Schall Minor Tweaks

Summary

Various minor tweaks that may improve gameplay. Options including modifying colour tone for logistics requester chest, character inventory size, grid size of various armours, free circuit wires, stack size of various fuels, player chat colour, research queue availability, scale of mining drills status light, and more...

Usage

Here is a collection of small tweaks that are not big enough to be built as a separate mod, but still I feel useful enough to be included to improve the player experience. All of these do not add new contents, only modify them.

All changes can be made under "Options" → "Mod settings" → "Startup" tab, like the following:

Colour Change Requester Chest

0.16 had nice and distinguishable logistics chest colours. 0.17 changes the colour a bit, especially requester chest now changes to cyan, which closely resembles with light green used by buffer chest. This becomes a problem to players not having very sharp eyes (including me), who wants to distinguish them even at large zoom out.

This mod provides the second option "0.16 Blue" to revert to the old colour, and even third option "Enhanced" to give an even stronger contrast.

Mining Result of Logistics Chests

Although all logistics chests have exactly the same ingredients, they come out as different types so will appear in your inventory as different stacks. So why not just keep the basic steel chests and electronic circuits (where most players keep some in inventory)? This mod allows setting the resulting item when placed logistics chests are mined. These two combined together allow you to have a slightly slimmer inventory, and with only a minimal cost to change the chest type.

Default option of this setting is to return steel chest. You may also choose to return storage chest (yellow) if you do not want to lose the electronic circuits used in crafting. But of course, if you do not want this feature, you can always disable it, just like any other features of this mod!

Character Inventory Size

This can be a little bit cheating, but convenient to builders who want to carry a lot of items around.

Armour Grid Sizes

There are three vanilla armours which have equipment grid. But sizes like 5×5 and 7×7 are tricky to players, especially when the vast majority of equipment are even in size (e.g., 2×2). This mod allows you to tune up or even tune down these values a bit.

Circuit Wires for Free

The two circuit wires, red wire and green wire, are not normal products or entities. Players cannot get them back when mining the combinators and electric poles. Also, it can be troublesome when you are in the mood of deciding some great circuits, but have no copper plates nearby. With this option on, circuit wires do not need any ingredients at all.

Fuel Stack Sizes

When nuclear fuel is put into trains or tanks, the embarrassing small stack size (1) is limiting its uses. Although it looks similar to rocket fuel (stack size: 10), their stack sizes contradict to what we would expect. On the other hand, the uranium fuel cell (fuel for nuclear reactor) has stack size (50) much more than anyone would ever need. For example, circuit-controlled reactors would only ever need one fuel cell for fine control; five fuel cells can run modded nuclear tank like forever. Setting a lower stack size can prevent excessive accumulation. This mod allow editing stack sizes of both fuel items.

Player Colour

Yes, in vanilla you can change the player colour with console command /color, BUT you have to type it every game. So if you are tired of setting the player colour for each new game, NOW this mod allows you to set it once and for all! More importantly, there is no console command to set the chat colour. Chat colour is "automatically" set to a slightly brighter tone of player colour. Player has no control of it. Furthermore, if player colour has low brightness (e.g., blue, black), the chat text will be extremely difficult to read! This mod allows you to freely adjust the chat colour.

Both the player colour and player chat colour can be adjusted under "Options" → "Mod settings" → "Per player" tab. (Note that they are NOT in the same tab as other settings of this mod.) The colours are using RGBA model. The colour values can take either the set of 0 to 255, OR 0.0 to 1.0, NOT BOTH. For example, you can use either { 255 0 0 255 } or { 1.0 0 0 1.0 } to get the classic high-saturation red. Mixed form like { 255 0 0 1.0 } will only give you a bright pink.

Research Queue

Forgot to set allow research queue at startup? No worries, now you can change it during mid-game.

Remove Decoratives

Decoratives are purely for aesthetics. They do not have any role in the gameplay. Although you can choose to hide them in Graphics menu, they are still present in RAM and save files. They are still processed in file I/O, leading to longer loading/saving time and larger save files.

For users who want to skip them, this mod allows you to turn on the decoratives removal calls. You can choose to make the call on chunk generated or charted (or not calling at all). Therefore, the searches are only performed upon new chunks discovery, not causing any load in other times.

Scale Mining Drills Status Light

From 0.18.31, the vanilla electric mining drill has a status light on it. However, it is too small to be meaningful. Not every player uses a magnifying glass when playing Factorio.

This mod allows you to adjust the scale of this status light from 1 (unchanged) to 16, as the p