Factorio Forums

Hi! I'd like to have a separate localisation for tooltips and factoripedia entries, and it seems like the API reflects wanting to supply that agency. Currently, however, if I have a localised_description entry, then it overwrites the factoripedia_description in the Factoriopedia. I feel like this is a bug, so I'm sharing.

Also, setting a 'factoriopedia_description' directly in a recipe doesn't seem to actually make an entry.

It seems to me factoriopedia_description is shown only for entities. Not for items, fluids, or recipes.

Can you please provide us with some good examples? Both types of description were added to the game for very different purposes.

Localised description is mainly used if you have several items or technologies sharing the same description but all having different names. For example, you have multiple science packs and want to have the same description for all of them.

Factoriopedia description was added for special cases of complicated entities in need of extra wordy descriptions that would be too much to have in a basic tooltip. In the game, we have it only for the fusion generator and fusion reactor.

Both those cases are in contradiction to the other.

For items, all descriptions should be brief.

For recipes and technologies, you can have as wordy descriptions as you want since it isn't a problem in most cases.

Entities are the only place where you could need to have extra description. But in this case it doesn't make much sense to group them with different entities in the first place.

If you are using localised description just to have a different name for the prototype than its description, then it isn't used for its intended purpose.

Of course, you could have some very viable use cases that I am missing. If you do, please feel free to describe it here.

Thank you for taking a look at this!

So, the tl;dr is that you would need to add detail to an item when you basically have to build and communicate a concept in your mod structure for the player to successfully engage with it.

In this case, I have a system wherein I add several metals, each of which have properties, and the player machines those into various Stocks -- sheet stock, angle stock, etc. Those cannot, by themselves, be used for anything -- EXCEPT to be made into machined parts that retrain one or two properties. That is, there's an interface:

[Metal-Stock] -> [Property-Machined Part]

This is my solution to Factorio not having fungible reagents; basically, it allows me to source, say, "Load Bearing Framing" from Iron, Titanium, and Steel. Same with "Corrosion-Resistant Piping" and "Basic Shielding" and such. Then, I can make a single recipe for, say, an Assembling Machine 1 -- instead of a myriad of recipes that all account for the different metals.

And I have to explain this to the player. The thing is, there's a number of metals, stocks, properties, machined parts, and metal machining entities (minisemblers in my case) that all interact with one another, and this can get very confusing. To combat this, I made very expansive tooltips that outlined what the player would need to know at a glance in order to utilize something. Metal-Stocks list their properties and what minisemblers consume them; Property'd-Machined-Parts list what metals can source them and what stocks are needed for this.

This information would be very useful to have in tooltips, because it'll help keep players in flow as they learn to navigate the structure of the production chains. On the other hand, expert users may not want the clutter. So I've made a setting in my mod that will activate or deactivate the Detailed Tooltips. But, in both cases, the Factoriopedia entry should reflect the information contained in the Detailed Tooltips. Hence, the request. I've shared two screenshots of tooltips that utilize this approach.

There are also a bunch of recipes that should be able to take advantage of this as well -- I have downgrade recipes, remelting recipes, machining byproducts, and various other groups of recipes that relate to other concepts in the modpack. These would benefit from explanation in the Factoriopedia.

I hope this helps! <3

I will look at the possibility of expanding factoriopedia_description to other prototypes. Since factoriopedia_description was always for entities only it wasn't overridden by localised_description. It just was ignored

Thank you kindly. My 'stretch goal' of an ask would be that if it has an icon that can be clicked on in the Factoriopedia, then ... it would be sweet if the factoriopedia_description property worked. But, I won't press my luck. Either way, I appreciate it!

+1, any extra control over the factoriopedia is a much needed addition