Scanner Tool

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The scanner is your primary tool for finding things across the map. If the cursor is how you operate on individual entities, the scanner is how you locate them in the first place. It surveys a large area around your character and organizes everything it finds into a navigable list, sorted by distance.

The scanner covers a radius of 2500 tiles — enough to span most of a typical factory — but it can only detect entities in areas that have already been charted. More on that below.

The Category, Entry, Instance Hierarchy

The scanner organizes its results into three levels:

Category — the broad type of thing you are looking for, such as Resources or Enemies
Entry — a specific kind of entity within that category, such as "iron ore"
Instance — an individual occurrence of that entry, such as a specific iron ore patch

This structure keeps the list manageable. Instead of one flat list of thousands of individual tiles and entities, you first choose what kind of thing you want, then find the closest example of it, then move between individual instances if there are several.

A concrete example: to find iron ore, switch to the Resources category, move through entries until you reach iron ore, then move through instances to find the closest patch.

Running a Scan

Run a scan: END

Directional scan: SHIFT + END — filters the scan to entities roughly in the direction your character is currently facing.

The scanner does not update continuously. Each scan is a snapshot taken at that moment. Entities that move or are destroyed after the scan will still appear at their old positions until you rescan. For dynamic situations like combat or active construction, rescan frequently.

The scanner runs computation in the background and may take a moment to populate after a fresh scan. After a mod update, scanner data may also reset and take a short time to rebuild — this is expected.

Navigating the Scanner List

CTRL + PAGEUP / PAGEDOWN — move between categories
PAGEUP / PAGEDOWN — move between entries within the current category
SHIFT + PAGEUP / PAGEDOWN — move between instances of the current entry
HOME — move the cursor to the currently selected entry's location

When you move to a new entry or instance, the cursor automatically jumps to that location on the map. You can then use all normal cursor interactions — check status, open a menu, teleport — without walking there first.

HOME also acts as a persistent reference: the scanner always remembers the last selected entry, so pressing HOME at any time returns the cursor to it even after you have moved the cursor elsewhere.

Charting and the Access Radar

The scanner can only find entities in charted areas. An uncharted area is one your character has not yet explored and no radar has covered. If part of the map is uncharted, entities there simply do not appear in the scanner list, even if they would otherwise be within range.

Walking through an area charts it as you go, but this is slow for large distances. The better solution is the access radar, a mod-specific building found in the crafting menu. Once powered, a single access radar will slowly chart a 1024×1024 tile area centered on itself — enough for the vast majority of playthroughs. If you need coverage beyond that, place additional radars at the edges.

Do not confuse the access radar with the vanilla radar. The vanilla radar has a much smaller charting range. The access radar sacrifices the rapid nearby refresh of the vanilla radar in exchange for its large long-range charting capability.

Aggregate Entries

The scanner does not list every tree or every water tile individually. Instead, it clusters nearby entities of the same type into aggregate entries:

Forests are groups of trees. Individual trees only appear as separate entries when you are within about 25 tiles of a forest.
Water bodies are clustered lake-by-lake.
Ore patches are grouped by patch. When you are within about 50 tiles of an infinite resource, individual resource tiles appear instead of the aggregate.

This keeps the list useful at all scales — you get a single "iron ore" entry pointing to the nearest patch, not thousands of individual ore tile entries.

Scanner Latency Note

API limitations introduced in Factorio 2.0 affected scanner performance. This is a known issue being worked on. If the scanner feels slow or its data seems stale after a mod update, give it a minute to rebuild — this is expected behavior, not a bug.