Talk:Biochamber

Should the page list all biochamber recipes?

Should this page list all of the recipes that the biochamber can craft? Currently it lists them. Points against: the recipes are hard to keep updated and take up a large part of the page because they are so many, which may be a bit of information overload. This why for example the assembling machine pages do not list the craftable recipes. Points in favor: Many recipes are alternate recipes that (currently) do not have their own pages, so they have to be listed somewhere, might as well be here. -- Bilka (talk) - Admin 20:12, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Well, the alternate recipes are all listed on the pages for that item. All of the recipes are technically somewhere else, so its viable to remove them. At the same time, I'd prefer not to get into the situation that the Foundry is in, where several metal casting pages are just a page for the Foundry's version of making that item. Alfonse (talk) 22:25, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

People might be confused as to what the machines can and can't produce, though. For example, the electromagnetic plant's description states that it "specializes in electronics" but can't craft electric engines. Although I do agree that it does take a large amount of space. Maybe use the expand/collapse folder to save space? (see below).Iridium235 (talk) 23:23, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Click to view.

Description/table

Also, which method is preferred? Iridium235 (talk) 23:35, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

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  Table format
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  List format

Maybe it's a better way that only list recipes in few topic pages for following reasons:

* Essentially, recipes are NOT entities, they have less properties and usually just related with a single building, it's not necessary to create new pages for each of them.

* Some buildings have many recipes, list all the recipes of their own may lead to information overload, and those informations are also too scattered and difficult to maintain.

* The template {{imagelink}} is often abused when recipes are listed, which causes many unnecessary requires of recipes pages (and redirects, e.g the Foundry page).

In conclusion, my personal opinion is that just list related recipes in few topic pages. For example, all informations on enemies are concluded in the page Enemies, it can be referenced anywhere when needed, and when any changes happened, only the topic page need to be updated. That could improve the maintainability of the entire wiki system, reduce unnecessary new/redirect pages and increase the information density of existing topic pages (such as Oil processing and Uranium processing). Perhaps some new topic pages are needed, but finally that could beneficial for improving the efficiency of information circulation. -- Cardinal (talk) 08:40, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

This is getting a bit off-topic, but the "Enemies" page is not what I would use as an example of a good page. In vanilla, maybe it was OK, but SA has enough new enemy types and mechanics that shoving them all onto the same page makes it basically unusable as something you would ever read. It's a gigantic grab-bag of vaguely related information. Linking into the middle of it maybe works, but the page as a page has too much information in it. It'd be like putting plastic, sulfur, solid fuel and lubricant all on the same page because... they're all oil processing products.

Speaking of which, the Oil processing page is very much like that. If I want to look up Coal liquefaction, that link doesn't even take me to the recipe. It takes me to some text that describes it, but I have to scroll up to the top of the page to find the recipe itself.

The game names these recipes; people are going to search the wiki for those names. We at least need redirects for them. I agree that we don't need a page for every metal casting or bio-whatever recipe. But people do need to be able to find whatever that page will be. And we shouldn't have large omnibus pages; pages on topics are important, but they shouldn't be replacements for recipes. The Inserters page describes the mechanics of all inserters; it does not replace the pages for any particular inserter types. Alfonse (talk) 15:03, 20 January 2025 (UTC)