Find your Stuff and where it comes from!

My factories develop somewhat... organically (aka Spaghetti Factonara), so I was having trouble finding where my various gizmos were being made.

Enter the BeastFinder to scour the local area for the items you require and highlight them on the map.

Search for items & fluids...

in Assemblers & Furnaces
Both ingredients & products can be searched.

in Storage tanks, Container & Roboports
Chests & logistic chests are included.
Roboport inventory search is an option in BeastFinder → Settings

Search on the ground for...

Built entities
Use this to search for entities rather than in them. Ideal for finding entities to upgrade or chests you plopped down somewhere random and forgot where.
NB: You can search for belts, pipes etc., but you may get a lot of results that could give the Beast indigestion and cause you a lengthly wait.

Items on ground
You might be surprised how much random stuff is littering your factory floor. The keen nose of the Beast can find specific dropped items, or use the Beast Wildcard signal to find ALL items on the ground within range.
See the tooltip ingame.

Results

Search results are displayed as Chart Tags on the map, with different shapes/colours for the above categories - see the example map image above. A summary at the bottom of the BeastFinder window shows how many results and how many groups are displayed on the map (hover over the message for a legend).

Matching results that are close together are grouped together to avoid clutter… the Threshold configuration option determines how close is too close. If a result group contains multiple categories (eg: product AND ingredient), the colour/shape of the highest one is chosen, and a black circled + is added

NB: Only results for the same Search Item will be grouped, so some overlapping may occur if searching for multiple items.

Other stuff

Search range
Searches are performed in a box centred on the player – the range is configurable and can be set fairly high, but remember that an excessive number of results could cause a delay. Increasing the grouping Threshold may help if this causing you issues.
That being said, the grouping function is now performed by kd-tree range searching and performs significantly better on large results sets than before (finally got to use something from my education long ago!)

Recipe Teardown
Choose a recipe in the Teardown box and BeastFinder will set it's ingredients as Search Items.
This will optionally clear all existing Search Items first.

Usage & options
The hot-key to open the search dialog defaults to Shift-F and is configurable as usual in:
Factorio →Options → Controls → Mods.
There is also an optional menu button in the top-left corner of the screen.

My personal favourite options include "Clear tags on closing GUI" and "Dragable windows".

Most options are configurable in-game by clicking the gear icon in the BeastFinder window, but to change the number of search slots, toggle the menu button or change the result highlight size requires using:
Factorio → Options → Mods → Startup.

Support
The BeastFinder should play nicely with other mods since it searches by type:
{ assembling-machine, furnace, container, logistic-container, storage-tank, roboport, entity, item-on-ground }
Tested with Bob’s Mods.

Multiplayer support: In theory - only limited testing performed.

Console command to reset to default settings:
/c remote.call("BeastFinder", "Reset")

Please raise any issues or suggestions on the Discussion tab.

Deprecated features
I've optimised the layout for the default 2 (or more) columns - the single column layout is not supported in this version. If you really like 1 column, have a whinge at me on the Discussion tab and I may re-visit it.

Due the increased number of filters, it was problematic trying to show all the different combinations of categories on the chart tags with sub-icons - so as mentioned above, if there are multiple categories in a group, it will be represented by a single sub-icon (a black circled + sign).

Thanks
Thanks to the Wube for Factorio and the many modders out there who provided the inspiration and in some cases what you might call (ahem) a code blueprint. I believe in a free internet, so have released this as public domain - please let me know if I have inadvertantly included material of yours in breach of a more... repressive licence.