Factorio Forums

You can drag-and-run to lay down properly spaced power poles.

I would love to see a feature similar to this for pipe-to-ground connectors. You would click to lay the first segment (into the ground) normally, but keep the button depressed while you move in a straight line. Then, instead of the placement repeating every tile, it would place two connectors every 6 tiles, so the pipe is mostly underground.

This would probably use the same or similar code functionality to the existing special case for power poles.

Attached is a screenshot. Top to bottom:

what power poles would look like without the existing special case
what pipes to ground currently look like while dragging
what power poles currently look like while dragging
what pipes to ground would look like with a special case

Also underground belts.

Edit: And roboports.

+1 for underground pipes and belts

This would also be nice for miners, repeating so that their mining areas do not overlap.

Also, for the specific case of pipes, it would be nice to have an option or modifier to place a solid pipe between each pair of pipe to ground, for forking and liquid identification.

sparr wrote:This would also be nice for miners, repeating so that their mining areas do not overlap.

I place them often as narrow as possible, to clean the fields as fast as possible.

Thought I'd bump this cause placing underground pipes is easily the most annoying thing in the game

ssilk wrote:

sparr wrote:This would also be nice for miners, repeating so that their mining areas do not overlap.

I place them often as narrow as possible, to clean the fields as fast as possible.

I agree here. Others sound good, but leave miners out of it. Thank you.

I agree.

*bump* - this is a nice comfort for little expense. Well, it's a bit more complicated than with the poles since devs have to rotate the endpieces and this could be way harder than it sounds^^

Wutklumpen wrote:*bump* - this is a nice comfort for little expense. Well, it's a bit more complicated than with the poles since devs have to rotate the endpieces and this could be way harder than it sounds^^

The end pieces already rotate when you're placing underground pipes, which does make placing them easier most of the time. This would just entail modifiction of the placing logic.

A complication is how to deal with misalignment. Power lines can be placed at any angle relative to another pole, however pipes only connect when in a straight line. Should the pipe placement not connect unless you're in line, or should it place a pipe in the correct spot once your cursor passes the maximum distance even if it is out of line?

SteelGiant wrote: The end pieces already rotate when you're placing underground pipes, which does make placing them easier most of the time. This would just entail modifiction of the placing logic.

I merely thought about fiddeling this stuff in between the mouse-events. what currently seems to be on mouseUp needs to fit into mousePressed. Maybe it's easy, maybe not

Making oil outposts is something i don't like to do in facotio due to the fact that you can't easily place them underground.
implementing this idea will make oil so much more fun to get.

Well, I use train for this, but I get it.

Just to be clear: more trains. Any excuse whatsoever. Even a single oil well on its own. More trains.

+1,000,000

kovarex wrote:Well, I use train for this, but I get it.

_aD wrote:Just to be clear: more trains. Any excuse whatsoever. Even a single oil well on its own. More trains.

Depends on distance and accessability.

More oil wells about 100-500 tiles from my oil storage tanks and refineries? Pipes
more oil wells fairly far away, but within reach of my logistic zone? (I usually cover my whole base in a logistic zone, it can be quite large, a few thousand tiles across) make an oil barreling outpost, but link it to the logistic network.
Even further away, outside of logistic zone? Train!

When I first started setting up the train lines, I had it so empty barrels and full barrels went in the same carriages, I would find that often the train was just running loops with the same cargo, because there wasn't enough room to unload the full/empty barrels, depending on the situation. this is when I started using seperate cargo wagons for full barrels ran empty barrels.


Back on topic with the pipes... there's more reason to have pipes than just oil. my mod for example has lots of new fluids, so many in fact that it is impossible to build your factories where the fluid you want is produced, so you'll end up piping it to odd places, just because there was some room to set up a new factory there.

having the ability to more easily place long underground pipes would be an advantage.

I would like to lay pipe above ground side by side without making a connection between them like conveyors. If you want to connect them use the rotate key (R by default).

Slooney3 wrote:I would like to lay pipe above ground side by side without making a connection between them like conveyors. If you want to connect them use the rotate key (R by default).

While I don't personally have a problem with the way pipes work, making them behave more like transport belts is definitely an idea worth considering. It would reduce instances of "whoops just erased my entire petroleum supply" and make more space efficient setups possible.

xnmo wrote:

Slooney3 wrote:I would like to lay pipe above ground side by side without making a connection between them like conveyors. If you want to connect them use the rotate key (R by default).

While I don't personally have a problem with the way pipes work, making them behave more like transport belts is definitely an idea worth considering. It would reduce instances of "whoops just erased my entire petroleum supply" and make more space efficient setups possible.

I could get behind that, as long as we don't forget to add in a new hub-pipe item to replace the existing pipe^^

There's a mod somewhere that does these "Pipes link where you want them to" things, I think it's called pipe dream on the mods section.