Freighter config improvements
If you want to set up a lot of similar freighters, It would be helpful to be able to copy the settings between them, or even link them to have the same schedule persist through edits. It would also be useful to be able to reorder stations in the list if you want to add another one somewhere in the middle of the list
Comments: 7
Oldest
•
Newest
•
Most likes
•
Fewest likes
-
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)Highlighted comment
Add hub menu to top-right of screen
Immediately to the left of the Freighter icon on the top-right menu, there should be an icon that opens a new "hub" menu that shows every hub in my factory, what resources they're holding, and (most importantly) a navigation icon to immediately snap the world view to that hub.
In addition to giving me a proper inventory of my hubs, this would be a huge navigational aid. By the late game, I'm thinking mostly in terms of large functional regions in my factory, and being able to jump to specific hubs would be a big time-saver. -
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)Recommendations for freight system
Hello! Absolutely adore this game, now well into the Superior tech tree.
This morning I realized that the majority of my complaints, such as they are, are tied specifically to the freight system (even though in many ways it's a big improvement from, e.g., Factorio and Satisfactory).
I hope it would be helpful to compile my list of recommendations in one place.
General changes
All hub menu visualizations should show eight cargo slots, not four
This one should be self-explanatory. Sometimes hubs are origins, sometimes they're destinations, and usually they're both (I'm often at least shipping some coolant and one flavour of 8x8x8 cube to the hubs where I'm otherwise mainly loading cargo). -
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)It would probably be better to show the slots two rows of four. If it's more convenient to put them in a single row of eight, I recommend they be sorted by slot number (Input 1, Output 1, Input 2, Output 2, etc.), rather than by port type (Input 1, Input 2, ... , Output 3, Output 4). This will make it easier to keep the controls consistent (see "loading/unloading" controls below).
Input slots should have blue borders around them, and output slots should have green borders. -
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)Show "phantom" cargo on cargo slots
When a cargo slot is emptied (other than by being manually purged), it currently shows an empty icon in the slot. Instead, it should show 0 of whatever resource last occupied the slot.
The fact that a slot is empty doesn't change that it almost always has a single dedicated purpose. I should be able to easily identify that purpose even if it's currently exhausted or not currently being fed.
Phantom resources should always show up in the freighter menues - I'm less clear on whether they should also show up on the little display windows above each port of the hub structue. At the very lease, it seems like it might be confusing to show a resource on an output slot, with no resource actually coming out of that slot. -
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)Freighter menu changes
Rearranging hub order from the freighter menu
Unless there's already a way to do this? If so, then the user interface probably needs a slight redesign to make that clear. If there isn't a way to do this, then that's obviously silly.
Loading/unloading controls
Assuming each row on the freighter menu now shows all eight cargo slots instead of four (see above), there are a couple of options for how to toggle a pair of slots between Load, Unload, Swap, and None.
One way is to just click on each pair of slots to toggle between the four modes.
The other is to make each slot its own two-state toggle (i.e. basically a checkbox) - for each slot, you can set loading on and off, and unloading on and off. If both are turned on, you get swap behaviour.
I think the four-way toggle is better, though - the checkboxes would make it harder to intuit that swapping is even allowed. -
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)Freighter action icon colors
Currently icons are green for loading, red for unloading and blue for swapping.
They should be recolored to blue for loading, green for unloading, and yellow for swapping.
There's no reason not to use the game's established convention of blue to indicate input belts and green to indicate output belts.
As for using yellow, red just feels like the wrong color to denote a swap. I'll just leave it at that. -
20 Apr
Pmnox (Discord)Show how many other freighters interact with each cargo slot
In a freighter's menu, if one or more other freighters are interacting with a hub's slot, there should be a small number on or next to that slot (e.g. a little red box on the top-right) indicating how many.
Remembering which slots are "spoken for" on a hub is obviously relevant to certain freight decisions, especially when we're feeding the same resource into all four of a hub's input slots. Right now, we can't even inspect this information without leaving the current freighter's menu and inspecting another freighter's menu. It's much better to have this information at our fingertips.