Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make selection boxes on the deconstruction planner be able to rotate to better handle rail and/or tile placing

What ?

While you are selecting entities with the deconstruction planner, simply press R (rotate) once to shift the verticals by 45° degrees. Another R tilts them in the other direction. Pressing R a third time should return to normal.

Why ?

The deconstruction planner is frustrating as hell when dealing with diagonal rails.
Often than not I press R in anger in the hope that the selection box magically rotates for me but sadly, here I am.
Here an example, followed by a possible solution:

Yes that would be a cool little feature. However I would prefer the rotated selection box to still be of rectangular shape (rotated 45°), instead of the parallelogram you drew. Because with the parallelogram you do not only have the choice between left slanting or right slanting diagonals but also the choice between keeping verticals or horizontals for the grid-aligned edges. And that I think are a bit too many options and it is not clear how to order them as a roation. I understand however, that for such a diagonal waiting area, the fitting parallelogram selection would be quiet ideal.

The idea is neat, but a rotated square would simply deconstruct different things it's not supposed to deconstruct (as can be seen on the right side of your screenshot. I'd much rather have a simple line-shaped deconstruction option that deconstructs anything between the points where i start/end dragging it.
That could be extended into a two-step select if required. Adding a second dimention (converting line to parralelogram) by drawing with the mouse a second time.

A rectangle would maybe be more suitable. There's only one possible rectangle with 45° rotation from horizontal/vertical and a given diagonal.

Here's an example of double-drag select:
I guess i'm just used to it because that's how "extrude" in 3D-moddeling works. Once Start and middle are fixed you can freely move the mouse to get any of the three end shapes (or any other arbitrary angle). The middle point could also be set by right-clicking while left-click-dragging, that way it could be used any time during a normal drag selection. (Sadly mouse-drag isn't moddable. D:)