The problem
By far the most annoying part of Factorio, responsible for the vast majority of my abandonments of it over the many years since I first found Factorio, is the tediousness of rotating and placing belts and pipes to go places (the quickbar has substantially reduced this annoyance level, leading to my second ever rocket recently
).
The solution
Then a couple of days ago I discovered the awesomeness of the rail planner! Clicking shift allows a train track to automatically be routed from point A to point B, dodging all obstacles:- factorioRailPlanning.png (4.45 MiB) Viewed 1541 times
Implementation
In implementation I'm imagining it working exactly like the railway planner, you hold shift and click on the edge of an unconnected belt/underground belt/pipe/underground pipe while having selected the item you want your route to be made of:- factorioBeltPlanningClick.png (2.18 MiB) Viewed 1541 times
- factorioBeltPlanningClickMove.png (1.73 MiB) Viewed 1541 times
If you have selected the underground belt, the route should be made of underground belts where possible, only using normal belts for the corners (Naturally, selecting non-underground belts will result in more circuitous routes as it goes around all obstacles):
- factorioUBeltPlanningClick.png (1.82 MiB) Viewed 1541 times
- factorioUBeltPlanningClickMove.png (3.45 MiB) Viewed 1541 times
Related enhancement
This would also be very helpful to have for small, medium and big electric poles. No more having to make train track+power line blueprints and carefully pasting them, just designate start and end points for your big electric poles and start and end points for your train tracks!Business value
This would be THE biggest Quality of Life improvement I can think of for Factorio and would have prevented me repeatedly abandoning it in annoyance. No joke, this would approximately double the fun and value-for-money for me (I will literally buy two more copies of Factorio to give to friends if you implement this).Despite repeated searching I haven't seen this suggested anywhere, even though it seemed like an obvious feature...
