Factorio Forums

What is the best practice, or what are some good options, for creating buildings that will have behavior specified in control.lua and do not inherit from other buildings (i.e., not an assembling-machine)? For example, a dummy "deep mining machine" which can be placed on any land and creates random ores around it at specified intervals.

Some approaches I've seen are using the brown-asterisk and shipwreck decorations, but this requires modifying a number of rendering and layer properties. Is there a nice, non-functioning building/entity that could be deep-copied and then only need a change of name and graphic to serve as a dummy?

if they don't do anything, and don't require power... a tree, or rock entity might work.


if you want it to require power, there's a new entity coming in 0.13 that might help.

bobingabout wrote:if they don't do anything, and don't require power... a tree, or rock entity might work.


if you want it to require power, there's a new entity coming in 0.13 that might help.

Thanks. To check a bit further, I think the answer is 'no', but is there any way to create a chimera prototype- say, add an inventory to a mining drill?

Versepelles wrote:

bobingabout wrote:if they don't do anything, and don't require power... a tree, or rock entity might work.


if you want it to require power, there's a new entity coming in 0.13 that might help.

Thanks. To check a bit further, I think the answer is 'no', but is there any way to create a chimera prototype- say, add an inventory to a mining drill?

No, modular prototypes are apparently not a thing that is going to happen anytime soon. Sadly. Though you could probably request a particular feature that you'd like to mod in, once the current update cycle is done.

Sean Mirrsen wrote:

Versepelles wrote:

bobingabout wrote:if they don't do anything, and don't require power... a tree, or rock entity might work.


if you want it to require power, there's a new entity coming in 0.13 that might help.

Thanks. To check a bit further, I think the answer is 'no', but is there any way to create a chimera prototype- say, add an inventory to a mining drill?

No, modular prototypes are apparently not a thing that is going to happen anytime soon. Sadly. Though you could probably request a particular feature that you'd like to mod in, once the current update cycle is done.

Sad to hear, but the info is appreciated. Smoke and mirrors for the time being, then.