Factorio Forums

It's kind of tedious to place inserters onto ghosts as you have to manually rotate the inserter. It would be nice for the inserter to automatically match the direction of the ghost. This sort of automated behaviour isn't new. For example, when placing an assembler on a ghost with a recipe, the new assembler takes the recipe of the ghost.

k4lcifer wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 03, 2022 4:09 am

It's kind of tedious to place inserters onto ghosts as you have to manually rotate the inserter. It would be nice for the inserter to automatically match the direction of the ghost. This sort of automated behaviour isn't new. For example, when placing an assembler on a ghost with a recipe, the new assembler takes the recipe of the ghost.

Both your examples are not exactly similar : the inserter takes the settings from the ghost (circuit, stack size, ...) the same way the assembling machine takes the recipe from the ghost. And most of the time, the assembling machine is rotation invariant so there is no "turning it to face it the right way"... Until one starts building lines with fluid/solid ingredients (blue circuits for example), and then, the pipe is indeed automagically placed where the ghost tells it should be.
So yeah, but no. But yeah .

Once you get construction bots, it just happens... until then, yes it is a little tedious, for belts as well as inserters...

The devs have several times said that they didn't wish to make the "handbuilding" part any easier to push the players towards construction bot automated building. So don't expect too much.

k4lcifer wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 03, 2022 4:09 am

It's kind of tedious to place inserters onto ghosts as you have to manually rotate the inserter. It would be nice for the inserter to automatically match the direction of the ghost. This sort of automated behaviour isn't new. For example, when placing an assembler on a ghost with a recipe, the new assembler takes the recipe of the ghost.

A way to reduce the tedious is to use the pipette tool and the clear selection hotkey.

When you pipette an inserter where the ghosts is located and paste it immediatly its rotation is similar to the one of the ghost. Then you can clear selection and redo over another ghost that has different orientation.

It work best if you do 1 orientation first and build all inserters that have the similar orientation, then clear selection, use pipette on another inserter with different orientation and build all of them with that 2nd orientation.

It can be fast once you get used it.

Koub wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 03, 2022 7:52 pm

The devs have several times said that they didn't wish to make the "handbuilding" part any easier to push the players towards construction bot automated building. So don't expect too much.

I am curious if this was before or after the bots were pushed deeper in the tech tree, kinda feels like a bit of a deadzone around blue where expansion is needed, but bots are several techs away making for a QoL dive.

cbhj1 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 03, 2022 8:28 pm

I am curious if this was before or after the bots were pushed deeper in the tech tree, kinda feels like a bit of a deadzone around blue where expansion is needed, but bots are several techs away making for a QoL dive.

Logistic bots were pushed further down, construction bots are still fairly early game, or early mid game. Roboports use red chips instead of blue which the the portable ones use.

This could be help as all inserters are then in the same direction. But only for bob's adjustable inserters

"If using bob's adjustable inserters, also provides a selection tool to rotate all inserters to face north without changing their pickup/dropoff locations."
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/northifytool

cbhj1 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 03, 2022 8:28 pm

Koub wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 03, 2022 7:52 pm

The devs have several times said that they didn't wish to make the "handbuilding" part any easier to push the players towards construction bot automated building. So don't expect too much.

I am curious if this was before or after the bots were pushed deeper in the tech tree, kinda feels like a bit of a deadzone around blue where expansion is needed, but bots are several techs away making for a QoL dive.

It was after the construction bots were pushed back into blue science, which happened, if my memory serves me right, when the basic oil processing was kind of trivialised.

Some links to back up my claims :
Construction bots pushed back into blue science (july 2019) : https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-304
Multiple "no"s from the devs (last one in february 2020) : viewtopic.php?f=71&t=62293
Another "no" from a dev (march 2020) : viewtopic.php?f=71&t=82683

In short, the devs seem to be opposed to making building over blueprints easier earlier than when the construction bots currently get available (early blue science).

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have automated building pushed earlier so that I can already use it to start automating within green science, but I'm afraid it won't be in vanilla.

behavior in game is a little mixed
power poles - drag build matches ghosts
assemblers - rotation is automatic to match ghost pipes
belts - manual rotation, straight building is groovy though
inserters - manual rotation, precision placement required, drag build is out unless you prefer mining the off ones, sheer quantity/repetition, one bright side is long/normal is respectededit:was mistaken on this upside

I'm not arguing for the blueprints to be filled in automatically, just a bit more sticking to the build plan. Early blueprints feel like autocomplete but you still need to type it out fully instead of hitting tab.