Smart Belt Dragging Setting

[Merssedes]

Why would you have to rebuild Undergrounds after this auto-places undergrounds? They're already built.

Because it builds them in the way I don't need.

[bakerbelays]

I continue to run into annoyances. "Smart Belts" are locking me into a contrived system that isn't grid based and it never does anything I want except linear-locking.

I have never *once* dragged a belt and thought "oh good thing it placed an underground there"

Never. Once.

I am very good at placing the right belt where it needs to go. I want dumb belt dragging back.

[myridium]

+1

Another long-time player here chimimg in to say that something has been lost now that the game tries to be 'too smart'. You're programming the player out of the game! Just let us place the belts and make mistakes! If we want flawless patterns, we'll use blueprints!

My 2c.

[Thelaststandn]

+1

This isn’t a feature I use often, but a couple days ago I was placing down some belts that fed chests for loading a train and I went “Man I need to place a lot of belts that are facing perpendicular to the direction I’m placing them…. Hey wait a minute, there’s a bind for doing that quickly! What was it again?”
After searching every setting in the game, and asking for help in the factorio discord to no avail, I gave up and placed them the slow way.
Now I few days later I find this thread and at last have an explanation.

Again, this isn’t something that comes up often, which is likely why it was removed, but when it is needed, it’s a very nice solution to the problem. Also this thread shows that there are people that prefer to play with this option on all the time, and it seems a little…. I don’t know, presumptuous? To take that option away from them and think that they will suddenly be ok with what they’ve been avoiding up to this point. That being smart belt placement.

Those are the reasons why I think the keybind and the setting should be returned. Thank you for your consideration.

[BlueTemplar]

There wasn't a keybind for multiple belts in vanilla, that was (and still is) a mod feature.

[kelianmao]

I got annoyed by random undergrounds appearing too may times, so I went and made a mod that disables this functionality. It seems to works well enough for now, until they hopefully add the option back to the base game...
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-fix

It's a mod so it probably disables achievements though? Sigh.

[bakerbelays]

I should clarify the problem isn't just automatic undergrounds, though that's a big part of it- not being able to drag parallel belts is arguably a worse issue for me. It's one thing for the game to build undergrounds for me, it's another for the game to *stop* me from doing something I want to do- drag parallel belts.

[curiosity]

Forcing belt building into a straight line is among the worst things you could do to players. I don't care about the undergrounds, since a mod can disable that. Maybe the automatic underground placement is even good. I won't know, I never tried it because it comes part and parcel with this obnoxious "feature".

Make belts freely placeable if you have any respect for players, Wube.

[Riyshn]

Having it split in two options for autoplacing undergrounds and enforcing linear building like it used to be is definitely the way to go. Genuinely don't understand why they might have removed the options. Should also have a keybind to toggle either/both, though I don't remember off the top of my head if that existed in the previous version.

I think smart dragging might have actually gotten less smart, too? I'm pretty sure it used to be that if you were upgrading a belt manually by dragging say a red on top of a yellow, it would automatically place upgraded splitters where needed, which it does not do any more. Really weird decisions here by the devs all around.

Personally I always left auto-undergrounds turned on, because the convenience of being able just drag a belt across my buss or past cliffs or whatever outweighed the occasional annoyance of needing to correct unneeded placements. Linear building though, I've always kept turned off; not being able to quickly paint down something a buss lane or even just having to click each individual input belt into a splitter because you can't drag a single row of parallel belts is horrible, especially after having that basic ability for the last decade .

[curiosity]

I think smart dragging might have actually gotten less smart, too? I'm pretty sure it used to be that if you were upgrading a belt manually by dragging say a red on top of a yellow, it would automatically place upgraded splitters where needed, which it does not do any more. Really weird decisions here by the devs all around.

It didn't upgrade splitters in 1.1. Did upgrade undergrounds, though. And this is not part of smart belt dragging, it was the case even with the option off.

Personally, I don't particularly care about inter-type belt interaction like that. If losing it is the price to get direction-unlocked belt building back, I'll take it.

[GodAlmighty]

Absolutely asinine decision to remove this based on "speed runners" and devs playthroughs. Not everyone plays the same way, and that's kind of the whole theme with factorio. OPTIONS. Many, many people used this and it really should be an option that is returned.

[a.gemme]

I can't believe that WUBE would make such a change without announcing it.
I don't mind the undergrounds but not being able to place multiple rows of belts in on go is just slower not smarter

[curiosity]

I keep placing belts while trying to find a workaround and I don't know how anyone can use this garbage. At times it refuses to place even a single belt. The rules are way too overcomplicated and unintuitive. If they were trying to simplify the code, they deleted the wrong part. Threw out the baby and kept the bath water.

[jbreker]

Please add back the options to turn off "smart belt dragging" and "lock belt to straight line".

[chris-tier]

Chiming in for the same requests. Really disapointing that these options have been silently removed. It made the experience significantly worse for me. So many annoyances...

Why would you have to rebuild Undergrounds after this auto-places undergrounds? They're already built.

I, for example, hate that the automatic undergrounds not use the full underground lengths. So I have to go back, delete the underground, delete the surrounding belts, place new underground. That is driving me insane.

[BlueTemplar]

Heh, funny, meanwhile it's these gaps (that might appear later due to changes in belt routing) that I can't stand, I remove them at every opportunity, for appearance reasons, even if it's less efficient in materials...

[DeHackEd]

Smart building has issues. It can lead players to make undergrounds under nature (trees, rocks) which is totally unacceptable, especially when ghost building and there's the expectation that robots will take care of it.

It also makes fixing drawing mistakes more difficult since smart mode will tend to try building undergrounds under your error rather than just re-orienting the belt you go over. Needing to destroy it, especially with some of the extra "mining" delays even of ghosts makes it a lot more annoying.

Please bring back the option to disable this.

[noname1208]

Oh I thought this was a bug and reported it as such, I'll add my voice here. Re learning hundreds of hours of belts, particularly when they don't give you as much functionality now, is kind of off putting.

I do wish to thank the devs for the great content as well as always having the old versions available to roll back to. This would be a bigger pain if I couldn't just roll back to 1.1 until it's fixed

[maniak1349]

+1
Quite used to the option for an old behavior (no smart no line lock) for quick distance measurement, place holding for not yet researched entities in copy paste blueprints and bulk belt line placement.

[BlueTemplar]

Smart building has issues. It can lead players to make undergrounds under nature (trees, rocks) which is totally unacceptable, especially when ghost building and there's the expectation that robots will take care of it.
[...]

This too is subjective rather than «totally unacceptable [for [all] players]», because while I don't care much about rocks (and often clear them first anyway to avoid getting stuck on them), I try to preserve trees as much as I can - on Nauvis at least. (And the "undo" setting doesn't support bringing trees back.)