Underground Placement Indicators

[IronCartographer]

If there were placement indicators (like the rail signal placement indicators) for max-length locations relative to unconnected undergrounds while holding a matching entrance in hand, it would simultaneously eliminate the guesswork of both "Where is the unmatched underground?" as well as "Where is the other end of this going to reach?"

Running while click-dragging is useful, but it only speeds up the construction, not the planning and troubleshooting.

It's a small feature whose real-time feedback would save countless hours of head scratching and rebuilding across the playerbase.
Even experienced players have visible pauses and briefly misplaced connections which could be prevented.

See also: Reddit.
Somewhere in my base is a single underground belt, not connected to anything.
MRW I have one spare underground pipe and no idea where I placed the other one

While holding underground pipe:

Underground pipe guide.png (1.04 MiB) Viewed 6035 times

While holding [tier 1] underground belt:

Underground belt guide.png (1.05 MiB) Viewed 6035 times

To support belt braiding, holding one tier of underground belt could cause the white dashes of the other belt tiers to turn purple, meaning "Same category of underground, but alien--won't connect."

[Xeanoa]

I support this. I often end up moving the pipe over the ground to find the point where it went out again after moving my character, because there are zero visual clues, especially if you try to go through a forest or something with a long pipe.

[Deadly-Bagel]

To further prove your point, I'm not sure if you've noticed but the Yellow Underground Belt on the left, the pair just under the Refinery, aren't actually connected as they're 5 tiles apart, yellow belts can only bridge 4 tiles =)

EDIT: I'm guessing so because on second look, you've labelled these and not the others that have partners. I assume you built this setup purely for this example =P

[mattj256]

It would be great to have some visual indication if an underground pipe is placed on the ground and not matched up with another underground pipe. This would eliminate most of the debugging issues.

[ssilk]

A very good idea. In combination with an automated placement of belts, pipes, poles etc. it would be really an absolute great enhancement in game-play.

[Stripes]

Agree.

Such feature will certainly give an rise to "quality of life" - especially in liquid handling (even basic oil refining can be quite confusing).

[ssilk]

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=18153 Information-Layers (for map and/or normal view)

[IronCartographer]

Got to thinking about this again, and what it would take for a mod to implement it albeit very inefficiently (indicators would have to be processed and displayed on every player's screen, not just the one holding the underground).

There's an additional useful design feature which a mod would not be able to do, even clumsily: Display the placement indicators for an underground entrance/exit pair based on the first half in-hand, before either one is placed.

All of the examples in the images above could be achieved with a mod detecting and matching up with orphaned entrances on the map, but a mod cannot display virtual indicators based on the cursor of a particular player.

Should I post in the modding interface request forum about player-specific visual-only modding capabilities? It would be great if we could display things relative to the player's cursor without them being game state data and causing sync issues.

Edit:
Since https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-276 introduced https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/LuaRendering.html it is now possible for mods to do exactly this, but a base game implementation would still be far superior.
An oldschool style implementation (using entities visible to every player) exists in the form of https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Underground%20Indicators which was last released for 0.16.
Additional reddit support: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... und_pipes/