Why It Says Unknown

Why It Says "Unknown"

Critical Path will tell you it does not know something. That is a feature, and it is the design rule the whole mod is built around: an unknown stays unknown.

A factory tool that guesses is worse than useless, because a confident number gets acted on. A blank gets investigated.

Where you will see it

Vehicle routes

Trains, trucks and drones move goods in batches, not as continuous throughput. Critical Path knows the route is connected and carrying, but does not claim a rate:

Vehicle route connected - delivery rate unknown because throughput is not yet measured

Any item whose supply crosses such a route is marked not-known rather than being given a plausible-looking figure.

A scan that hit its limit

Very large factories can exceed the collection limits. When that happens the report says so - it will tell you how many buildings were examined out of how many exist - instead of presenting a partial scan as a complete one.

A solve that did not settle

Some factory topologies do not converge to a stable answer. Only the affected transport network is marked as not known. Independent networks that settled keep their measured results instead of the whole factory being blanked by one difficult loop.

A joined multiplayer client

Not any more, in the usual case - the host sends its report to you. See Multiplayer. The one time you will still see a refusal is a host running a version too old to send one, which says exactly that.

What is not unknown

Some things people expect to be fuzzy are not:

• Pipe feasibility is binary. A route either clears its head lift or it does not. There is no "probably". A blocked pipe carries exactly nothing.
• Storage is transparent at steady state. A container that is filling is not treated as an infinite consumer, and one that is emptying is not treated as a producer.
• Fluid rates are not softer than belt rates. Both rest on the same steady-state model. Neither reproduces the game's moment-to-moment behaviour, and neither pretends to.