User talk:Bilka

Welcome to Factorio! We hope you will contribute much and well. You will probably want to read the help pages. Again, welcome and have fun! Mishka (talk) 13:07, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Templates that might need CSS cleanup

• Template:Outdated image
  • Consider adding css for .boilerplate classes. This will put all the css of Template:Game image, Template:Move, Template:Screenshot, etc. in one place and reduce loading times --Longtomjr (talk)

• Template:Game image

--Longtomjr (talk) 11:37, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Cleanup done

• Template:Key
• Template:Move
• Template:Disambiguation
• Template:Cleanup
• Template:Delete

--Bilka (talk) 11:52, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

CSS has been merged into .factorio-boilerplate for all templates that use Template:Boilerplate. Template:Outdated image, Template:Game image, and Template:Screenshot still use .boilerplate. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:48, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Navigation box links

Hi Bilka! I found the misfunction on Navigation page. There are links to Navboxes in lower row of each Navbox but in all languages it links to English template. I'm going to change links. Please see the example. Is it OK to create pages Template:ProductionNav/ru, Template:CombatNav/ru and so on? --Snowball II (talk) 22:50, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
One more question. Is it OK to create pages with Russian names. For example Железная плита with redirection to Iron_plate/ru? --Snowball II (talk) 13:05, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi again. I have not received any response so i create pages Factorio:Navigation/Logistics, Factorio:Navigation/Logistics/ru and change link on Template:ProductionNav. Don't you mind? --Snowball II (talk) 19:59, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Hey there snowball. Not sure why Bilka didn't respond to you, but we are internally debating how to fix navigation boxes. Please leave it alone until we can form a consensus. As for creating russian redirection names, that's completely fine. --Gangsir (talk) - Admin 21:21, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

German translation worldgenerator

Hi Bilka! I just tried to translate the page World_generator and for me it feels like the page is verry unorganized since it's not written with a intelligent order. So I stopped translating and tried to rearrange the site. My goal was, writing about the Generator in general, then talking about possible configurations, after that talking about the presets. This because it makes no sence for me to talk about presets if you don't understand what they actually change within the config. So I tried to build up the page like you see the menu ingame. I would like to hear your feedback on my attempt. Weltengenerator Vorschlag

Another problem are those sheets with the preesets. I don't know right now if it makes sence to translate them and how. What do you think, can you help me?

Btw: Thanks for CoReading my stuff and checking for typos, I'm trying my best  :)

Greetngs from switzerland Hoeloe (talk) 11:39, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Your organization definitely seems better to me. I think the biggest problem of the article is that it talks about the gui, its options and their effects, and about how the world generation works. Your organization somewhat seperates those topics, which makes the article more readable.

Some possible improvements: Perhaps you could also list the presets and their descriptions in the first small section on them, and then put something like "Für genauere Information was die Voreinstellungen verändern, siehe [[#Voreinstellungen|]]". A link from the "basically it works with perlin noise" to the section that explains more about it would also be good. I think it might be a good idea to rework the preset resource table so that it only lists the changes from the default, instead of every single option, no matter if one of the presets changes it. Since the official game has translaions on everything used in the world generation gui, translating the rest of the tables shouldn't be too hard. It would be nice if you could do that reorganization also on the English page, "aber es ist kein muss".

I appreciate how well you translate pages. I personally struggle with translating pages like Crafting or the World generator page because I am so used to the English words for things that I can't find appropriate German translations (even though German is my first language...). So thank you for your work on them! -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. I will try to totally rewrite the presets part, but first I need to think about how to. I often use links, sometimes it feels too much for me, but the Perlin Noise one makes sence. There is one big point about the english page I struggle. The Erweiterte Konfiguration is actually not covered right now. I don't know, maybe I will try to rewrite the english one, but I definitely need someone to check it since english is not my native language as well.

I just translate the stuff 1:1, rearrange the sentence so it's readable in german and sometimes I switch some terms for better wording. But I know, sometimes you realy need to think about it since english can be written verry easy, flat and repeating while german can be very complex. I thank you for appreciating my work and also that you check it and help me. Ah and when you read my stuff particularly check for missing β's since this letter does not exist in the Swiss-Deutsche Rechtschreibung :) -- Hoeloe (talk) 13:30, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, the advanced options just weren't added to that page yet because it hasn't really seen much of an update to 0.15. I can definitely check the changed page (or your WIP of a rework) for language or ask Gangsir to have a look at it. But what I can read from you right now, your English isn't too bad either :) As a heads up: You should translate page titles, like the title on the crafting page or on the campaign page, using the translation/de template instead of displaytitle. Oh and when you use the languages template, please don't put a blank line between it and the following text. Doing that creates some ugly whitespace at the start of the page. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 15:16, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Okay, *hust* wieso sagt mir das keiner? Dann möge jemand die Anleitung aus dem Language Template entfernen! :P -- Hoeloe (talk) 12:43, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't see any instructions on that template page that mention using displaytitle. Only in the template itself, stating that it does that. Should I reword that comment? -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:56, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I just found this sentence in the language template and also in other translated /de articles. That was why I used it, I didn't know the translation template does this job. I need to say I'm not very used to wikis in terms of templates programming and stuff. Also there is no guide which explains all this.

What do you think about my attempt of the english Wordlgenerator-page? I messed arround with the page again. The How it works part is now in Generation, Made no sence to me to seperate this. I also changed that Generation is the first section (we can still swap this afterwards). The Presets part now does directly attend the individual presets. Hoeloe (talk) 08:04, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Such a (style) guide is currently WIP. Just another thing that is missing documentation :/

Looks good so far. However, I think putting the technical generation info first isn't a good move. I imagine that the article is frequented by beginners who just want to know what changing the settings does, not how excatl the world is generated, or when chunks are generated. I think it would be a better idea to take the first few paragraphs of that section (up to the algorithm subsection) and leave them at the beginning of the article, perhaps without a header, more as a general thing. The rest of the generation section should be moved below the presets. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:44, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

About {{translation/ms}}

Will do... and now I know how that template works. SNN95 (talk) 11:14, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Shipwreck

I understand the merging, but did you really need to wipe everything? I worked a very long time on that stuff. I don't see the harm in the shipwreck getting mentioned. It is part of the game - something the player can interact with. -- Zippy (talk) 08:28, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Well, the page had to go and I thought I had copied the relevant info. The problem is simply that we cant document the campaign only items at the same place as the freeplay items, that would only confuse the player; but making the shipwreck a subpage of the campaign page doesnt sound useful either, so the info should just be on the campaign (sub-)page. Feel free to add more info back to the campaign page. Since I dont think you can view the deleted page, I copied the latest state of the Shipwreck page to hastebin: [1]. Let me know if you think some of the images should be restored too, or just include them in the campagin page text about the shipwreck as redlinks and I'll restore the relevant ones. I hope this solution is okay for you. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:00, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Template:Inventory/pl‎‎

Hi Bilka, I apologize for the confusion with the site Inventory/pl‎‎, I read the rules, but I did not apply :(

I wanted to make the name appear in my language after hovering over the icon, so I just start translate in links on this page, from

<div class="factorio-icon">[[File:Transport belt.png|32px|link=Transport belt{{If language suffix}}]]</div>

to

<div class="factorio-icon">[[File:Transport belt.png|32px|link=Transport belt{{If language suffix}}|Taśmociąg]]</div>

After you deleted the page, I started to wonder if it would be better to add to all links in Template:Inventory

{{Translation|...}}

for example:

<div class="factorio-icon">[[File:Transport belt.png|32px|link=Transport belt{{If language suffix}}|{{Translation|Transport belt}}]]</div>

Do I think right? — Preceding unsigned comment added by JakubSTR (talk • contribs) 11:15, 9 February 2018‎

That indeed was a good idea, so I added it. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:41, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Intermediary Products

Am I allowed to make a page on intermediary products? --Zippy (talk) 14:06, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

What would be on it? We already have Category:Intermediate products which lists all of the items in the intermediate tab in the inventory, what extra information would you add to a page about them? Also please consider moving this discussion to the wiki-work channel in the factorio subreddit discord, communication is much faster there :) -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 15:16, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I was also thinking about adding such page or modifying Category:Intermediate products, as there are now two meanings to the phrase "intermediate products": this can either be the products on the "intermediate products" tab or the items that can be created using productivity modules. I've tried to clarify this on the Module page, but perhaps a separate one would help with that too. Uukgoblin (talk) 13:54, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Intermediate products are intermediate products and that's it. The error message you get from productivity modules is simply misleading, and will hopefully be changed. However, I've been thinking about making a category for "recipes that accept productivity modules" for a while. If you have an idea for a shorter, non-misleading name that is not "intermediate produtcs", let me know and I'll set up the category. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 14:04, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

OK, that makes sense. Yeah, a good name for such category is not easy to come up with :-) Maybe the devs will sort it out for us when they fix the error message ;-) Uukgoblin (talk) 14:18, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Is there any ways to mark the translation obsolete?

Hi Bilka! I'm glad that you gave me a welcome message.

I found some of translations obsolete and useless. For example, the Japanese version of Electric system didn't mentioned Steam turbine or Nuclear power (research). Maybe it's too much and too obvious for example, but there should be more obsolete texts it's not so clear to be obsolete.

The wiki forced editors to follow the English version, so I think it's convenient if there is a template, a category or something to state that the translation is obsolete. (It's also good if some bots automagically detect the obsolete pages and notify readers/writers of that) --Fried biter (talk) 07:34, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

If we had such a template, we would just end up with many pages being marked, which is not an improvement, it's just clutter. If you see that a page is outdated, update it. If you dont have the time/energy/whatever to update it, put it on a to-do-list in your userspace. This has the same result as marking with a template, but wont clutter a lot of pages. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 20:14, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

First, I don't think it's not an improvement that mark obsolete pages obsolete, since it could be simply a lie. It helps not only writers but also readers. So I don't think it's enough to put in my mind or my userspace.

But your concern is reasonable. Well, If we put and remove the template by hand, it should be just clutter. But I don't think leaving it to bots are quite hard. Basically, it watches Special:RecentChanges. If an English page is edited, then follow the inter-lang links and paste the template(or anything). If a non-English page which contains the template is edited, simply remove the template. If this is too much or too less, we can add some conditions like:

• tolerant to small changes (ex: edit only 2bytes changed, which is likely to fix typo)
• tolerant unless it's too obsolete (ex: only if the sum of changes in the original is more than a threshold / only if the translation is n-months older than original)
• force non-English editors to tell translation edits from the other minor ones apart (ex: translate edit should contain '[Tt]ranslat' in Summary)
• etc...

If your concern is that template/category/something itself is a clutter to readers, maybe it's not so much. Make it hidden category as wikipedia do. If your concern is about server performances, it's over. I have no way to deal it with :P --Fried biter (talk) 04:59, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

My concern is that it wont be useful because so many pages will be marked. Furthermore, a script that automatically marks pages will be very error-prone since it's a bot, and not a human. But I should be able to throw together a script that makes a list of most likely outdated pages. That will take a few days, then we can review the list to see if it would actually be useful to mark all of those pages, and take appropiate action. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 15:37, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

I understood your concern. And I believe it can be solved by an appropriate conditioning. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that you are willing to try it to gather information to review. Thank you for your support with a bot. I hope it will work out fine. (p.s. I don't know what language you are using to run bot on the wiki, but I can r/w some python or java so maybe I can help you with reviewing script)--Fried biter (talk) 10:32, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

I wrote the script, you can find it here: [2] The result of it is about what I was expecting: User:Bilka/Outdated pages. Most pages are outdated, so the list is rather useless. I excluded my own and my bot's edit from the language page dates because I only made structure maintaining edits on language pages without actually changing the content. I hope this shows why I dont think it's a good idea to mark the pages with templates. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 18:27, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

(<- outdent) Thank you for writing a script! And as mentioned above, some filtering by certain conditions might be useful to reduce the number of "outdated" pages. The script simply compare their timestamps, and this results in too many candidates and make the list useless. So why not try to introduce some limitations such as en.timestamp > langTimestamp + PATIENCE_CONST, or setting rvlimit parameter gives us previous revisions so that we can ignore minor edits. I don't know how it costs server resources, but if not too much, I think it still can be useful. (P.S. Can I run/test the script without special privileges? Special:ApiSandbox is not so flexible...) --Fried biter (talk) 06:28, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Both your proposed conditions will falsify the result. Even 1 edit on a page can make any translation outdated, no matter how old it is, see for example Special:Diff/155934. So for example excluding pages that are "only" a week/month outdated will lead to wrong results. We have no rules or guides for what to mark as a minor edit since it is impossible to enforce, so sorting by that would also lead to wrong results. You should be able to test the script by just copying pasting it into the browser console and running main(languages); after lowering the 100 in line 112 and 113 to 50 to account for your lower api limits. The create page call on line 64 also wont work, you'll have to find another way to print the output somewhere. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:29, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

Translate template to different word-order languages

Hi Bilka! I find it hard to translate Template:about to Japanese.

In the Factorio:Translation_guide, it says translation of templates should be done with just replace the argument of the template. And the first sentence of Template:about is {{Translation|This article is about}} {{{1}}}.. But in Japanese, that sentence should be translated as この項目では、{{{1}}}について説明しています。. I mean, another translation template is needed after {{{1}}} to simply substitute. Some similar issue should be aroud here and there since Japanese has quite different word-order to English or other Europian languages, so I want to know how to translate in such cases.

(reference: Template:Otheruses in Japanese Wikipedia, which is used as equivalent of Template:About in the other languages.)— Preceding unsigned comment added by Fried biter (talk • contribs) 13:20, 10 March 2018‎

Sadly there is no good way to solve this issue. Due to how translations are set up on this wiki, I can't add another translation template after the {{{1}}}, or include it in the template used for the sentence, neither of these options would yield the desired result. So, your options now are either making template:about/ja and translating the template directly, or rewording the sentence in a way that uses the English sentence structure, which would be preferable. I can understand that the second option may be very hard to do, which is why the first option would be acceptable. This issue and the options to solve it vary on a case by case basis, so please let me know of any other templates where you also have this problem before doing anything with them. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 14:03, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

Okay, I will postpone translating the templates until the consensus about how to translate them has reached by the Japanese editors community. Additionally, I will inspect them and try translations by rewording. If it's done, I will notice you. --Fried biter (talk) 05:30, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Getting rid of BurnerNav template

Hi, Thanks for the initial warm welcome!

I've seen that the Template:BurnerNav didn't get the same treatment as other nav templates, so I've added missing links. However, I've now realised that the content of this template is entirely covered by other nav templates (Intermediate products, Production items, Logistics templates). What about getting rid of that template and relaying on the existing ones instead? Spyhawk (talk) 17:53, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree, so I added the valid fuel row to the infoboxes to completely replace the template, the template will be deleted soon. Please next time think about these kind of implications before editing some of the most used templates on the wiki. Thank you. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 18:37, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Yes, definitely a big oversight from my side. Sorry about that! Spyhawk (talk) 18:58, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Roadmap

Hi,

The Roadmap page is deceptively empty. What about merging [[Roadmap/Coming_Releases]] with it, as it serves as the actual Roadmap page anyway? Spyhawk (talk) 13:47, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Hey, this had been planned for a while, thank you for reminding me. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 14:43, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, this is much better now. Spyhawk (talk) 14:57, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Tutorial: Combinator tutorial edit

Hey Bilka. This was my first edit, so forgive me for overlooking the summary section of the edit page. I removed a link that serves no educational purpose and seems self-promotional to me. Exploring this youtube channel does lead to some videos that may or may not be relevant, but the link itself is too aspecific. And because of the other link (reddit), it is also redundant.

Even if it were just plain text, claiming ownership of an idea on this wiki seems inappropriate to me, although I'm not sure if there's a specific rule against it.

By the way, is this the place to post this, or should I use the discussion page of the page in question? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Koekjesfabriek (talk • contribs) 20:55, 30 April 2018‎

The design is mostly known under the name of the original designer ("Madzuris train loader"), so it is not directly self-promotional. I however agree that the link to the reddit thread is enough, so I removed the youtube link again, and included the name with the reddit link, so that people searching for the design can still find it.

This is the right place; a big reason for reverting your edit was that it was your first edit, and a "controversial" one, so I expected some kind of reasoning. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 07:49, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

New translation language - pt-pt

Hey Bilka, I am new to the wiki and I would like to contribute translations in pt-pt. Can you please add support for this language? Thanks. FranzPT (talk) 15:03, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice, I have added support for pt-pt. Have fun translating! -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 15:06, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Nice, thanks for the quick response. I will carefully read about the translation rules/procedures and start asap. FranzPT (talk) 16:30, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

What is the standard on what information is useful?

Are you always this hostile to everyone? Honestly, this explains why the wiki has so much outdated information. I'm just trying to follow some kind of consistent guideline.

A number of pages already use smallest whole-number ratios as building guidelines, especially for early and midgame structures. https://wiki.factorio.com/Solar_panel 23.8 solar panels per megawatt is somehow "useful information", and 1,000 / 42 is apparently not "easy to calculate"? What exactly is the standard?

If power grid information is that obvious, does the laser turret page really need a note about energy usage at all? Again, I'm just trying to find a consistent standard. Does every single page for a high-energy drain building need a "don't forget to build accumulators and steam storage" reminder? The roboport page only has a much less specific "make sure your power grid can handle the load" reminder (again, is it really necessary to even have that, when the building clearly consumes up to 5 MW when active?). But then it just copy-pastes numbers from the sidebar. The numbers are literally right next to duplicate information. That's "helpful" and "not easy to calculate"? You're really going to need to explain, clearly and precisely, what the standard is, instead of making rude, passive-aggressive remarks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arrkhal (talk • contribs) 20:19, 10 July 2018

Since you presented examples I will explain the rough guidelines using them:

The information on the solar panel page is useful because you deal in predictable units in the electric system; usually you will know how much power you want your solar panels to supply. This amount of power can usually be obtained directly from the game when you are building solar panels to replace another energy source, or from online calculators when you are planning a setup. It shouldn't have its own section though, that is likely just a relict from an earlier version of the page.

In contrast, when dealing with enemies nothing is predictable: Neither the number of enemies, when they will attack, or their strength can be reliably predicted, meaning that you will never know how much shots your turrets will fire. So, the information does not have a use case.

I am still unsure about how suitable the sentence on the laser turret page is, which is why I modified it when I reverted your edit. I will put further thought into whether it should be removed completely. In general, the high power demand should not be mentioned on every page. The roboport section wasn't changed since the guidelines were established, so I took the liberty to fix it.

As you can see, there can't really be a consistent standard about something where context matters immensely. I recommend you to just edit the pages while trying to follow the general style. After a while you will get a feeling for what is suitable, and until then, your edits will be corrected. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:26, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to explain the general guidelines more clearly, and I apologize if my first comment was itself passive-agressive, I was just a little frustrated with the lack of consistency with page information, and lack of clear communication about exactly what was amiss with my edits, instead of just generic "not helpful" and "then don't edit" notes. Anyway, if specific power grid management tips shouldn't go on most buildings, maybe it should just a basic "this building has unpredictable and high power needs which can lead to brownouts or blackouts, unless the power grid is able to compensate" with a link to the power grid guide, rather than the much more specific advice for accumulators and steam storage? Arrkhal (talk) 03:33, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

I don't think that a generic sentence is better than a specific one, so I will keep it how it is for now. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:52, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Code for blueprint

I can place the code of the [[:File:5to2_balancer.png]]? AiltonCow (Talk) (Steam) - Okarin. 06:14, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Sure, the balancers should have blueprint strings. Just remember to include all 3 belt tiers in the book and to name the blueprints and book.

And while I am talking with you, please add the ratio sections to the 3 science pack pages that your partially translated. Thank you. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:49, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

disambiguation

Hi again, can you see the page Furnace/pt-br? the disambiguation template its not translating the page name -- AiltonCow (Talk) (Steam) - Okarin. 10:51, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Fixed. If you ever want different text than the page title there, use {{Disambiguation|my different text}}. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:55, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

The history section in translated pages

Hi. So... why the historical section should not be in the translated pages? I don't understand it. Because I would like to see a history of changes of a particular thing from update to update. And, by the way, in all the articles I translated, the historical section was also. And, yeah, this is article where you wrote message about history section: https://wiki.factorio.com/Firearm_magazine/ru By some reason there's no my nickname... I'm Aldekotan, russian translator.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Aldekotan (talk • contribs) 08:02, 1 August 2018‎

For the same reason the version history is not translated: The history section is copied from the in-game changelog, which also is not translated. Furthermore, users would often only partially translate the history section, like on the page you linked. However, it is just a guideline, so if you want you can still translate the history section and include it. You sign talk page messages like this: ~~~~. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 08:11, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Localisation stringtables

- Can't find 'em. Is there a page containing the translations like "Power Production"->"Stromerzeugung", which you can edit, or is it only accessible to the staff ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Factoruser (talk • contribs) 19:33, 20 August 2018‎

You can find them here: Template:Translation/de. Please read the translation guide for help with translations. I also saw that you summarized your edits in German. While I can understand it, it would be nice if you wrote your summaries in English so that they are accessible to all wiki users. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:45, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Images

As you can see, I'm pretty good at making images/gifs/whatever. Wherever I make an edit, you don't seem to be far behind. So I might as well ask you directly: are there any more pages in need of images? --Zippy (talk) 01:46, 6 October 2018 (CDT)

And yet you managed to catch me on a weekend off work :P One article that I can think of is deconstruction planner — it needs a general update to include the filter functionality which should include images of the GUI. If you are able to make gifs using an external program/website, you could also have a stab at making all the biter/spitter/worm images on enemies transparent gif using the files from the game files, like the small biter and spitter. You could also make more of the "[thing] entity" images that are included in the infoboxes, you seem to know the general rules for those already, but here they are again: Entity on grass, zoom level 2, alt mode on, images 300 or 400 px width/height if possible, no clutter/smoke/clouds/decoratives as usual.

Something to keep in mind when uploading images: Add {{Screenshot}} to screenshots, and {{Game image}} to game images (and the enemy gif renders) in the file description to categorize them correctly and to keep the licensing clear. Furthermore, please name your images with spaces/underscores, it makes them more readable and easier to search for. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:14, 7 October 2018 (CDT)

The thing about the images of enemies... Do they need to be animated? Or is that just a bonus? Also, could you elaborate on the "zoom level 2" thing? --Zippy (talk) 14:26, 10 October 2018 (CDT)

Yes, animation and transparency is a requirement. If you don't know how to do that (I don't completely know myself...), don't worry about them. With "zoom level 2" I mean that your screenshots for the entities in the infoboxes should be taken at that zoom level (of course with hr graphics). You can do that with the screenshot command (and setting it there) or by pressing F5 and using the zoom level that you can find at the top left. It's a way to ensure that all images have the same scale.-- Bilka (talk) - Admin 15:35, 10 October 2018 (CDT)

Going through the files of the game and seeing how the enemies are drawn in-game, it's no secret why we don't have pixel-perfect animations of the all the enemies. They are drawn by very strange layers and the image files don't show up as we see living creatures in-game. I could *try* to come up with something, but it would take me a very long time so I wouldn't look forward to any miracles. -- Zippy (talk) 17:27, 23 October 2018 (CDT)

Starter map

I think I need to bring in some context for this one. The save I found was on the forums and I did some editing to it. I thought it was one of the greatest starter saves ever. I don't know how that made you feel when you saw it added here, but your "no. just no." comment shed some light on that. If it makes you feel any better, I'll never do such edits without your consent again. I don't want to mess up your wiki, I want to make this the best wiki anyone has ever known. --Zippy (talk) 14:26, 10 October 2018 (CDT)

I'm sorry reacting in such a way, I didn't intend to make you feel bad about the edit. My reaction stems from the fact that the wiki should not show off "the best setup" to players. Tutorials are somewhat exempt from that, but even they should not include images that simply show "the best setup" or "I use this setup". This is especially about including a way for the player to gain access to the design without "thinking about it" - so blueprint strings, and map downloads. Including a save in the quick start guide encourages the player to just use something premade for them without ever learning about the options, or finding out if they even need such an optimized map. We as the wiki want to encourage exploration, not discourage it. I hope that is more clear now, sorry again for being rude. Please do continue to make your edits, their quality was rather good so far. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 15:35, 10 October 2018 (CDT)

Wanted pages for script

Hi Bilka! I'm writing some quick-and-dirty translation helper script, which automates routine works such as item-name link translations (and include NO google-translation, of course). As of now, I scrape Factorio:Wanted_pages/ja to obtain Japanese wanted pages. Is it acceptable way? Or should I hit the wiki API with ?action=query&list=querypage&qppage=Wantedpages by myself? Fetching top 10k results like your bot require me 20 requests, perhaps more expensive than a index.php?action=raw request. --Fried biter (talk) 17:11, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Scraping is acceptable for now. What exactly does your script do? I would be okay with giving you a bot account to make the queries, but for that I need to know what exactly you are doing (and I'd prefer if the script was open source :)). If it is possible for you, please message me on discord (I'm Bilka#2444) so that we can work out the details. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:19, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Multiplayer and fluids

I don't see why the images on the multiplayer page were removed. I mean, the image showed what multiplayer looked like on a page about multiplayer. The images gave the page some flavor, rather than just text. Also, is it allowed to have pictures of fluids in pipes/storage tanks for the actual fluid pages (water/heavy oil/etc.)? Better I ask than risk getting any more warnings or whatever. -- Zippy (talk) 19:12, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

The only difference in multiplayer is that there may be multiple players. There a plenty of images on the wiki that show more than 1 player, so I don't see the need to add one to the multiplayer page. You are however right in that it gives the page some flavor. You can add another image, but please avoid excess clutter and sharing real players names (privacy concerns) — perhaps simply host your own local multiplayer game and join yourself with some generic user names. The console is not a multiplayer feature and as such a screenshot of it is not related to multiplayer.

I think an image of the fluid in a storage tank would work for the infobox images of the fluid pages. So, if you want to make those, please go ahead.

Thank you for the amazing enemy gifs, I am glad that we could finally replace the old images with something nice and proper. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 21:04, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

If Wube or any higher-up gives you some sort of praise for the wiki, which I know happened at least once because I saw your name in one of Factorio's Steam updates, please mention my name. I want to say that it took me 2-4 hours per image, and might have been the most work I've ever done in my life in terms of making a gif - as I've had to work with nothing but vague overlays, tedious photoshop work and a bit of pure luck all at once. Anyway, how do I make a bunch of "dummy" players joining a local server? -- Zippy (talk) 23:14, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

You can run multiple instances on your PC, for example using the zip download. Host a LAN game and disable user verification, then join yourself (since you don't need to log in, just set the name in the "other" settings). If that sounds a bit complicated/your PC can't handle a high sprite res instance besides other factorio instances, I can make an image tomorrow no problem. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 23:19, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

If I were to make custom cursors for this wiki, would you add them? Zippy (talk) 13:21, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

No. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 14:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

You're... You're being serious? Even if the cursors are subtle? I heard this rumor that... that uh... if your wiki doesn't have custom cursors, then uh... you're not a cool kid. You wanna be a cool kid right? -- Zippy (talk) 14:36, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

I asked Albert for his opinion and he gave the same answer as me :P -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 14:51, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

I never seen a small idea get rejected so fast. I don't know who Albert is, but I'm spreading around that you and this Albert guy aren't cool kids. Seriously? Not even so much as a cursor with just a different color? -- Zippy (talk) 17:01, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Albert is the art director :) He does not like custom cursors. Btw, you can add the cursor for yourself by putting it into your user css -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:06, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

An art director that doesn't like custom cursors? Sorry but I gotta call the cops on both of you. rip. -- Zippy (talk) 17:59, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Hey, sorry for not being clear about this. You can use the css code, but please don't host the images on the wiki. You can upload them anywhere (like imgur) and simply link to them in your user css. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 22:41, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

I should've known, sorry. I linked all my cursors to imgur urls. Still calling the cops though. -- Zippy (talk) 09:39, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

One more thing, if you want me to make you anything custom. Ask me anything. On the house. Because I'm the nicest guy ever. Still on the phone with the law though. Bet you're scared right now. -- Zippy (talk) 12:19, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Another 'one more thing', am I allowed to make a "sandbox" page for myself to test things? Like a 'zippy/sandbox' page? -- Zippy (talk) 17:56, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

Of course, you can do whatever you want in your userspace as long as it's within the rules. The rule explicitly mentions sandbox pages, so those are okay :P -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:55, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Don't worry it's totally not Zippy spamming your talk page. Are there any more high quality images needed anywhere that I missed? -- Zippy (talk) 01:52, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Not that I know of. With 0.17 a lot more sprites will be high resolution, so that will bring back the demand. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:46, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Is it alright if I leave tiny-text notices about the animated APNG's in that they don't animate for every browser? Or should I just leave it? -- Zippy (talk) 20:03, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't think you need to leave a note. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 20:20, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Why did you remove the images for the construction and logistics robots' infoboxes? And not to sound like I'm arguing, but what was the issue with me changing the text color by 10% on the fuel page? -- Zippy (talk) 14:31, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

The images were removed because they were not used for multiple weeks. If you upload something, please use it. I removed the text color because it is not needed to help make the page more clear. Our style guide states that text color and styles should not be overused. Some of your additions of colors on page were on the boundary of that, but as long as it was directly related to the content of the text (like the rail signal colors), I kept it. Making "unusable" colored fails that point of reasoning, so I removed it. Don't worry about questioning what I do, it makes sure I keep my decisions well reasoned. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:46, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Should there be a page for the game's "planning/ghost mode" (shift+click when placing) mode? -- Zippy (talk) 19:51, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes. There is a redlink on blueprint to "entity ghost". You could make that page and put it on there. Some other info that would be useful on that page is how long ghosts last (infinite from blueprints, some other time from destroyed entities). -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 20:02, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Well the page exists now. I forgot to ask this before. Am I allowed to add images for every single type of damage on the Damage page? -- Zippy (talk) 23:50, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

The page is great, thank you. What would images of damage types show? (Feel free to upload an example image to explain. I simply don't know how you'd do that) -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:05, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Anymore pages that need to be made? -- Zippy (talk) 22:47, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Nothing that would be worth it before 0.17. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:21, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Will you have the time to add any of that stuff? It seems like there's a plethora of new things coming. Enough to make our faces explode 4 times over. -- Zippy (talk) 15:58, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

I hope I do, it is my job after all :) I am already preparing for 0.17, so I hope to have most pages prepared before 0.17 comes out. Once it is out, it will be a community effort to finish updating the entire wiki, but it should definitely be doable. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:02, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Can I make a "bus" page? Since there's one on balancers? As well as a page titled "Warnings" that redirect to "Alerts"? -- Zippy (talk) 06:09, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

We already have Tutorial:Main bus, so no. Yes. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:50, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Probably a good time to bring this up *before* 0.17 comes. I recommend taking screenshots with something like Fraps, because using the screenshot feature from Steam just compresses the hell out of the images like a low quality .jpg. -- Zippy (talk) 23:47, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I use either ShareX or the screenshot feature built into the game which both produce high quality images. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 07:56, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

You know how some of the images I made have the checkered background? Is it valid to make the pictures of buildings entities also have that? -- Zippy (talk) 16:26, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

No, I dont want to stray so far from the vanilla game. The images are there so that players can know how something looks like in-game before they see it. If that is shown in a completely different context than the player will ever encounter, it will make it harder for the player to recognize the building. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:31, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Do you happen to know what the "dot" and "info" signals are in 0.17? -- Zippy (talk) 17:29, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

They were added because the Introduction uses them in the guis. As far as I know it's on the to do to remove them again since they never really were meant to be in the base game as signals. Other than that they are just virtual signals, nothing special. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:31, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Can I add the 'stop conditions' to the locomotives page? (cargo empty, cargo full, etc.)? -- Zippy (talk) 01:49, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Also, to save myself a lot of work if need be, do ALL images need to be redone for 0.17? Even if the older image gets the point across to what something is? Like say, some belt images on the transport belt system page. -- Zippy (talk) 02:09, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

The conditions fit better on Railway#Train_schedule, you could link to that if it's not easy to find on the locomotive page. No, they don't need to be all redone. I think once 1.0 is out we will make such a "full pass" and make sure that every image is up to date, now it would be too much work for something that might change again. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:07, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Are there any pages that still need redoing, or any more (animated) images I've missed? -- Zippy (talk) 03:49, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Only the really big pages (inserters, map editor, world generator) and small pages that I don't have on my list are left. I kind of want to do those big pages mostly myself, I hope that is okay. I've not been keeping track of the images, sorry. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:19, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Permission to make a template for glowing and/or outline text? You never know when you might need something like that. -- Zippy (talk) 21:40, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

No. Please see the rules on templates for why not. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 23:32, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

I see, what if there just so happened to be a glowing text thing in the game itself, and we were making it match in the wiki? Regardless of what you're answer is, have a sensational day! Are there any unrelated template pages that need making anyway? Also, can add a super subtle glow effect to the words "everything", "anything" and "each" on the circuit network page? -- Zippy (talk) 10:53, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

When that happens we will make the appropriate changes, no need to make them now. No not currently, and no. Don't overdo it. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:51, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

One of your edit notes was "Factorio gui style: Round corncers = can be interacted with. This cannot be interacted with." I'm sorry but I haven't the slightest clue in the world what you're saying here. Also am I allowed to make those colorboxes rounded for *just* the lamp page? -- Zippy (talk) 04:58, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Basically, one of the "standards" in the GUI style introduced in 0.17 is that when an element has rounded corners, it can be modified by the user. You can see this all over the vanilla game — textfields have rounded corners, buttons do not etc. In the long run, the plan is to make the wiki use the in-game GUI style. So anything new that is created should already follow that style, to make transitioning to it easier. So no, you are not allowed to make them round for the lamp page. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 11:13, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there a way I can edit my .css page so they appear rounder just for me? -- Zippy (talk) 17:23, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

I added the class "template-color" to the template, so you can use that for your user css. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:45, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Can I add a template for a "map icon"? Like for the little arrow icons you see for tanks/locomotives/cars in the mini-map? -- Zippy (talk) 22:45, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't get what this template would do. Could you create it in your userspace so that I can have a look, please. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:07, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Am I allowed to make prototype template(s) to help demonstrate my point? -- Zippy (talk) 12:49, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, create the template in your userspace, like I said. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 18:18, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

I was gonna redo all the inserter images to make them more 0.17 related. Though the alt-mode in 0.17's inserters looks real cluttery. It might look better with alt-mode off. Is uh... will that work? -- Zippy (talk) 22:01, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Oh, be sure to check out my workbench page. Look at the fake car infobox. See the little arrow icon? Pretend that "Storage Size" says "Map Icon". That's what I propose what this wiki should have. I can't edit the main templates so... yeah that's all you. -- Zippy (talk) 00:20, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

The alt-mode did not change with 0.17, so it is not okay to turn it off for images that had it on. The car icon looks okay, but it doesn't use any template. If you just want the property for it added to the infoboxes, I can do that no problem. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 18:20, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Could I just upload updated inserter images but photoshop the yellow arrow and bar on them? And yes, I'd very much like for you to add that property if that's alright. Though it's for the good of the wiki more than it is for me. -- Zippy (talk) 23:52, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I already updated the images. I will add the property tomorrow morning. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 23:57, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Actually, I meant the individual inserter pages: yellow inserter, fast inserter, filter, etc. The images in the infoboxes. -- Zippy (talk) 01:18, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Okay, for those you definitely have to use "alt-mode" and please do not photoshop them beyond cropping. Thank you. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:35, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Am I allowed to add a mini-section on the circuit network on the transport belt system page about how they connect to the circuit network? And did you add the 'map icon' thing to the template page? -- Zippy (talk) 23:01, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 08:18, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Say what's that trick again where you can add another "fake" player to the game? -- Zippy (talk) 04:00, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

The one I explained to you was making a LAN multiplayer game and joining yourself locally. You can however also use /c game.player.surface.create_entity{name="player", force="player", position={0,0}}, but that player wont have a name and it cant move. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 07:59, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Strange link in Power_production#Ensuring_enough_energy_is_produced

Hi Bilka, the section "Power_production#Ensuring_enough_energy_is_produced" contains a link that leads to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback It has only marginally to do with "brownouts/blackouts"!? I assume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_outage was meant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by VandenPlas (talk • contribs) 15:44, 9 January 2019

That is the result of an discussion over whether the feedback loop is positive or negative. You can find the discussion here User_talk:AnthonyQBachler and on power production talk page. Feel free to link to brownout instead, the link to "feedback" never really made sense. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:22, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Headline change to different language

Hi Bilka, how do I change the headline of a page to a different language (german in this case)? Please see: wiki.factorio.com/Refined_hazard_concrete/de, wiki.factorio.com/Refined_concrete/de — Preceding unsigned comment added by VandenPlas (talk • contribs) 08:21, 22 February 2019

Add the title (Refined hazard concrete, Refined concrete) to Template:Translation/de. You can find more tips for translation here: Factorio:Translation_guide -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 08:38, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Revising my edits

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for revising and especially commenting on my last set of edits. It's good to know how to keep to wiki style and make things consistent. Techhead7890 (talk) 14:49, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Understanding logistic chests

Yeah, constantly expanding that "multiplayer and fluids" section was getting old. Logistic chests, for me, was not something I could understand so easily from the start. If I made an image, giving accurate visuals to what each chest does, would it be allowed on this wiki? -- Zippy (talk) 08:53, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Depends on the image, but generally yes. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:01, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

How do you feel about this idea: imagine having more signal labels, but some of them are symbolic and interactive. Look at this image: https://i.imgur.com/EB0HJoq.png - Now imagine you pick the first bullseye-looking signal, and that signal is activated. So you get an effect like 'this' on the minimap (https://i.imgur.com/OQjJBJr.gif). You think something like that would be a good add to the game? -- Zippy (talk) 04:53, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Uhh, yes? No? -- Zippy (talk) 06:24, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

Vacation :) Ideas and suggestions for the game have no place on this wiki; make a forum post for that. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:19, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Is a multiplayer image of players fighting off enemies allowed if there's no mod elements? -- Zippy (talk) 15:56, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

What value do you think the image would add to the page? -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:30, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

An interesting image that's different from one player just standing around a bunch of enemies. -- Zippy (talk) 04:26, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Okay, add it. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:36, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Wait... You mean add the image from before or the alternate "non-mod" one I brought up? Also, am I allowed to add gif's for all the weapons? -- Zippy (talk) 13:40, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

The non-mod one. Yes. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 13:52, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I mean, couldn't I just crop out the mod stuff and post the same image..? -- Zippy (talk) 06:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Please make a new image, the coin/random beams are in the middle of the image/directly where the fighting happens, so cropping it is nearly impossible. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 08:50, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Is there a way to find out which articles are visited the most? -- Zippy (talk) 15:47, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, Factorio:Top pages. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 21:09, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

I was wondering, you know how you can change the style of this wiki through the user page preferences thing? What if I designed a bunch of different colored CSS templates for people to pick from? -- Zippy (talk) 07:27, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

The wiki is pending a major-ish style rework in corporation with the Factorio graphics department soon™ (not this year probably), so I don't think putting work into changing the current style is a good idea. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 11:14, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Am I allowed to make a template (similar to the "stub" one) that says something like "this page has outdated images"? Or does that already exist? -- Zippy (talk) 06:29, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Wait nvm that already exists. -- Zippy (talk) 07:16, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Wanted pages/de

Hey Bilka, from time to time I translate a page in German and I noticed that some of the pages listet at Factorio:Wanted_pages/de have only one page referring to them which should not be referring to them in my opinion. An example is Special:WhatLinksHere/Mods/de. The referring page is the uk translation and I couldn't find the link on that page.--Ickputzdirwech (talk) 09:57, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

The language template on the uk page refers to the German page, even if you can't see it. Just ignore any page that doesn't have an English version, that is what the column is for. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:05, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Two things...

It's me again making your talk page doubly longer than it should be. Just throwing this out there, is there a way to add .webp image support to this wiki? I don't know if you understand how that format works, but it would allow .gifs to be resized and still animate. Also, this one is minor, but are you alright with having a GUI image for buffer chests? The deletion log says you got rid of it for being too similar to another image or something, though the only difference is one chest has as extra option on the GUI. Don't know if that counts. -- Zippy (talk) 01:43, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Mediawiki recommends against using webp's for images since not all browsers support their display. Furthermore, adding support for displaying them properly looks pretty complicated, so I don't think it's likely to be added. The buffer chest image is alright to add - the deletion in the log was me accidentally uploading the requester chest image as a buffer chest image and then moving it to the right place, nothing to do with the actual buffer chest GUI. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 06:30, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Localisation misinformation?

Hi. You reverted my edits on mod Localisation, citing "misinformation". Could you elaborate? I use rich text formatting in my mods, as do other people, so that definitely works, and it was the Factorio developers themselves that have clearly stated that the final string cannot be accessed in scripts. Where's the misinformation? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Modo lv (talk • contribs) 16:24, 22 January 2021‎

Whether rich text can be used depends on where the locale is used. E.g. rich text does not work in script render text. The final string can be accessed via LuaPlayer.request_translation. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:29, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

OK, but shouldn't the info be updated to reflect that then, instead of removing all mention of these features? I originally came to localisation page to figure out how to color text and add images, and it does not give any information on that at all (instead the given examples lead me to believe that the only way was to use parameters to insert images programmatically, and colors/fonts were simply not an option). As for reading the result, Google (specifically on the API docs!) and forum search on the issue only led me to the (outdated) forum post stating that it can't be done. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Modo lv (talk • contribs) 16:39, 22 January 2021‎

If you can find a way to mention rich text without it ending up as misinformation, feel free. Regarding reading the result, I'd personally prefer if the page stays the way it is, as request_translation is basically a newbie trap. At the point that you'll be able to determine what it's useful for, you'll have found it in the docs/in another mod anyway. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:50, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Well, I didn't find it. :) I have no idea how to tell if a mod might be using request_translation (since it's such an advanced and specific feature, I would guess that not a lot of them do, at least in singleplayer) and all my attempts at googling "lua read localisedstring" and similar only lead to the forum post saying it can't be done (and so I naturally stopped looking for it). So there is already misinformation out there that people do find and we can't remove, but we can ensure that the wiki — the first place a person looks — is accurate, thorough and and up-to-date. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Modo lv (talk • contribs) 17:00, 22 January 2021‎

Okay, good point. How about you implement your vision (with the new info) on the page and we'll work with that. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:06, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Already on it! :) Ideally I would love to see a list somewhere of what supports rich text and what doesn't, but starting a whole new page seemed a bit much so soon. :D So I'll just add what I know to localisation page for now and we can go from there. Thank you for your time & patience!

Heatpipe in german

Hello, I have a problem. In German factorio heat-pipes are called "Wärmerohre" but here the wiki calls ist "Hitzerohre". How can I change the name? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jojo04 (talk • contribs) 14:46, 24 February 2021‎

Hey, you can change it in Template:Translation/de. Just click edit, search for the heat pipe and change the entry. You can find more information on translating here: Factorio:Translation guide. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:53, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Iron gear

Hey, just wanted to thank you for the detailed explanation on the iron gear diff, it was very helpful. I'd still like to expand on "many basic and advanced recipes" a little bit, as the page seems a bit like a stub at present. (For example, I should note that the first sentence is actually describing the ingredient information, which is present in the infobox.) Would you be opposed to the following (without the miscellaneous categories originally present):

It is very important for many basic and advanced recipes, including all levels of belts, the basic inserter and assembler, and raw resource extraction equipment such as the electric mining drill.

I feel like this gives a bit more detail on basic, highly-produced items using the gear wheel, with recipes have been left unchanged in quite some time. Additionally, the prose allows grouping and categorisation of the items (rather than having to understand exactly which item icon is in the infobox's list, and then know the item's significance). Thanks in advance (and PS, thanks for tidying up the Assembling machine 1 page for conciseness!). Techhead7890 (talk) 11:10, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

I'll be transparent here, the iron gear change was sitting in my to-do for a few days because I could not figure out how to handle it. Looking at it again now, I agree that the page should be longer and your proposed sentence fits well, so I added it. I think the description on electronic circuit pretty much nails what I think fits well for these item pages - some concrete examples and category mentions, but not so much/so detailed that it begins to look like an exhaustive list. But I want to stress again that I am not very set in my opinion here, so please keep proposing things/changing pages around and we'll keep communicating so we hopefully find the best solution :) Additionally, I want to say thank you for the history section additions, they are great. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 11:59, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

German Mainpage

The German main page contains several outdated info. For example, the German version of the "get the game" part contains the info that Factorio is currently under development and is available as early access. Other parts of the main page are outdated as well. Is it allowed to update these important subpages to the current state of the English ones on my own? Is there some kind of review process?

Another question: A few German pages contain elaborate details that are not present in the English version. They look as if they are WIP relics from the game development stage, when the corresponding features were not yet stable or not yet fully understood by the wiki community. As far as I see it, all translated wiki pages should contain exactly the same information, regardless the language. So the task is to remove these details and replace them with exactly the information that is in the English version of that page. Not less, and not more. Is this the intended approach? Tertius3 (talk) 16:53, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

You can update the main page subpages on your own. Yes, updating translated pages to the state of the English page is the intended approach. However, if you find that the extra information that is on the German page is valuable, you could add it to the English page. There is nothing that speaks against expanding pages with valuable information. Thank you for reaching out and making sure that you're working on the right things :) -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:15, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Another question: how should the player (reader) be addressed in German? In English you address everyone as "you", but in German you address someone formally as "Sie", informally as "Du", and some kind of middle ground is "Ihr". Usually, German game wikis, especially fan-based ones, address players as "Du" and sometimes as "Ihr", but never as "Sie". "Sie" is used with professional texts, but usually not with leisure/gaming topics. Given that Factorio started as indie game and still looks like one, I recommend addressing the player with "Du". This is how friends are talking to each other. Is this ok? I found a mix of "Sie" (in some tutorial, sounds a bit strange) and "Du" (in the old installation instructions and probably elsewhere), so I'm asking for consistency. Tertius3 (talk) 16:42, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

For that and most other things we follow the in-game translations, which go with "Du". Im Internet duzt man sich ;) -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

So I think the Best way to this in german is with "Man", because it is some kind of bad language, to adress the reader directly. (In german) ~ Jojo04 08:50, 5 April 2021

I personally consider "man" as bad language. I prefer "Du". It's a good way to 'involve' the reader and keep him/her reading. --Ickputzdirwech (talk) 09:13, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

As in most cases the english "you" refers to everyone, the correct German word is "Man". The translation with "Du" is an anglizism and so an bad language. Also the Wiki style guide says, that (in english) "you" should be avoided. Jojo04 (talk) 09:50, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I usually go with "man" on my translated pages, and it looks better than the direct "du" in my opinion. In english, some sentence is "To achieve this, you click on this and do that", the corresponding translated phrase as I see it is "Um dies zu erreichen, klickt man auf dies und tut das". In many articles on this wiki, "you" is used like this, and translation to "man" feels quite natural. It's simply factual, not too personal. Really bad would be, if you translate to "Um dies zu erreichen, klicken Sie auf dies und tun das". I use Deepl for initial translation work, and it often starts to address the reader as "Sie" - this is what I rework to "man". I would use "Du" in elaborate tutorials, which at the most part are not yet translated. The only one is the Quickstart tutorial, but unfortunately this addresses the player as "Sie". Tertius3 (talk) 11:17, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Generally, the aim should be to keep articles that aren't tutorials in passive voice, so for example "this can be achieved, by clicking on this and doing that" or using phrases like "the player inventory" instead of "your inventory". This goes for both English and German. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:36, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

This Wiki's Origins...

Me and the creator of the game "Song of Syx" are discussing starting a wiki. He actually said he was curious to how THIS very wiki got started. Did you buy a site and make this all from scratch? --Zippy (talk) 23:39, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Back in the day, the wiki was hosted on the same server as the forums, it didn't even have its own subdomain. MediaWiki is free and open software, so there is nothing to pay for there. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:39, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Does MediaWiki provide you with its own server space or do you need a server of your own. The dev of Song of Syx seems to think you need one. Also, I noticed that you updated some of the images in the 'combinator tutorial' page, but you left some not updated. Is that because you want to save space to not stretch the page? Because the new GUI for the combinators are way fatter and space-taking. --Zippy (talk) 01:52, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki is just software, no server and no service included. So you need to provide your own server. The Factorio wiki probably started as additional install on the official forum server and was later carved out to its own server because of the growth. Despite its power, MediaWiki is very easy to install.

Apropos combinator tutorial - could you take a look at this image made by yourself: https://testing-wiki.factorio.com/File:Onetime_Clock.png? It's not only a bit outdated, it's wrong unfortunately. The bottom decider has to be "input count". The previous image in the history has the correct setting. Tertius3 (talk) 14:11, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

As Tertuis3 says, you need to have a server to host the wiki software. I updated the images on the combinator tutorial page that had mistakes and left the rest the same for the reason you give. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 09:30, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

I think I asked you this, but is there a tutorial on how to make templates from scratch? You had to have learned somehow as there's hundreds of templates made by you. Also, what's the name of the file you edit to change the main CSS of the entire wiki? -- Zippy (talk) 12:56, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

The MediaWiki help pages are linked in the sidebar of this wiki. They are rather good at answering questions like this. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 13:49, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

I'll try to make this my last question. And yes, I went through the MediaWiki help pages. You know how it says "Factorio Wiki" in the browser? Can that be changed with ease? Mind you, I'm an admin of the wiki I'm working on, but not the actual owner. -- Zippy (talk) 18:37, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

This page has some info on how to change the wiki name. You will need to be able to access LocalSettings.php for that, some info on that is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LocalSettings.php#Location_on_the_server. Good luck with your endeavors! -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 18:51, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Might as well throw this in. When a transparent image is resized in a thumb image, it has a white background which looks kind of... "loud" and off on this site's color scheme. You can change that by editing the background-color of "html .thumbimage". I'm sure you knew that for the longest time. Just throwing that out there just for the sake of it.

html .thumbimage {
    background-color: #222;
    border: 1px solid #797979;
}

^ I think something LIKE that could maybe work.-- Zippy (talk) 19:44, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

I did not know that, thanks for the info! -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:15, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Spam

May I ask what you use to keep the spambots out? -- Zippy (talk) 04:19, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

We have editing disabled for people without accounts. And then for getting an account, we use Extension:ConfirmAccount, it provides Special:RequestAccount. It's working well so far, but certainly not without weaknesses. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:04, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Do spambot accounts still slip in? -- Zippy (talk) 17:01, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Also, this is the wiki, if you're interested in knowing what it looks like. -- Zippy (talk) 18:10, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd prefer not to further comment on how we combat spam. If you know the techniques, they are much easier to work around. I hope you can understand this. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 16:38, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't want you spilling the beans on your techniques, either. But I have to ask this, even with your spam-fighting methods, do you still get spam accounts that slip in every now and then? -- Zippy (talk) 15:38, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Not in a way that they are of any concern to me/affect the wiki. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:29, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Mass search and replace

Do you have a bot that is able to mass replace every "[[Damage/de|Schaden & Resistenzen]]" and "[[Damage|Schaden & Resistenzen]]" and "{{TransLink|Damage|Schaden & Resistenzen}}" to "[[Damage/de|Schaden & Widerstand]]" within the German pages? And could you please run it?

I just reworked the German article about damage and found that German ingame terminology for resistance is not "Resistenz" but actually "Widerstand". However, Resistenz is used in all of the footers of the ammo and weapon articles.

Or if you are lazy, you can give me a hint how to make such a bot myself (I'm able to script programming with the major script languages on Linux. It would be the perfect exercise to destroy the whole wiki improve my Python knowledge). Tertius3 (talk) 16:56, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't have one right away, but making it wouldn't be an issue. This is a great example to highlight why Template:L is so good when not manually overridden - it would adjust all those links automatically, though generally outdated translations aren't the biggest issue. This may be a good time to think about whether the page should maybe be moved, should be split into separate pages, whether the links to it should be in the see also at all, whether they should link to a redirect (which auto-translates) instead. What do you think here? These changes would affect English and all other language, but may have better long term results. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:58, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Do you mean the "damage" article that is linked by these links? It deals with damage and damage mitigation (resistance). We can split it to a damage-only article and a new resistance-only article and change all links from [[Damage|Damage & Resistances]] (which are many as well) to either just [[Damage]] or into two links to the two articles. I'm at a loss here, I'm not a person that intends to question and change all design choices made long before I joined. I just want to translate what currently exists.
If you ask me, I would not change/split the damage article but change all references to it to just [[Damage]] and leave out the extension "& resistances". A redirect from "Resistance" to Damage#resistance would be useful for search. And keep all the "see also" references. May be only me, but I'm using these links very often to get a broader picture of some topic, especially if I don't know that much yet.
With redirects, there is the next question I wanted to ask: the search function is useful only for English. It would be useful to create redirects in all the languages to all the "English topic/<language>" pages, for example Schaden -> Damage/de. This can probably be automated if you use all the custom language templates as source and a little bit of text processing and scripting magic. However, I don't know if this clutters the pages too much. What a pity this wiki doesn't use the native translation module available for MediaWiki. --Tertius3 (talk) 16:26, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for still providing your opinion despite not wanting to question old design choices. The damage page is a design I wanted to question because to my knowledge, the current form of the page is just an expanded version of what was created back in 2013, during the "birth" of the wiki. Both the wiki and the game have changed a lot since then, so it can be good to take another look. I like your suggestion of keeping the page as is, but changing the links to remove the resistance part. The redirect you suggest already exists (in English at least), so that is good too. So, I took the freedom of taking 10 minutes out of my day to do the change manually, both for English and German pages. Doing it manually allowed me to directly link to the resistances redirect for the armor and tank pages, since it is a bit more fitting. I created the appropriate redirect for German (the translation already existed). I hope you don't mind that I just ran with your suggestion :)

Regarding general language redirects - they are allowed, but I'd rather not create them in bulk, as the Redirects created with the idea of "This might be useful someday" are noise and provide nothing. note from the rules still applies here. This also gets difficult due to changing translations and overlapping languages. E.g. there is both an Eisenstange and Eisenstab redirect for the German iron stick. An example for overlapping would be logistic system (the research) in German and Danish - it's the same translation, so which language do you redirect to. So, I would instead suggest to try to create the redirects mostly as search enhancers. For example, searching for "Zug" doesn't result in railway/de. So that would be good to have as a redirect. On the other hand, searching for "Öl" yields crude oil/de, so that doesn't really need a redirect. I hope that still helps to make the search more usable in German.

Regarding the translation module, could you link what exactly you mean? Last I looked at things, there was an extension that allowed translations, but it wasn't really fitting for the wiki ([3]), but maybe you mean something else/the extension has been improved. I'm quite open to changing the translation system (as long as the new solution is better) because our current system is rather obviously running on technology from 2014. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 17:29, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Creating infoboxes on SpaceExploration wiki

Hello Bilka, there is an official wiki for the Space Exploration mod. However, there isn't much content. I wanted to try contributing, but I think the most important starting place is to get working infoboxes. I figured stealing infobox source code from this wiki would be the best way, since the types of infoboxes needed are the same. I (and a couple other people based on the history) have tried copying over and failed.

I'm wondering if you have any guidance on how to get infoboxes setup on that wiki.

https://spaceexploration.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page https://spaceexploration.miraheze.org/wiki/Template:Infobox

--Vicarious (talk) 23:56, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Hey. I cannot assist you in breaking the license of this wiki. However, infoboxes are rather widespread concept, so there should be plenty of non-license-breaking inspiration out there. I would recommend to look into modern technology like Extension:Scribunto to build your infoboxes if you want to get as complicated as this wiki. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:00, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Hm, I guess I should have looked closer at each wiki's license. Thanks for your time. --Vicarious (talk) 16:55, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Expandable tables/divs/etc

I noticed you didn't want a long list of sounds on the programmable speaker page. What if the list was put into an expandable table so that it didn't stretch the page by default? -- Zippy (talk) 07:08, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

That would improve the collapsed case, but once expanded, a list of over 300 things would still be a lot at once. So some kind of solution that collapses the contents of the second dropdown in the in-game GUI may be better, but that seems weird for example for the Miscellaneous category where the contents of the second dropdown is all that is interesting. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 12:17, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

What if the table was designed in a way where the speaker choices were in rows? That is, if the table was 7-8 columns long, it would only be 37-50 cells tall. Which would be very tall, but no so much that it ruins the page? -- Zippy (talk) 15:35, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

That sounds quite big still, especially for an item page. But it may be worth a try (perhaps with only some of the content, so that it's not a lot of work). -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:29, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Rocket rush ready to merge in

Hi, I decided to make my very first wiki contribution ever and created a page for the Rocket rush scenario. I have 0 experience contributing to a MediaWiki, so I have no idea if I followed the right protocol while building out the page--forgive me if I made things inconvenient. I linked the draft page off of my user page to facilitate building it out. Per the rules, I'm here asking an admin to merge this page into Game_modes_and_options -- While 1 (talk) 14:08, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the page! I made some formatting and wording changed and then merged it into the main namespace. The page must have been a lot of work with the item list, thank you for contributing it! -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 10:47, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Is it appropriate to add usage information for a linked belt, somewhere on this wiki?

Hi Bilka,

Hope all is well. Thanks for all you have done for this wiki -- it has provided me value on numerous occasions.

I read all of your edit summaries of your recent linked belt edits. Thanks for the information.

I also read the rules and the style guide. I apologize for not having read them before my edits. My bad.

Additionally, I read the editor and admin noticeboards to possibly further familiarize myself.

I want to keep this wiki being good.

I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use a linked belt, that one can see in the vanilla map editor. Initially, I did not find linked belt usage information from my web searching. I eventually found some information on how to use a linked belt from the Factorio Discord server.

This required more effort than getting the information from direct web searching. Thus, I wanted to record the information in a canonical, more accessible location, and I thought this wiki would be appropriate for this linked belt usage information.

Is it appropriate to add usage information for a linked belt, somewhere on this wiki?

If so, where would it be appropriate to add it? Perhaps at Prototype/LinkedBelt?

Thanks again.

Best,
Snayday (talk) 18:44, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Hey, thank you for the nice words. I agree that usage information is good to have. My intention was to take all the info you added to the linked belt page and merge it into the prototype page. I see now that I missed mentioning that mods or console commands are needed for executing the linked script function. I added that to the page now.

Another place where there could be more information is the console commands page, I could add a command to connect two linked belts. I don't know if that would help your usecase since your original page only mentioned "use mods". So, if my edit is not enough, feel free to add more info on Prototype/LinkedBelt. Or let me know what exactly you would like to add and we can figure out the best place to put it here on the wiki. Thank you for reaching out about this :) -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 19:30, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Hey Bilka, thanks for your kind words as well. I felt like responding here to possibly make the dialogue here more complete, in case it's of use to anyone. Hopefully this is okay.

I believe I have made changes that cause the wiki to provide better usage information for linked belts: On the console page (which is the redirect of console commands), I added the section Console#Connect_linked_belts, and this new section is linked to in the Prototype/LinkedBelt (linked belt) page.

(I also accidentally forgot to include an edit summary for one of my edits to Prototype/LinkedBelt. My bad. I don't think it's really an issue, but want you to know I intend to succinctly summarize my edits, if necessary.)

Thanks for getting back to me :)

Best, Snayday (talk) 05:50, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the great edits! The console command is clever, I wouldn't have thought of using the entity tags but it's quite convenient with the map editor interface for them. So thank you for that and your other edits, I look forward to seeing more contributions from you :) -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 13:50, 25 July 2022 (UTC)