Factorio Forums

I am sure I have seen this or something similar suggested before but can't find the reference...

I just started a new game (where obviously efficiency is more important because everything takes so long -- including Mining) and I realised how useful it would be to have the mining Lock In to whatever was being mined while the cursor was in the down state. The reason being is that its so easy to slide the cursor over the square to the adjacent one and then start mining that square all over again. With the Mining Lock-In implemented, If the cursor moved too far away while still down then mining would stop and would Not start to mine something else ...but if still down, if it moved back to first square, it would continue to mine the item started initially.

Although this should be fairly self explanatory, an image to highlight scenario: (two images combined into transparent overlay to give better example)
EDIT* I now see that once mining an item, it wont allow switching to mining a different item while the cursor is down if the cursor moves out of the square. This is great but still doesnt resolve the problem above if the cursor moves a little while mining the same item type and thus starts to mine the same item type, adjacent

How much do you mine and needs to change mining target?
I always run for drills to do everything without me working, so I don't need such features and I believe many others too.
It would be useful, but there are more important things and this wouldn't be used often I guess.

MindChanger wrote:How much do you mine and needs to change mining target?
I always run for drills to do everything without me working, so I don't need such features and I believe many others too.
It would be useful, but there are more important things and this wouldn't be used often I guess.

Its mainly for early game like I just said since mining speed is so fast later game, even IF manually mining something it doesnt make much of a difference. Obviously most people will be using automated methods to mine things later early game on, thats why I highlighted early game being where it could be useful.

I think that early stage is so short it is not worth programming, but it is just my opinion
I for example never mined by hand more than maybe 100 items and there is a lot of sources under one cell