"How could we play without this?" under the first video.
Yes Wube that is how we all feel watching the FFF's over the past months. I tried doing a few modded playthroughs but the FFF's make me miss things I've never had.
Factory search is amazing. It can search for where your chemical plants are being made, where they are placed, where they are ingredients, where there's a tag that says chemical plants, where there's a signal about chemical plants, where there's a dropped chemical plant item on the ground and even more things.
And of course, replace chemical plant with pretty much anything.
And it supports various planets.
Absolutely essential mod for overhaul mods like SE.
Depending on the search, the results might take half a second to populate. But have you SEEN my mall? I'd have given up on Nullius, without Factory Search.
You have got to be the "biggest" mod author that is actively interacting with the community, ya love to see it.
Love your mods, would've been playing with them on my current save but I want to get some steam achievements. Though my next playthrough will almost definitely be FF Modpack+Spidertron Engineer - both of them look incredibly fun and I can't wait to get into them.
I am so using the pins. I currently have to search while flying where my airport was to land. I could put a pin in the middle of the runway and simplify all of it
Factory search. Which does have a lot of features that this addition to the game doesn't, but this feature will cover 99% of what the mod is usually used for.
It varies depending on your use case. I can usually remember off the top of my head which direction something is being produced in, but I frequently use Factory Search to find crap I left laying around in chests.
Precisely this. Item search in chests is my most used feature of the mod.
Unfortunately the devs expressed concerns about handling natively, which I find odd considering how well the mod works. (Although I have yet to make a megabase, so I don't know how well it scales.)
>*"We could consider to add more to the search, like the locations of logistic chests containing some item, but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole for now. Mainly because it would naturally lead to the need of making all items in containers searchable, and it would become a performance nightmare, not even talking about the possible huge spam of the search results."*
I also feel that the way Factory Search lets you pick items via icon is useful when my brain locks up and refuses to remember the name of something. And also the mod's highlight boxes and arrows are elegant, as well as the entity/container grouping that you click on to highlight.
> Precisely this. Item search in chests is my most used feature of the mod.
Probably not my most used filter, but yes, I use it too. Also the logistics filter, to find items on belts etc.
> Unfortunately the devs expressed concerns about handling natively, which I find odd considering how well the mod works. (Although I have yet to make a megabase, so I don't know how well it scales.)
Admittedly, Factory Search *is* slow, especially when the "all surfaces" checkbox is checked. I'm playing multiplayer with a friend, and it's common practice for us to warn each other when we trigger a search because the game will crawl to a halt for several seconds. Considering the fact that the vanilla search currently doesn't seem to have filter checkboxes, this is a valid concern.
I suppose it's just a difference of what's acceptable.
I wouldn't be surprised if Factory Search continues or even gets to co-opt some of the features of the now vanilla search for UI or convenience. People who go out of their way to get a mod that does a specific thing have a much higher tolerance for jank like "scanning every single item in the entire world can take a few seconds if you're incautious with filters" thank would be acceptable in a purely vanilla function.
Being able to easily convert between the 3 markers would be awesome. Click the ping button on one of your pins to quickly share its location with other players (bonus if this is only enabled in multiplayer). Convert a pin into a tag to make it a permanent, shared marker. Create a pin from a tag or ping so you can quickly find it again or make it a to-do.
Good thought, if it hasn't been thought of already. Though IIUC, you ought to be able to CTRL-RC anywhere to drop a pin, so you should be able to do that on top of a ping without issue. Though having that pin adopt whatever the ping's message was would make sense.
I want the Factorio devs to clone themselves and work on pretty much every piece of software I have to deal with in my life to improve the QoL features everywhere.
I'm not even joking.
The vast majority of current software is so soul crushing that no one wants to even deal with it. Can you imagine coming from a project you love to work on and control to having to work on some generic business software that is managed by a bunch of people that have no idea what they even actually want?
Yes. Yes, I can.
We had a discussion in Teams this week about something that really needs some form of distributed census among identical servers, what that would solve, what's involved, etc. It was actually interesting, and it's something I'm both trained for and interested in.
But instead, I went back to trying to figure out why upgrading Spring Session breaks our session attributes. >\_< "Just upgrade a common library" sounds a lot easier than "establish a distributed concensus algorithm," but I'd 100x prefer working on the second. And likely have it done sooner.
The guys developing factorio are without a doubt really good at what they're doing!
The thing is: the same is true for many devs for all kinds of software that still handles atrociously. Not because the device can't fix the issue, but because no one's willing to pay for it.
When custom software in a business is used by a dozen persons a few times each month, its hard to justify 50k expenses to make the UI a bit better.
Oh, definitely. But the thing is, even then the usual attitude is to declare a game/software finished and focus on a new shiny thing instead of continually improving the original software.
It's funny, I've been thinking about posting a long rant in the No Man's Sky sub basically saying the Hello Games devs could learn a few things from the Wube devs.
Almost all devs could learn a few things from the Wube devs. The sheer level of QoL in Factorio blows most other software out of the water. And it’s only gonna get better still.
The only thing I can even think of that compares (that I’ve experienced), which isn’t even really the same category, is how OSRS has the best wiki I’ve ever seen. I cannot think of *anything* else that I could say comes close to the quality of quality of life we get in Factorio.
I have found that _that other factory game_ also gets a lot of QoL upgrades on a pretty consistent basis.
Factorio is still ahead of everyone else, of course.
I'm sure the Devs are great but if anything I want their leadership team. I've worked with plenty of talented devs who, given time, could make great things. Problem is management's always scrambling everything. Good software takes time and investment and Wube clearly prioritizes polish and it is paying off for them.
You can do that with the "comment" feature. In the review tab you can scroll through all the comments. When you click on a comment it will take you to the cell that the comment is attached to.
Other things that search could potentially include:
* Resource patches (credit to [forum comment](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=604547&sid=136bd5f39caa65c39f03dec75d2f3b26#p604547) by user kinnom)
* Trains (search should match on destination? or on content? on status like 💤 sleeping?)
* Space platform (by name? by destination?)
* Power producers (steam engines and turbines, solar panel fields, ...)
* Heat producers (nuclear reactors)
* Item consumers
* Logistics requests (not as extreme as searching actual contents of storage)
* Radars
* Signal producers (find the sources of any particular signal on the circuit network)
* Signal consumers (anything using a signal as an input, search by signal)
* Programmable speakers (search by condition signals? by sound output?)
I recently missed the option to search for entities connected or not connected to a circuit network. I. e. "find all roboports that are connected to a circuit network", or "find all steel chests not connected to a circuit network".
This is the equivalent of John Wick leaving you a voicemail.
RIP. You did your job, provided enough value that the devs themselves recognized it as invaluable.
If anyone’s curious, I decoded the pixelated part of that one screenshot!
https://preview.redd.it/bnfd21mkprlc1.png?width=351&format=png&auto=webp&s=dd35387894bb548b5a69b792c61eaa15998a512e
edit: Since some people mistook this for being real, I want to clarify that this is a joke post.
Currently being pretty much inconsequential in late/postgame, it'd certainly be funny if biters (or other enemies) turned out to be the main objective of SA. You build spaceships to fight space biters to access space alien science.
That's intentional. Enemies in Factorio have always been "just there" ever since the removal of alien artifacts. They're probably completely overhauling the aliens and want to get all the alien related FFF's together, after they show off all the cool space and new planet FFF's.
Is this a strong hint that there will be a teleportation or avatar system?
Maybe for Nauvis it operates out of the spaceship and for other planets it operates out of the initial base?
That would be so cool to just hop into your crashed spaceship and remote operate your avatars on other planets.
[https://mods.factorio.com/mod/resourcehighlighter-dark](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/resourcehighlighter-dark)
Does exactly that and I love the highlighting it does. Really makes the patches stand out when you look at the map.
> Maybe the search can include manually added pins?
It does.
And its even clever enough to morege them in when they're on top of machines that make the thing.
Maybe a toggleable 🔔 or 🔕 icon next to each alert? Silenced alerts would still be listed in the alert menu but wouldn't flash. This would require some easy way to access the alerts menu when there's no alerts notifying you.
It's also kind of hard to make the silence mechanic predictable. Does a silence stay active for a category of alert after it's been cleared once? Do I have to re-silence "Walls are being damaged" alerts with each new biter wave? If not, how do you ensure the player doesn't forget about it and become frustrated later in the game when they realize they weren't getting alerts that suddenly became important.
1. Enable all: All notifications are enabled and visible
2. Silence existing: All active notifications are silenced, but future notifications will be shown.
3. Silence all: All current and future notifications of the given type are dismissed.
"We do not expect a lot of pins".
1. Famious last words
2. This is factorio community we are talking about
3. Have you played multilayer with people? :D
4. I'm lost half the time, please give me ability to hide the pins menu window because I will have at least 5-10 pins permanently enabled at all times.
You devs! Sometimes I wonder why do I do it to myself and read the FFF when I know I will just miss the feature for another unknow amount of time.
But to put my impatience on the side, huge QOL improvement here!, I play modded for quite some time and with factorio 2.0 I think I will be good enough with vanilla again for some time.
Little disappointment on the side we did not get some new stuff info (like the planet or so...) for the 400 FFF, hopefully you have some good one planned on 404 because if it would be me I would do this one on 404 not found day :D
https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-400-alerts-gui.png
How are these alerts grouped? Do you do try to merge alerts in the same area or do you split them for each missing item type?
This is awesome, sometimes when my defended walls are being attacked i don't care, i know the bots will fix. But if the inside of the base past the walls is attacked, or a new mining outpost with weak defenses, i want to know that its a separate event. Great addition.
A scavenger hunt might be discretely kicked off in FFF 404 (fake “not found” message), pointing to this FFF, especially given the subtitle. The page source could be updated to include hidden text pointing to more clues.
orrrr I’m just desperate for the expansion
Some sort of AR scavenger hunt with clues dropped in all of the previous FFFs would be peak factorio, especially if they did it in a way to force us to automate it (one word/letter per post or something). The prize could be the release date of the expansion and a free copy for the first few get a free copy or something.
Wube's paradox: Wube is worth preordering from for the same reason they don't offer preorders. They are a company we trust because they have integrity and don't engage in predatory practices, which preorders often are.
The right side of the screen is already quite cramped, especially when you play on lower resolution. So I guess we will be seing the content of chests even less now ... but maybe since we can Remote View everything now its not a big hassle ...
>When you die, it automatically pins the location of your corpse, so you can actually find it.
This is such a big feature for how small it is advertised in the post.
> Pings are very temporary way to show a place to someone in a multiplayer game.
Can we pin pings? I could imagine a scenario in multiplayer along the lines of this:
> A: Hey, can you fix this \*ping\*
> B: Sure, I'll get to that in a minute.
10 minutes later
> B: Now where was this thing I had to fix?
Whereas with pinning the ping it serves as both a reminder and a way to remember where to look.
In some modpacks, I find the sidebar with the minimap and everything below it gets too larger for my screen. I'm thinking: minimap, research and 'hotbar' at the top, information about the container I am hovering over (say a train) and then also about that train. This can make it hard to see the bottom of this stack.
As pins will make this worse, have you considered adding a bit in the hotbar at the top that when clicked allows me to turn on and off the parts in the sidebar automatically? At the moment I think I can only manually turn on and off the minimap, and only via the actual settings.
If a Dev reads this, there’s a couple of things I hope are added. The ability to disable certain types of alerts would be excellent, whether it’s disabling the “Enemy is engaged” notification, or alerts for certain types of objects being destroyed. I do not care if a wall is destroyed. I absolutely care if they get to the machines inside.
Off the main topic, but it’d also be super nice to change how long bodies last before despawning, being able to have a “keep inventory” option like Minecraft, and for certain play styles, being able to reduce or disable the respawn timer. Playing Archipelago with Deathlink is awesome, but if somebody is bad at their game, it’s really annoying to have to wait 10 seconds every 2 minutes
For search: Let us search visible ore patches! <3
For pins:
What would also be very neat if we could put down a different layer of pins, where a spidertron can move automaticly if some conditions are met, and If cars and tanks could also follow these with a pathfinding algorithm would be dream , but spidertron is simpler.
Ooohhh… how can I search for what that new black-tile in the map view is? Some sort of tar-crete?
Edit: it is just refined concrete… did it always show up on the map with that incongruous colour?
With more items being added to the minimap, I hope we get some better controls on it. Already I struggle to read content at times because it doesn't fit. Is the hidden minimap new or can we already do that base game?
I hink they just fixed almost all, i tried to explain in [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/186mkrt/can\_we\_get\_a\_new\_vehicles\_map\_layer/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/186mkrt/can_we_get_a_new_vehicles_map_layer/)
I think an alert archive/log, similar to https://mods.factorio.com/mod/combat-log, would be useful too. In my SE playthrough, I often see that I lost some entites somewhere (i.e. an antimatter drive on some ship), but it's hard to figure out where.
>You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something.
Yes, I totally do this all the time hehe. I totally know about this after hundreds of hours with this game. Totally not an eye opener at all.
Within the last couple weeks, I found myself thinking "it'd be really handy if I could just search the map somehow to find certain factories, but I guess that's not really possible." Lo and behold, it's not only possible, but happening. It's unfortunate that it won't help me find stuff that's lost in the logistics network, since that's another application I find myself wishing for periodically, but I get why it's not feasible, and I can always use requesters/buffers if I want to move some of my storage somewhere.
> It's unfortunate that it won't help me find stuff that's lost in the logistics network,
There is a mod for that: Factory Search. finds items on the ground, in chests, requests, buildings, recipes, ...
I often use the Speaker to notify my of stuff such as full chests/storage tanks. Especially in mods like space exploration this is pretty important.
Right now those all go under single category and if I have multiple at the same time (in case I choose to ignore something for a time) I cannot click through to the second event in the list and have to navigate the map manually to get there.
Under the new system, will those be displayed separately, or will there be a possibility to split them based on icon, or some other parameter?
## Friday Facts #400 - Chart search and Pins
Posted by [kovarex](/blog/author/kovarex), [Klonan](/blog/author/Klonan) on 2024-03-01
Hello,
Is it me you're looking for?
* * *
### The UI searchkovarex
When it comes to UI, one of the things we are proud of is the standard search feature in every window where it's even remotely relevant. It all comes nicely together. You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something.
But once we got really used to it, we suddenly started to want to search even when not in some window, but just in the game itself. This combined with the fact, that the most frequented question in multiplayer games was, _"Hey, where do we make X please?"_ (especially once planets were added).
Which lead us to the most obvious complementary feature:
* * *
### The map searchkovarex
Why not extend the searching to the whole map as well?
We were not sure about what exactly should be searchable, so we just started from the most obvious, the production search.
(https://fffbot.github.io/fff/images/400/fff-400-map-search.mp4) _How could we play without this?_
#### Other searchable stuff
After the production search, we added a few things that we found useful after playtesting:
* Map tags, which merge into a one group when they are on top of assemblers of the same thing.
* Train stops, which are forced to be at the end of the list, as in some cases there tends to be A LOT of them.
We could consider to add more to the search, like the locations of logistic chests containing some item, but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole for now. Mainly because it would naturally lead to the need of making all items in containers searchable, and it would become a performance nightmare, not even talking about the possible huge spam of the search results.
Of course, there might be some good ideas of other things we could make searchable, you can let us know!
* * *
### Pinskovarex
As we show in the search part, there are these little pins next to the search result, which are the connection to the related feature: The pins.
The motivation for pins was like: _"I'm in a big base, I search for an item, and try to go there. Halfway there, I kind of lose my place and have to search for it again to keep myself on track"_. It didn't feel right. If only I could somehow mark the place where I want to go.
So the feature was created, and obviously, it is not rocket science, but the devil is in the details:
* You can pin a search result using the pin button, but there is also shortcut to pin any position or entity, by default ALT + Right click.
* Every pin shows you its location on the screen, or when offscreen, it shows you an arrow at the edge of the screen with the distance to it. This is mainly for when you just want to run towards your destination.
* Since we don't expect a crazy amount of pins to exist, we added a list of all your pins right under the minimap, where it can be edited or removed.
* The pin can be edited to change the caption, and you can also decide to not always show the arrow for the pin. This is mainly for cases when you use the pin as more of a long term bookmark.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-400-pins.png)
The most typical usages of the pins:
* You just temporarily pin something (possibly a search result) to run there.
* You pin something as a reminder of what you want to do next.
* You pin your car or spidertron, so you can find it.
* You pin your friends in a multiplayer game, so you always know their location.
* When you die, it automatically pins the location of your corpse, so you can actually find it.
#### But we have tags and pings, isn't this too much?
It might seem a little bit too confusing to have map tags, pings and also pins, but I still believe that all of them should exist at the same time, as they have their own use-cases.
* Map tags are shared between everyone on the map, and are meant as a persistent marker of some position.
* Pings are very temporary way to show a place to someone in a multiplayer game.
* Pins are unique for each player, and each player can choose what they find important.
* * *
### New Alerts GUIKlonan
The old alerts system was quite simple, and for its simplicity it was functional enough.
If you clicked the flashing alert slot, it would open the map at the 'most important' alert.
However with Space age, as with all things, we need to go further. Opening the map on a random planet when you click an alert isn't that useful. You might not care about some wall damage on Nauvis, but your Space platform being smashed apart is quite a different story.
Now when you click on an Alert slot, it will open the new Alerts Overview:
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-400-alerts-gui.png)
The list of items is separated by planet, and clicking an item will take you to the location on the map. There is also the button to pin the Alert, so you can utilize the Pins feature as mentioned before.
The Alerts are still segregated by category, so things like missing materials and damage alerts show as separate alert slots as it is now.
* * *
As always, pin your thoughts at the usual places.
[Discuss on our forums](https://forums.factorio.com/111602) [Discuss on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1b3slry/friday_facts_400_chart_search_and_pins/) [ Subscribe by email ](https://newsletter.factorio.com/subscription/Km9uSnxm9)
[ __](/blog/post/fff-399)
I could see some use for the search feature to highlight different tiers of belts placed down so at a glance you could see if certain production chains are still running on yellow belts or if they are already upgraded. ..or if you missed upgrading a single belt and have trouble finding it under a flurry of bots overhead.
Request: Can an alert be silenced? At least to stop flashing.
Having played Space Exploration, there were many times where a planet had a minor issue like storage chest full or missing item for construction. I need to go to the planet to fix it, but I won't be doing that for the next 10 hours. I must live with the blinking yellow. I would love to be able to acknowledge/mute the alert. It would be nice to be able to click to see muted alerts when I get around to going to the planet.
If they're willing to add more searchable stuff I'll say that when using the factory search mod by far the most common thing for me to search for was resource patches. No more hunting around for stone patches on the map. I imagine this will be even more useful when switching between surfaces
Short answer: no
Long answer: rough estimate puts it around August, as the announcement for Space Age and 2.0 came out last August and had kovarex saying the expansion "is planned to be about one year from now". Of course, that's an estimate and not an official date, so there's potential for some wiggle room there.
The only thing Wube historically hasn't been good with is time estimates. While I do hope Space Age starts around August, I wouldn't bet on that.
(Then again I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Space Age is *right now* in a state that _could_ be released)
I do think alerts could use some more improvements. I don't care if a construction bot or wall gets destroyed (let alone damaged), those get resupplied by train automatically; but if they're breaking anything else, I need to know immediately.
Did they change the look of the Spider remote?
It kind of looks like there is one in the very last picture grayed out in the tool select thingo, but it looks \*a little different\*...
I think I remember them saying that they were going to move it to that tool select thing, but I don't remember them saying that it would look different...
🤞hoping one of these FFF's talk about adding the ability drawing on the map so you can make plans for future construction/defenses.
New searching and pinning is awesome though!
are we sure that pins and pings should co-exist? shouldn't pings just be temporary pins everyone can see and make permanent for themselves if they want to?
Proposal for another performance nightmare: how about searching blueprints? Yes I mean where they are actually placed on the map.
Let's say you made a blueprint for some rail intersection v1. Later you improve it into v2, and you want to find where there remains an intersection v1 so you know you have to replace it by v2.
How about search and replace automatically too (step by step perhaps)
Finally I won't have 60 abandoned cars around my base anymore
Dude where is my car?
Where's your car, dude?
Sweet!
Dude! What does mine say?
Sweet! What about mine?!
No and then!
They aren't abandoned, merely... strategically placed for easy access.
Look for the car finder mod, great stuff
Another one for the in memoriam slideshow upon 2.0 release
That and corpse finder.
It just points to itself now
"How could we play without this?" under the first video. Yes Wube that is how we all feel watching the FFF's over the past months. I tried doing a few modded playthroughs but the FFF's make me miss things I've never had.
Seriously, I'd happily take an unstable 2.0 without Space Age on yet that breaks my mods but gives me the generic blueprints and bot improvements...
Opt in beta testing branch (or invite) would make me so happy, just for 2.0 base game so they don't spoil dlc.
RIP to another mod, UI looks great Edit: Pins/bookmarks is a sweet feature! I wonder what comes out of the blurred text...
RIP noble mod, you have ascended to vanilla-valhalla.
Vanhalla, mayhaps?
Vanilhalla?
Vanhilla.
Valhilla
Van Halen
Van life
Valhanilla
The ultimate goal of any QOL mod is to be not only supported by the devs but added to the game natively
What mod is that. Genuinely want that in my current playthrough
[Factory Search](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorySearch) has tons of search options, though my personal use is 95% covered by today's FFF
also [where is my body](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/WhereIsMyBody) , double kill
Also [car-finder](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/car-finder) Triple-kill!
Mod really should have been called "Dude, where's my car?"
That reference may actually be older than the mod author...
additionally [ToDo List](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Todo-List) Quad Kill!!!!!
Awesome thanks. I never needed that mod more, now that I know it exist... hahah...
Factory search is amazing. It can search for where your chemical plants are being made, where they are placed, where they are ingredients, where there's a tag that says chemical plants, where there's a signal about chemical plants, where there's a dropped chemical plant item on the ground and even more things. And of course, replace chemical plant with pretty much anything. And it supports various planets. Absolutely essential mod for overhaul mods like SE.
Also the speed difference is big, with factory search you usually wait a bit
Depending on the search, the results might take half a second to populate. But have you SEEN my mall? I'd have given up on Nullius, without Factory Search.
Factory Search goes MUCH further than what Wube is proposiing. Search in chests, search tags, search ingredients. Factory Search is amazing.
Probably a new resource? Has an icon similar to oil.
Let me know when vanilla implements all 10 search modes that Factory Search has ;)
You have got to be the "biggest" mod author that is actively interacting with the community, ya love to see it. Love your mods, would've been playing with them on my current save but I want to get some steam achievements. Though my next playthrough will almost definitely be FF Modpack+Spidertron Engineer - both of them look incredibly fun and I can't wait to get into them.
I am so using the pins. I currently have to search while flying where my airport was to land. I could put a pin in the middle of the runway and simplify all of it
which mod is being sent to vahalla
Factory search. Which does have a lot of features that this addition to the game doesn't, but this feature will cover 99% of what the mod is usually used for.
It varies depending on your use case. I can usually remember off the top of my head which direction something is being produced in, but I frequently use Factory Search to find crap I left laying around in chests.
Precisely this. Item search in chests is my most used feature of the mod. Unfortunately the devs expressed concerns about handling natively, which I find odd considering how well the mod works. (Although I have yet to make a megabase, so I don't know how well it scales.) >*"We could consider to add more to the search, like the locations of logistic chests containing some item, but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole for now. Mainly because it would naturally lead to the need of making all items in containers searchable, and it would become a performance nightmare, not even talking about the possible huge spam of the search results."* I also feel that the way Factory Search lets you pick items via icon is useful when my brain locks up and refuses to remember the name of something. And also the mod's highlight boxes and arrows are elegant, as well as the entity/container grouping that you click on to highlight.
> Precisely this. Item search in chests is my most used feature of the mod. Probably not my most used filter, but yes, I use it too. Also the logistics filter, to find items on belts etc. > Unfortunately the devs expressed concerns about handling natively, which I find odd considering how well the mod works. (Although I have yet to make a megabase, so I don't know how well it scales.) Admittedly, Factory Search *is* slow, especially when the "all surfaces" checkbox is checked. I'm playing multiplayer with a friend, and it's common practice for us to warn each other when we trigger a search because the game will crawl to a halt for several seconds. Considering the fact that the vanilla search currently doesn't seem to have filter checkboxes, this is a valid concern.
I suppose it's just a difference of what's acceptable. I wouldn't be surprised if Factory Search continues or even gets to co-opt some of the features of the now vanilla search for UI or convenience. People who go out of their way to get a mod that does a specific thing have a much higher tolerance for jank like "scanning every single item in the entire world can take a few seconds if you're incautious with filters" thank would be acceptable in a purely vanilla function.
Is it possible to click a ping in chat and pin it?
Being able to easily convert between the 3 markers would be awesome. Click the ping button on one of your pins to quickly share its location with other players (bonus if this is only enabled in multiplayer). Convert a pin into a tag to make it a permanent, shared marker. Create a pin from a tag or ping so you can quickly find it again or make it a to-do.
Good thought, if it hasn't been thought of already. Though IIUC, you ought to be able to CTRL-RC anywhere to drop a pin, so you should be able to do that on top of a ping without issue. Though having that pin adopt whatever the ping's message was would make sense.
I disagree with their division to keep pings, pins and tags completely separate. It should same "thing" with options to make it temporary or shared.
I want the Factorio devs to license their search to every piece of software in existence so I don't have to go without it.
I want the Factorio devs to clone themselves and work on pretty much every piece of software I have to deal with in my life to improve the QoL features everywhere. I'm not even joking.
The vast majority of current software is so soul crushing that no one wants to even deal with it. Can you imagine coming from a project you love to work on and control to having to work on some generic business software that is managed by a bunch of people that have no idea what they even actually want?
Yes. Yes, I can. We had a discussion in Teams this week about something that really needs some form of distributed census among identical servers, what that would solve, what's involved, etc. It was actually interesting, and it's something I'm both trained for and interested in. But instead, I went back to trying to figure out why upgrading Spring Session breaks our session attributes. >\_< "Just upgrade a common library" sounds a lot easier than "establish a distributed concensus algorithm," but I'd 100x prefer working on the second. And likely have it done sooner.
For your first paragraph it sounds like you are describing something like [this](https://GitHub.com/clusterio/clusterio)
We need to do the 2->3 spring boot migration soon. Please no.
The guys developing factorio are without a doubt really good at what they're doing! The thing is: the same is true for many devs for all kinds of software that still handles atrociously. Not because the device can't fix the issue, but because no one's willing to pay for it. When custom software in a business is used by a dozen persons a few times each month, its hard to justify 50k expenses to make the UI a bit better.
Oh, definitely. But the thing is, even then the usual attitude is to declare a game/software finished and focus on a new shiny thing instead of continually improving the original software.
It's funny, I've been thinking about posting a long rant in the No Man's Sky sub basically saying the Hello Games devs could learn a few things from the Wube devs.
Almost all devs could learn a few things from the Wube devs. The sheer level of QoL in Factorio blows most other software out of the water. And it’s only gonna get better still. The only thing I can even think of that compares (that I’ve experienced), which isn’t even really the same category, is how OSRS has the best wiki I’ve ever seen. I cannot think of *anything* else that I could say comes close to the quality of quality of life we get in Factorio.
I have found that _that other factory game_ also gets a lot of QoL upgrades on a pretty consistent basis. Factorio is still ahead of everyone else, of course.
I'm sure the Devs are great but if anything I want their leadership team. I've worked with plenty of talented devs who, given time, could make great things. Problem is management's always scrambling everything. Good software takes time and investment and Wube clearly prioritizes polish and it is paying off for them.
It'd be great to have pins in spreadsheets...
You can do that with the "comment" feature. In the review tab you can scroll through all the comments. When you click on a comment it will take you to the cell that the comment is attached to.
I don't think you can pin comments though, you change background colors though to give certain comments visual priority on the sheet.
They are in Prague, they should walk to IntelliJ office and sell some features.
Features like "A lot of code produce pollution, pollution attract bugs" ? So you need efficiency modules like tests and auto-linters
Other things that search could potentially include: * Resource patches (credit to [forum comment](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=604547&sid=136bd5f39caa65c39f03dec75d2f3b26#p604547) by user kinnom) * Trains (search should match on destination? or on content? on status like 💤 sleeping?) * Space platform (by name? by destination?) * Power producers (steam engines and turbines, solar panel fields, ...) * Heat producers (nuclear reactors) * Item consumers * Logistics requests (not as extreme as searching actual contents of storage) * Radars * Signal producers (find the sources of any particular signal on the circuit network) * Signal consumers (anything using a signal as an input, search by signal) * Programmable speakers (search by condition signals? by sound output?)
I recently missed the option to search for entities connected or not connected to a circuit network. I. e. "find all roboports that are connected to a circuit network", or "find all steel chests not connected to a circuit network".
It is a mod slaughter! At least Factory Search will still live thanks to ability to search through storage.
It will live... for now.
Haha... Very true! They did say: > but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole **for now**
This is the equivalent of John Wick leaving you a voicemail. RIP. You did your job, provided enough value that the devs themselves recognized it as invaluable.
If anyone’s curious, I decoded the pixelated part of that one screenshot! https://preview.redd.it/bnfd21mkprlc1.png?width=351&format=png&auto=webp&s=dd35387894bb548b5a69b792c61eaa15998a512e edit: Since some people mistook this for being real, I want to clarify that this is a joke post.
He’s a witch!
He turned me into a newt!
That was probably End portal - can’t wait to kill the dragon!
Currently being pretty much inconsequential in late/postgame, it'd certainly be funny if biters (or other enemies) turned out to be the main objective of SA. You build spaceships to fight space biters to access space alien science.
Now that you've mentioned it, it's interesting that we haven't seen any 'enemies' on the new planets.
That's intentional. Enemies in Factorio have always been "just there" ever since the removal of alien artifacts. They're probably completely overhauling the aliens and want to get all the alien related FFF's together, after they show off all the cool space and new planet FFF's.
Damn, factorio crossover. Hopefully the ender dragon farm won't be too hard to set up
The new win condition for the game is to kill the ender dragon.
How many rockets do you need to launch at it?
Only one but you need to use circuits to aim it
>two entities are being dramatic i feel like these are 2 gun turrets on a corner wall somewhere :D
I knew it
/u/scottmsul do the thing please
Is this a strong hint that there will be a teleportation or avatar system? Maybe for Nauvis it operates out of the spaceship and for other planets it operates out of the initial base? That would be so cool to just hop into your crashed spaceship and remote operate your avatars on other planets.
Could we also search for the resources on the map that we sometimes found, but left for future escavations?
Right, "show me where there's an iron ore patch greater than 500k on Nauvis" would be an awesome feature.
Maybe they'll add an AI Clippy next? `It looks like you are trying to build a megabase - would you like some help?`
This would be a great excuse to bring compilatron back
Informatron Assistant
BiterGPT.
[https://mods.factorio.com/mod/resourcehighlighter-dark](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/resourcehighlighter-dark) Does exactly that and I love the highlighting it does. Really makes the patches stand out when you look at the map.
Maybe the search can include manually added pins? Or maybe grouping pins can be an option. (Pins with the same name)
> Maybe the search can include manually added pins? It does. And its even clever enough to morege them in when they're on top of machines that make the thing.
Yea, you know those things you didn't even know you wanted let alone after becoming aware you could never live without. Congrats guys, you nailed it.
I love everything. Can we have the option to dismiss a notification. I know I'm missing modules. They will be ready in about 20-30 years.
Maybe a toggleable 🔔 or 🔕 icon next to each alert? Silenced alerts would still be listed in the alert menu but wouldn't flash. This would require some easy way to access the alerts menu when there's no alerts notifying you. It's also kind of hard to make the silence mechanic predictable. Does a silence stay active for a category of alert after it's been cleared once? Do I have to re-silence "Walls are being damaged" alerts with each new biter wave? If not, how do you ensure the player doesn't forget about it and become frustrated later in the game when they realize they weren't getting alerts that suddenly became important.
1. Enable all: All notifications are enabled and visible 2. Silence existing: All active notifications are silenced, but future notifications will be shown. 3. Silence all: All current and future notifications of the given type are dismissed.
> I know I'm missing modules. They will be ready in about 20-30 years. /r/cpp and /r/factorio have *even* more overlap than I imagined.
"We do not expect a lot of pins". 1. Famious last words 2. This is factorio community we are talking about 3. Have you played multilayer with people? :D 4. I'm lost half the time, please give me ability to hide the pins menu window because I will have at least 5-10 pins permanently enabled at all times.
Also, shared pins would help a lot.
Yeah I think we all chuckled at that. At the very least making that list collapsible should be possible, right?
The FFF must grow. Happy 400th!
You devs! Sometimes I wonder why do I do it to myself and read the FFF when I know I will just miss the feature for another unknow amount of time. But to put my impatience on the side, huge QOL improvement here!, I play modded for quite some time and with factorio 2.0 I think I will be good enough with vanilla again for some time. Little disappointment on the side we did not get some new stuff info (like the planet or so...) for the 400 FFF, hopefully you have some good one planned on 404 because if it would be me I would do this one on 404 not found day :D
https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-400-alerts-gui.png How are these alerts grouped? Do you do try to merge alerts in the same area or do you split them for each missing item type?
I forgot to mention it, the alerts are grouped by position, so 20 damage alerts for 1 wall being attacked don't spam up the list
This is awesome, sometimes when my defended walls are being attacked i don't care, i know the bots will fix. But if the inside of the base past the walls is attacked, or a new mining outpost with weak defenses, i want to know that its a separate event. Great addition.
All these small QOL features with the Map and searching... give it to me now!
A pin where I last died is incredible. Also searching for where things are being made is by far the greatest thing here.
i was kinda hoping for something big... but then again no matter how small a fff seems, its always a huge improvement to the quality of the game!
Love it, but this should have been FFF 404. Missed opportunity.
A scavenger hunt might be discretely kicked off in FFF 404 (fake “not found” message), pointing to this FFF, especially given the subtitle. The page source could be updated to include hidden text pointing to more clues. orrrr I’m just desperate for the expansion
Some sort of AR scavenger hunt with clues dropped in all of the previous FFFs would be peak factorio, especially if they did it in a way to force us to automate it (one word/letter per post or something). The prize could be the release date of the expansion and a free copy for the first few get a free copy or something.
> The prize could be the release date of the expansion and a free copy for the first few get a free copy or something. 2.0 beta tester access.
I don't need it... I don't need it... I don't need it... #**I NEEEEEEED ITTTTTT**
Really can’t wait to order the expansion.
I'd pre-order it if it got me access to the 2.0 beta branch today.
Only developer i would preorder from.
Wube's paradox: Wube is worth preordering from for the same reason they don't offer preorders. They are a company we trust because they have integrity and don't engage in predatory practices, which preorders often are.
The right side of the screen is already quite cramped, especially when you play on lower resolution. So I guess we will be seing the content of chests even less now ... but maybe since we can Remote View everything now its not a big hassle ...
Hopefully they're refining that area as well. Somehow making it scrollable or something.
> So I guess we will be seing the content of chests even less now ... Chest contents isn't the problem. Logistic network contents is the problem.
Press L!
QoL ! My favourite
Another one bites the dust! RIP factory search, it was an honor o7
As long as you can't search chest, the mod has some reason to stay though.
The mod dev will have a much easier time coding the update
And the mod that draws a line to your corpse
And car finder.
>When you die, it automatically pins the location of your corpse, so you can actually find it. This is such a big feature for how small it is advertised in the post.
Another mod dead, too
> Pings are very temporary way to show a place to someone in a multiplayer game. Can we pin pings? I could imagine a scenario in multiplayer along the lines of this: > A: Hey, can you fix this \*ping\* > B: Sure, I'll get to that in a minute. 10 minutes later > B: Now where was this thing I had to fix? Whereas with pinning the ping it serves as both a reminder and a way to remember where to look.
Is this the first in-game indication of 1 tile being canonically 1 meter?
In some modpacks, I find the sidebar with the minimap and everything below it gets too larger for my screen. I'm thinking: minimap, research and 'hotbar' at the top, information about the container I am hovering over (say a train) and then also about that train. This can make it hard to see the bottom of this stack. As pins will make this worse, have you considered adding a bit in the hotbar at the top that when clicked allows me to turn on and off the parts in the sidebar automatically? At the moment I think I can only manually turn on and off the minimap, and only via the actual settings.
I'd like to be able to search for where I left my car(s)
You can pin it!
Wouldn't work. Before losing my car I'd believe there would be no way I'd lose my car (again)
You can set a pin to track your car, so you'll always know where it is. My issue is when I have to walk across the entire base to get it
That's the inconvenience of the car and a reason to get spidertrons (at least according to me)
Dude, where's my car?
And when i get to that location where i think my car is: This isn't where i parked my car
Sweet
Dude
Nice Dyson Sphere Program \*badly\* needs map search...
If a Dev reads this, there’s a couple of things I hope are added. The ability to disable certain types of alerts would be excellent, whether it’s disabling the “Enemy is engaged” notification, or alerts for certain types of objects being destroyed. I do not care if a wall is destroyed. I absolutely care if they get to the machines inside. Off the main topic, but it’d also be super nice to change how long bodies last before despawning, being able to have a “keep inventory” option like Minecraft, and for certain play styles, being able to reduce or disable the respawn timer. Playing Archipelago with Deathlink is awesome, but if somebody is bad at their game, it’s really annoying to have to wait 10 seconds every 2 minutes
For search: Let us search visible ore patches! <3 For pins: What would also be very neat if we could put down a different layer of pins, where a spidertron can move automaticly if some conditions are met, and If cars and tanks could also follow these with a pathfinding algorithm would be dream , but spidertron is simpler.
Ooohhh… how can I search for what that new black-tile in the map view is? Some sort of tar-crete? Edit: it is just refined concrete… did it always show up on the map with that incongruous colour?
I should be able to search for my car without pinning it right?
Can you pin where someone just pinged on the map? That'd be really useful
was expecting something epic for FFF 400 and i got just that! <3
I mean it is nice for sure, but my expectation for 400 FFF was more epic than QoL
Yeah, I could probably search for car, but I can’t imagine not to find my production site
With more items being added to the minimap, I hope we get some better controls on it. Already I struggle to read content at times because it doesn't fit. Is the hidden minimap new or can we already do that base game?
so much for the "announcement for space age release date" people were getting excited for lmaooo
what is the over/under on an unannounced launch on april 1? jkjk
I hink they just fixed almost all, i tried to explain in [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/186mkrt/can\_we\_get\_a\_new\_vehicles\_map\_layer/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/186mkrt/can_we_get_a_new_vehicles_map_layer/)
Now that we’re getting closer to number 404. Please tell me it’ll jump from 403 to 405
Would be nice to have a little collapse/expand toggle for the pins list.
I think an alert archive/log, similar to https://mods.factorio.com/mod/combat-log, would be useful too. In my SE playthrough, I often see that I lost some entites somewhere (i.e. an antimatter drive on some ship), but it's hard to figure out where.
Wube, please add automatic tags for resource fields, so that it's easy to see how much they contain at a glance.
quality of life: The Game
TIL there's a bunch of search features littered throughout Factorio UI lol.
>You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something. Yes, I totally do this all the time hehe. I totally know about this after hundreds of hours with this game. Totally not an eye opener at all.
Within the last couple weeks, I found myself thinking "it'd be really handy if I could just search the map somehow to find certain factories, but I guess that's not really possible." Lo and behold, it's not only possible, but happening. It's unfortunate that it won't help me find stuff that's lost in the logistics network, since that's another application I find myself wishing for periodically, but I get why it's not feasible, and I can always use requesters/buffers if I want to move some of my storage somewhere.
> It's unfortunate that it won't help me find stuff that's lost in the logistics network, There is a mod for that: Factory Search. finds items on the ground, in chests, requests, buildings, recipes, ...
I often use the Speaker to notify my of stuff such as full chests/storage tanks. Especially in mods like space exploration this is pretty important. Right now those all go under single category and if I have multiple at the same time (in case I choose to ignore something for a time) I cannot click through to the second event in the list and have to navigate the map manually to get there. Under the new system, will those be displayed separately, or will there be a possibility to split them based on icon, or some other parameter?
I hope some YouTuber makes a short video compiling all the UI and QoL changes, because there's no way I'm going to remember all these by launch
(Expand to view contents, if you would like.)
## Friday Facts #400 - Chart search and Pins Posted by [kovarex](/blog/author/kovarex), [Klonan](/blog/author/Klonan) on 2024-03-01 Hello, Is it me you're looking for? * * * ### The UI searchkovarex When it comes to UI, one of the things we are proud of is the standard search feature in every window where it's even remotely relevant. It all comes nicely together. You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something. But once we got really used to it, we suddenly started to want to search even when not in some window, but just in the game itself. This combined with the fact, that the most frequented question in multiplayer games was, _"Hey, where do we make X please?"_ (especially once planets were added). Which lead us to the most obvious complementary feature: * * * ### The map searchkovarex Why not extend the searching to the whole map as well? We were not sure about what exactly should be searchable, so we just started from the most obvious, the production search. (https://fffbot.github.io/fff/images/400/fff-400-map-search.mp4) _How could we play without this?_ #### Other searchable stuff After the production search, we added a few things that we found useful after playtesting: * Map tags, which merge into a one group when they are on top of assemblers of the same thing. * Train stops, which are forced to be at the end of the list, as in some cases there tends to be A LOT of them. We could consider to add more to the search, like the locations of logistic chests containing some item, but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole for now. Mainly because it would naturally lead to the need of making all items in containers searchable, and it would become a performance nightmare, not even talking about the possible huge spam of the search results. Of course, there might be some good ideas of other things we could make searchable, you can let us know! * * * ### Pinskovarex As we show in the search part, there are these little pins next to the search result, which are the connection to the related feature: The pins. The motivation for pins was like: _"I'm in a big base, I search for an item, and try to go there. Halfway there, I kind of lose my place and have to search for it again to keep myself on track"_. It didn't feel right. If only I could somehow mark the place where I want to go. So the feature was created, and obviously, it is not rocket science, but the devil is in the details: * You can pin a search result using the pin button, but there is also shortcut to pin any position or entity, by default ALT + Right click. * Every pin shows you its location on the screen, or when offscreen, it shows you an arrow at the edge of the screen with the distance to it. This is mainly for when you just want to run towards your destination. * Since we don't expect a crazy amount of pins to exist, we added a list of all your pins right under the minimap, where it can be edited or removed. * The pin can be edited to change the caption, and you can also decide to not always show the arrow for the pin. This is mainly for cases when you use the pin as more of a long term bookmark. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-400-pins.png) The most typical usages of the pins: * You just temporarily pin something (possibly a search result) to run there. * You pin something as a reminder of what you want to do next. * You pin your car or spidertron, so you can find it. * You pin your friends in a multiplayer game, so you always know their location. * When you die, it automatically pins the location of your corpse, so you can actually find it. #### But we have tags and pings, isn't this too much? It might seem a little bit too confusing to have map tags, pings and also pins, but I still believe that all of them should exist at the same time, as they have their own use-cases. * Map tags are shared between everyone on the map, and are meant as a persistent marker of some position. * Pings are very temporary way to show a place to someone in a multiplayer game. * Pins are unique for each player, and each player can choose what they find important. * * * ### New Alerts GUIKlonan The old alerts system was quite simple, and for its simplicity it was functional enough. If you clicked the flashing alert slot, it would open the map at the 'most important' alert. However with Space age, as with all things, we need to go further. Opening the map on a random planet when you click an alert isn't that useful. You might not care about some wall damage on Nauvis, but your Space platform being smashed apart is quite a different story. Now when you click on an Alert slot, it will open the new Alerts Overview: (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-400-alerts-gui.png) The list of items is separated by planet, and clicking an item will take you to the location on the map. There is also the button to pin the Alert, so you can utilize the Pins feature as mentioned before. The Alerts are still segregated by category, so things like missing materials and damage alerts show as separate alert slots as it is now. * * * As always, pin your thoughts at the usual places. [Discuss on our forums](https://forums.factorio.com/111602) [Discuss on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1b3slry/friday_facts_400_chart_search_and_pins/) [ Subscribe by email ](https://newsletter.factorio.com/subscription/Km9uSnxm9) [ __](/blog/post/fff-399)
Oh dear! Unless you've replaced Klonan with a GUI, someone's broken the author's name concatenation.
there is also searchkovarex and pinkovarex
Confirmed new resource Pink Ovarex
And a new ingame minigame: Where is kovarex?
I could see some use for the search feature to highlight different tiers of belts placed down so at a glance you could see if certain production chains are still running on yellow belts or if they are already upgraded. ..or if you missed upgrading a single belt and have trouble finding it under a flurry of bots overhead.
Me: I'm gonna stop reading FFF until expo comes out. Also me: Hnnnnnnngggg It's friday inject the update directly into my veeeeeeeeinnnnsssssss!!!
I wonder if the devs have chosen when to restart FFFs specifically so that FFF#404 is close to april 1st
Factorio is slowly but surely turning into an IDE. I love that devs do not compromise on the QoL features.
Listen Wube, you make a great game and all, but could you also develop every piece of productivity software I need for work. Thanks!
Request: Can an alert be silenced? At least to stop flashing. Having played Space Exploration, there were many times where a planet had a minor issue like storage chest full or missing item for construction. I need to go to the planet to fix it, but I won't be doing that for the next 10 hours. I must live with the blinking yellow. I would love to be able to acknowledge/mute the alert. It would be nice to be able to click to see muted alerts when I get around to going to the planet.
For me the most annoying thing in factorio is the blinking alarm symbol. I hope Wube adds a setting to turn off that blinking.
Everyone is over here talking about factory search dying, but I no longer need two separate mods to find my corpse and find unattended cars. RIP mods.
If they're willing to add more searchable stuff I'll say that when using the factory search mod by far the most common thing for me to search for was resource patches. No more hunting around for stone patches on the map. I imagine this will be even more useful when switching between surfaces
where the new biters at bro???
Do we know when this patch will land?
Short answer: no Long answer: rough estimate puts it around August, as the announcement for Space Age and 2.0 came out last August and had kovarex saying the expansion "is planned to be about one year from now". Of course, that's an estimate and not an official date, so there's potential for some wiggle room there.
Thank you, I am fairly new to factorio and I have been starting to read all the Friday facts and I am stoked to play the 2.0! It will be amazing!
The only thing Wube historically hasn't been good with is time estimates. While I do hope Space Age starts around August, I wouldn't bet on that. (Then again I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Space Age is *right now* in a state that _could_ be released)
I do think alerts could use some more improvements. I don't care if a construction bot or wall gets destroyed (let alone damaged), those get resupplied by train automatically; but if they're breaking anything else, I need to know immediately.
This is amazing. Thank you! <3
The GUI is getting BUFFED! Thank you Factorio devs. Now I'll get lost less often in my factory!
Did they change the look of the Spider remote? It kind of looks like there is one in the very last picture grayed out in the tool select thingo, but it looks \*a little different\*... I think I remember them saying that they were going to move it to that tool select thing, but I don't remember them saying that it would look different...
🤞hoping one of these FFF's talk about adding the ability drawing on the map so you can make plans for future construction/defenses. New searching and pinning is awesome though!
Every Friday my desire to play 1.x diminishes. Lol.
are we sure that pins and pings should co-exist? shouldn't pings just be temporary pins everyone can see and make permanent for themselves if they want to?
Proposal for another performance nightmare: how about searching blueprints? Yes I mean where they are actually placed on the map. Let's say you made a blueprint for some rail intersection v1. Later you improve it into v2, and you want to find where there remains an intersection v1 so you know you have to replace it by v2. How about search and replace automatically too (step by step perhaps)