Pipette Trees! Pipette Aliens!

For mapmaking by hand, for custom scenarios (and arrange battlefield starting-formations) this would be invaluable.

It's not a player-tool, of course, but a mod might want to use it on a subset of the above in the future... for whatever creative purpose idk.
So, when you're already going over the code for pipetting things... go all the way! Even if it won't be available in normal gameplay, I am pretty sure it won't stay unused for long. I would definitely use such a feature for all of the above purposes.

[Yenz]

Indeed a 404 Not Found "error"

[hexagon]

It'd also be nice if spidertrons could be driven remotely, similarly to how you plan to do it with trains. It'd make sense given we have a remote. Sure, sending movement orders with the remote will work, but I sometimes find it nicer to manually move a spidertron. Plus it could make us feel a little more present on the other worlds we've deployed our spidertrons to. Just a thought

[SounLee]

damn that was a rollercoaster... reading "RTS tool" as a RTS i fan was stoked!
"wohooo! i can now controll cars and tanks with it too?!"
turns out, you can´t, it´s just a very VERY MISSLEADING name for an" ONLY SPIDERTRON controll item".
new players or those who have not seen the FFF, are going to scratch their heads.

for the rest of the changes in the 2.0 update... YEAHHHH!!!! [for now]

[Terrahertz]

So if I pipette a fuel slot do i automatically select an appropriate fuel?

[Molay]

One thing that would be really cool for pipetting:
If you pipette a power pole you get a power pole entity.
If you pipette a power pole twice you get a cooper wire entity (to cut wires/put wires without having to select wires elsewhere)
If you pipette a power pole thrice, you get a green wire.
If you pipeete a power pole... fource(?) you get a red wire.

I.e. pipetting once works as it always has. Pipetting an entity multiple times gives access to it's related tools.

It could work on more entites.
Rails:
1: Rails
2: Signal
3: Chain signal
4: Train Stop

Refinery type building with liquid use:
1: The building
2: Pipe
3: Underground pipe

Inserter:
1: Inserter
2: Long Inserter

Fast Inserter:
1: Fast
2: Filter

Stack:
1: Stack
2: Filter Stack

Belt:
1: Belt
2: underground belt
3: splitter

Pipe:
1: Pipe
2: Underground Pipe

etc...

I.e. if you have an entity with a certain function, pipetting it multiple times gives access to related entites with related functions. Particularly the rail one could be handy. All I need is rails on my hotkey bar. After I place rails, I can access signals and stations via pipetting, saving me 3 slots on the hotkey bar, or saving me from looking in the inventory.

Bonus points if you can use this function on your hotbar directly.

[Shuisman]

I would love to see when you pipette ore, that by default you get the burner mining drill, but then it should change to an electric mining drill after your first crafted electric mining drill?

Thanks a lot for all the great updates.

[Zeroji]

"RTS Tool" seems like a weird name. The only reason I see for not keeping "Spidertron remote" is... new controllable entities?

I like the blueprint change. Just to be clear, "arrow keys" refers to actual arrow keys, not WASD?
For the blueprint editor menu, I'd like to see a couple of changes:

• Drag the flag to change position (mentioned by many others)
• Zooming in/out → I suppose this could be done by scrolling in/out, with the zoom center being the mouse position? Maybe add middle-click drag to pan around.
• And finally, a "show tile grid" checkbox so we can count tiles precisely when needed (maybe with larger divisions, but I don't know if they should be chunk-aligned or BP-size-aligned)

2.0 is gonna be awesome

[lm-]

Could you please stop making Factorio less and less playable?!?!



I can barely play my 1.1 save when I read about all of those improvements!

[Kadet123]

I would like to add the ability to zoom in on drawings in the drawings window. When you use huge drawings, and you need to remove some kind of traffic light, it is not even visible in the preview of the drawing.

This would be great. Or if we could open a blueprint in some sort of empty temporary surface and make edits to it.

[Salzig]

Hej,
it would also be awesome to have an option within the Blueprint Dialog to show the Blueprint repeated. Just a small Checkbox "Show repeated" and it will repeat the blueprint grayed out in the preview section of the blueprint dialog.

[Kadet123]

Could we maybe have a way to configure how many slots wide the toolbars are?

Personally, I'd rather have 2 toolbars 20 slots wide, than 4 10-slot toolbars taking up 4 rows of screen space (which can make driving south on a laptop screen harder, or attacking nests to the south).

[dylwhich]

Moving a central flag on the blueprint should be a thing as well.

...
For the blueprint editor menu, I'd like to see a couple of changes:

• Drag the flag to change position (mentioned by many others)

...

You can actually already do this in 1.1, you just have to hold Shift while dragging the flag. I feel like it should be clearer that you can do this though, I don't think it shows up in the key bindings settings or tips and tricks so it's very hard to discover on your own.

[ElderAxe]

I hope the alignment made on hand are temporary like rotation or flip of the blueprint and won't break the actual blueprint. I share my blueprints and if those position alignments are permanent, I sure people will make those changes (maybe by mistake, maybe intentionally) on downloaded blueprints then they will complain about my blueprints not aligned properly later on.


For me there are many frustrations about blueprints:

- The game should NOT remember the temporary modifications like rotation, flip or new position alignment of the blueprint and those temporary changes should reset every time you clear your cursor. If those changes needs to be permanent, then there should be a way to save it as a new blueprint. Or better it can remember when you put it to toolbar. Like the new RTS tool remembers its preferences.

- Maybe a "lock" option that would prevent unintended changes would be a solution. People can unlock the blueprint first if they want to modify it. Also if you're able to lock a book, it would keep the order of blueprints intact and prevents moving them by mistake. When you have a blueprint on your hand, and trying to select another blueprint, it moves the previous blueprint to position of the new selection.

- Blueprint descriptions are too short for detailed description on some cases.

- There is no actual metadata like "Version", "Last Modified", "Author", "Download URL". Workaround is putting these into description which reduces the description length further.

- I hate that blueprint window closes every time I open another window. On top of that it doesn't remember the previously opened book hierarchy and always starts from the main list. So if you're in a 4-5 level book, you need to open blueprint window and deep dive again just to use another blueprint from the previous book.

- There needs to be a way to exclude temporary changes like rotation, flip and active blueprint cursor when exporting a blueprint/book. Maybe holding shift or ctrl when clicking the export button would export the "original version" without these temporary changes.

- Zoom capability for blueprint window to see big blueprints.

- Ability to fully edit a blueprint. More like create a "Editor Extensions" mod Lab which only contains that blueprint and updates the original blueprint when you save it.

- Pipe connections to buildings not rendered correctly.

- Ability to control/download/update blueprints with LUA API. That way someone would be able to develop a "Blueprint Manager" mod like the built-in Mod Manager. And people can keep community blueprints up-to-date. Also search and find new blueprints. There are some websites for blueprint sharing but I don't think many people are aware of those websites.

[Brambor]

One thing that would be really cool for pipetting:
If you pipette a power pole you get a power pole entity.
If you pipette a power pole twice you get a cooper wire entity (to cut wires/put wires without having to select wires elsewhere)
If you pipette a power pole thrice, you get a green wire.
If you pipeete a power pole... fource(?) you get a red wire.

I.e. pipetting once works as it always has. Pipetting an entity multiple times gives access to it's related tools.

It could work on more entites.
Rails:
1: Rails
2: Signal
3: Chain signal
4: Train Stop

Refinery type building with liquid use:
1: The building
2: Pipe
3: Underground pipe

Inserter:
1: Inserter
2: Long Inserter

Fast Inserter:
1: Fast
2: Filter

Stack:
1: Stack
2: Filter Stack

Belt:
1: Belt
2: underground belt
3: splitter

Pipe:
1: Pipe
2: Underground Pipe

etc...

I.e. if you have an entity with a certain function, pipetting it multiple times gives access to related entites with related functions. Particularly the rail one could be handy. All I need is rails on my hotkey bar. After I place rails, I can access signals and stations via pipetting, saving me 3 slots on the hotkey bar, or saving me from looking in the inventory.

Bonus points if you can use this function on your hotbar directly.

Like that, but Q once works like now, hold Q to show a list of related entities as OP suggested. (Could be alt-Q, shift Q, ...)

Example group:
- Rails
- Signal
- Chain signal
- Train Stop
- Train

The groups are likely equal to the "crafting rows" in the crafting menu. They are a group of relevant items/entities.
Then Holding Q is "I want something like that, but not that exactly."

Mockup:
Hold Q over signal brings up this menu.
The menu is locked in place while Q is held. (If player hovers over something else, it doesn't bring new Q menu while Q is held.)
A player can click the item they want to have in their cursor.
The number is how many they have in their inventory.

Factorio mockup.png (925.67 KiB) Viewed 3247 times

Note:

Fast Inserter:
1: Fast
2: Filter

Stack:
1: Stack
2: Filter Stack

Filter inserters don't exist in 2.0

[adam_bise]

Still wondering what the "different military targets" are from FFF-373!

[mmmPI]

From what i understand it will be possible to sit in a spidertron, and task it to go somewhere around a lake, and back, while going on the map view and tasking other spidertrons to do other things RTS style. Both for your own spidertron and for the others the RTS control tool seems great to me !
The control groups for spidertron are great too ! before it felt somewhat hacky to tell several spidertron to follow a squad leader to emulate the function, as some could be destroyed leaving the others following it stuck.

I hope the easier way to align blueprints on grid will feel intuitive, i find it hard without a way to show the map coordinate of tiles and the chunk grid not using debug tools. Maybe it isn't required if things can be dragged for adjustment, curious to see !

Can you think of any other places pipette would make sense?

I can think of other places i try to pipette things currently not sure it make sense and maybe it is what parameterized blueprints are for :

Signals !

I know it's not something you can have in your inventory, and the inventory even closes when you open a combinator, but then the pipette tool/hotkey maybe could be used to pick and drop a signal in boxes so you don't have to click it and find the appropriate icon in a list. You could open a combinator, press the pipette button over a signal there would be this signals icon attached to the cursor and it could be dropped on the other fields with the left click replacing the "open menu". It would disappear in case of right click, or closing combinator ui, and could reappear when opening another combinator if it hasn't been cleeared.

When you have an array of combinators that you want to duplicate but change 1 or 2 things in all of them so you can't just duplicate.