Forward crafting reference
Posted: Fri May 15, 2015 11:57 pm
Factorio already has excellent backward crafting refernece in its interface. If I examine an item, in-game, them the game tells me which subcomponents are required to craft said item.
So far, so good.
But I'd like to have an in-game way of also seeing the reverse, at least upon active player request, e.g. when the player pressed a particular key while in the inventory interface: A way to see what further products each item can be used to make. For instance, it took me a long while to really get a formal understanding of how few things Copper Plate and Plastic are actually used for. I assumed that both were widely useful as-is, whereas in fact each is only involved in the direct manufacturing of about a dozen items, including several obscure ones. The main use of Copper Plate is to make Copper Wire, and the main use of Plastic is to make Red Circuits. Apart from those ones each, they're used for almost nothing.
I know there are plenty of out-of-game references, including the wiki, but having it in-game and automated would be a huge boon for players using mods that add or change crafting recipes. Also, the text of the wiki often implies that its content might be incomplete, and even if that is rarely the case, the wiki is likely to contain incomplete for a period of time after the release of a new major revision, e.g. alpha 12 and later alpha 13,.
So far, so good.
But I'd like to have an in-game way of also seeing the reverse, at least upon active player request, e.g. when the player pressed a particular key while in the inventory interface: A way to see what further products each item can be used to make. For instance, it took me a long while to really get a formal understanding of how few things Copper Plate and Plastic are actually used for. I assumed that both were widely useful as-is, whereas in fact each is only involved in the direct manufacturing of about a dozen items, including several obscure ones. The main use of Copper Plate is to make Copper Wire, and the main use of Plastic is to make Red Circuits. Apart from those ones each, they're used for almost nothing.
I know there are plenty of out-of-game references, including the wiki, but having it in-game and automated would be a huge boon for players using mods that add or change crafting recipes. Also, the text of the wiki often implies that its content might be incomplete, and even if that is rarely the case, the wiki is likely to contain incomplete for a period of time after the release of a new major revision, e.g. alpha 12 and later alpha 13,.