A more intuitive way to place a wire from 1 object to many
Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2016 12:48 am
First off I love the Factorio control scheme as weird as it is. It feels natural to play, for me. All except for wire placement, which feels a little cumbersome.
I assume that for most players it is straight-forward to just run from A to B connecting everything in one go with the wire dragging manically behind them snapping to everything they touch with it. But if you are like me then you prefer to have wires that branch from pole to inserters and never from inserter to inserter because it feels more like "progress" and you can more easily diagnose faults with the network (e.g. inserters not being connected)
There's a chance I am missing information on some control and I would love it if I just missed it and someone could just tell me, otherwise I present here my problem and suggestion.
The Problem: There are too many keystrokes and too much inventory faff to get a wire to go from one object to multiple other objects
e.g. 1 pole with wires to 4 inserters
step 1- place wire on inserter 1
step 2 - place wire on pole
step 3 - place wire on inserter 2
step 4 - press q
step 5 - press hotkey for wire
step 6 - place wire on inserter 3
step 7 - place wire on pole
step 8 - place wire on inserter 4
The Suggestion: Lets say we made the shift key a modifier when placing wire where it functions by preventing the wire snapping from changing targets
e.g. 1 pole with wires to 4 inserters
step 1- place wire on pole
step 2 - place wire on inserter 1 (holding shift key)
step 3 - place wire on inserter 2 (holding shift key)
step 4 - place wire on inserter 3 (holding shift key)
step 5 - place wire on inserter 4
Just from that small-scale example we shaved 3 steps off from 8. You can imagine the number of unnecessary keystrokes that this would save for larger projects since the saving would scale roughly linearly for every object connected to the pole.
Im not going to discuss at length the implementation detail of the suggestion such as which key modifier to use or key to press or whether to make it an option since that is up to the devs of course. I only post this in the hope that wire placement can be a little less cumbersome in the future
I assume that for most players it is straight-forward to just run from A to B connecting everything in one go with the wire dragging manically behind them snapping to everything they touch with it. But if you are like me then you prefer to have wires that branch from pole to inserters and never from inserter to inserter because it feels more like "progress" and you can more easily diagnose faults with the network (e.g. inserters not being connected)
- Just look at the pretty picture
- Capture.PNG (433.27 KiB) Viewed 1859 times
The Problem: There are too many keystrokes and too much inventory faff to get a wire to go from one object to multiple other objects
e.g. 1 pole with wires to 4 inserters
step 1- place wire on inserter 1
step 2 - place wire on pole
step 3 - place wire on inserter 2
step 4 - press q
step 5 - press hotkey for wire
step 6 - place wire on inserter 3
step 7 - place wire on pole
step 8 - place wire on inserter 4
The Suggestion: Lets say we made the shift key a modifier when placing wire where it functions by preventing the wire snapping from changing targets
e.g. 1 pole with wires to 4 inserters
step 1- place wire on pole
step 2 - place wire on inserter 1 (holding shift key)
step 3 - place wire on inserter 2 (holding shift key)
step 4 - place wire on inserter 3 (holding shift key)
step 5 - place wire on inserter 4
Just from that small-scale example we shaved 3 steps off from 8. You can imagine the number of unnecessary keystrokes that this would save for larger projects since the saving would scale roughly linearly for every object connected to the pole.
Im not going to discuss at length the implementation detail of the suggestion such as which key modifier to use or key to press or whether to make it an option since that is up to the devs of course. I only post this in the hope that wire placement can be a little less cumbersome in the future
