Factorio Forums

TL;DR

One should be able to upgrade or reverse the direction of a segment of belts other than replacing them one by one.

What ?

I suggest that double clicking a belt on top of an existing belt does not only replace the belt piece but replace all the belt pieces in that segment of belt.
When replacing a yellow belt by a red belt all the yellow belts in the segment would become red. When replacing a belt with one going the other way all the belts in the segment would reverse direction.

In the case of an upgrade a segment could be all the belts where an item can be placed to reach the belt that was clicked and all the belts that an item can reach from there if not picked up by an inserter or blocked by some circuit logic without changing belt colors. Splitters and underground belts are included in this. So if you have 2 yellow belts, a red belt, 5 yellow belts in a line and you click on the first yellow belt then only the 2 yellow belts get changed. That way it would be easy to only upgrade parts of a larger segment by upgrading the ends first and then double clicking the part that should be upgraded.

When changing direction a segment is both more and less limited. For the direction the belt color does not matter. But a splitter can't simply be reversed. So a segment stops at a splitter. Side loading a belt can't be reversed as well. But the reversal operation could continue on the main path and leave the side loading path as is. This might be more practical than stopping at a side loaded segment. So for changing direction a segment is everything drawn as a continious belt excluding splitters.

A segment could be limited by the players reach and not work on the map view. In that case though I would like if the change could also be blueprinted and done by bots.

Why ?

A single belt tile can be upgraded or reversed simply by placing a new belt over it. A straight belt can be changed by pressing the mouse button and running along the belt simply enough. But when the belt has underground belts or twists and turns then one has to constantly stop, switch to undergound belt, replace that, switch back to belt, rotate belt to the new direction after a turn and continue till the next interruption.

This quickly becomes tiresome and error prone. I often reverse belts after placing a blueprint as a way to mirror/flip the blueprint in which case they can be long, have many twists and turns and lots of underground belts.

Wow! Actually interesting, and makes sense, IMHO.

Potentially problematic with belts branching, or with merging belt sections for sideloading. Personally, i'd appreciate an ability to bulk replace belts with an upgraded version (yellow-> red etc... isn't there a mod for that already?) but a bulk reverse? I don't really see where that could be useful.

Aeternus wrote:Potentially problematic with belts branching, or with merging belt sections for sideloading. Personally, i'd appreciate an ability to bulk replace belts with an upgraded version (yellow-> red etc... isn't there a mod for that already?) but a bulk reverse? I don't really see where that could be useful.

I see no big problems, actually. Sideloading shouldn't be affected at all. Branching is worse, meaning that it's logical to go on it the same way, but it might need players attention = "moved splitter plus one belt direction change (back again)". You're sometimes changing direction of the belt on some smelting columns, especially blueprinted ones.

But at least bulk upgrading would be definitely nice and is logical. It could be done on the segment principle, i.e. all contiguous belts (until a splitter or an underground is met). Or with all the branching.

LazyLoneLion wrote:

Aeternus wrote:Potentially problematic with belts branching, or with merging belt sections for sideloading. Personally, i'd appreciate an ability to bulk replace belts with an upgraded version (yellow-> red etc... isn't there a mod for that already?) but a bulk reverse? I don't really see where that could be useful.

I see no big problems, actually. Sideloading shouldn't be affected at all. Branching is worse, meaning that it's logical to go on it the same way, but it might need players attention = "moved splitter plus one belt direction change (back again)". You're sometimes changing direction of the belt on some smelting columns, especially blueprinted ones.

But at least bulk upgrading would be definitely nice and is logical. It could be done on the segment principle, i.e. all contiguous belts (until a splitter or an underground is met). Or with all the branching.

Exactly, blueprints is the most frequent cause to reverse a belt direction. The other is destruction of a factory part, like a smelter. I don't want to carry all the coal in my inventory so I tend to reverse the coal belt so it flows back to somewhere else that needs coal and then I deconstruct the empty belt.

As for branches and such: Anything that is non trivial to revert marks where the automation stops.

I like the idea, even with robots it's a pain to be forced to replace belts tile by tile. What makes it even worse is the fact that you automatically collect the items on the belts into your inventory. I'd love to have a way to tell the robots to update a belt section say from yellow to red or red to blue (including tunnels and splitters). There is a mod somewhere, don't remember the name exactly, something like "upgrade planner" I think, which does exactly that. You can just select your whole base and then tell the upgrade item in your inventory which items should be replaced by what.

I think something similiar is absolutely needed in the core game.

There was actually a mod for mass belt reversal. Last I checked, it wasn't updated for 0.15+. (I don't recall using it in 0.15.x when I ported my 0.14 save and mods over.) It worked quite well. I think it was just called Belt Reverser.

*A one minute search later*

Ahahaha! Guess I was wrong about the updates: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-reverser

I think I just forgot I even had the mod as I did step away from Factorio for a while. *Checks 0.16 install* Yep. Completely forgot I had it installed.