Factorio Forums

This is a quality of live improvement fit for 1.0 polishing I think.

Many times in the game you just want to place long straight belt lines. But as there is no restriction in mouse movement, it often happens that I accidentally place some belts in the row/column next to the one I want. Watching a few speedruns I see that this is a problem for other players too.

So here's my idea:

When placing a belt and pressing a modifier key (ctrl or alt?) lock the move on the axis the belt is facing for the time the modifier key is pressed.
So if I have a belt facing west, while holding the modifier key, the mouse can only move in x direction, y movement is discarded.

Alternatively: Don't lock the mouse, but just lock the placement. So even if the mouse moves up on a west facing belt, disregard the mouse's y-position for placement, just use the first belt's y-position.

There is a collection:
viewtopic.php?f=80&t=22305

Which contains a very, very old suggestion
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1084 Placement when walking (from 2013)

I think it was one of my first suggestions here. I don’t want to join the articles together, .... seven years ...

But there are other similar suggestions. Some concentrate more on locking the mouse movement, some more on the placement when walking. For me that’s essentially the same problem:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=48196 vertical/horizontal lock on item placement?
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=29947 When you run into a tree when building, stop, don't sidestep
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=35894 Locking mouse X/Y coords when placing things
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=48196 vertical/horizontal lock on item placement?
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=57689 Keep same column/row when placing belts by mouse

But I don’t want to give all those suggestions a big chance for implementation - I mean: 7 years and nearly nothing changed.

This would be a great mod!

Thanks for digging that up. I did a quick search but didn't find anything matching. Was too quick I guess.

Still I hope the devs will consider this. There are so many convenient short-cuts in Factorio, why not add this too? It doesn't look too complex to implement. And if the devs are really against this proposal, why not give an answer explaining their reason?