Point at a machine and see how well it really runs, what exactly is holding it back, and what to build to fix it.

Factory Insight measures your machines while you play and follows every problem to its source - through inserters, belts, chests, pipes, the suppliers behind them, and the power network.

The inspector - hover any machine

• One-line verdict: "Needs more copper cable", "Needs nothing - more capacity than demand", "Runs flat out - build more of these".
• Efficiency while needed, with one coloured bar showing where the last minute went: working, waiting for ingredients, power/fuel, output full, idle. A machine that is simply not needed right now is not marked as a problem.
• The supply chain as icons, ending at the root cause: missing item ← who brings it ← who makes it ← … ← the actual culprit. Click any icon to jump there.
• Measured, not estimated: the inserters around the machine and the belts it picks from are counted for real ("0.9/s of copper plate arrive here, 2.5/s are needed"; "this inserter is busy 100% of the time and moves 0.83/s").
• Whole belt lines, trains and robots: "8 machines want 20/s but this belt carries 15/s", "the last 3 machines on the line run dry", "all trains for this stop are stuck being filled at [station]", "no iron plate anywhere in the logistic network", "all 50 robots are busy".
• Module advice: speed modules where a machine runs flat out, productivity where it is short of ingredients, efficiency where the power network is overloaded - and a hint when speed modules sit in a machine that is hardly used.
• Understands modules, beacons, productivity, quality, mining productivity, pumpjack yield, fluids and the classic "refinery blocked because heavy oil is full".
• Works on assemblers, furnaces, chemical plants, refineries, centrifuges, rocket silos, mining drills, pumpjacks, labs, boilers, steam engines and turbines, inserters and belts - and on modded machines, since everything is read from the game's prototypes.

Automatic production blocks

Inspecting a machine also finds its production block by itself: what feeds it, what it feeds, and all machines doing the same job on the same lines - by following the real belts (however long), chests and pipes. The block is outlined in the world with the game's own selection brackets, and you get ratio advice for it:

Build 1 more cable assembler (producers cover only 86% of the demand)
Spare capacity: room for 5 more red-circuit assemblers

Top problems - ALT + P

A small see-through list ranking what costs your whole factory the most output, telling root causes from symptoms:

Make more petroleum gas: all makers already run flat out
Copper plate is available but doesn't arrive: fix the transport
Not enough power: 149 machines run slow

Click a row to jump to the worst machine.

Also included

• Status overlay (ALT + O): a status light on every machine around you, with the measured efficiency where something really holds it back.
• Area analysis (ALT + Z): drag over any part of your factory for made vs. used per item, "build N more" / "M are not needed", and inserters that are too slow.
• ALT + I pins the machine under the cursor so you can walk away and keep watching it.

Multiplayer

Everything this mod shows - panels, overlay, highlights - is per player. Other players see nothing unless they use the hotkeys themselves, and anyone can switch it off entirely for themselves under Settings → Mod settings → Per player. The mod adds no items, recipes, technologies or entities, so the game plays exactly like vanilla.

Settings (per player)

Inspector position (inside the game's own entity panel / right column / bottom left / free), see-through or solid background, what reacts to hovering, how far the automatic block search goes, overlay radius, highlighting on/off.

Performance

Only machines somebody is looking at are measured, spread evenly over ticks, and forgotten a few minutes later. The factory-wide survey only runs while the Top problems list is open, at a slow pace. With nothing open the mod costs practically nothing.

Known limits

• Inserter maximum throughput on belts is an estimate (shown with "~") until the measurement has run for a few seconds.
• The "inside the game's own panel" position writes into the machine's status line, which the game shares between players: someone hovering the very same machine at the same moment sees it too.
• Tested on the base game. Space Age is not tested yet (stacked belts, recyclers, spoilage, space platforms) - reports welcome.
• English only for now.