Factorio Forums

When placing inserters and power poles in a line, I am experiencing mysterious extra power poles being placed on some occasions. In this scenario I am placing inserters and then using my hotkey to change what I am building without letting go of the mouse button, and then sometimes letting go of the mouse button to leave gaps.

One of my viewers was able to capture it happening in a Twitch Clip here: https://clips.twitch.tv/GloriousUnsight ... NGNRfdHf7r
The same viewer broke the video out into individual frames, and you can see the frames for the erroneous placement in the attached 7z files.

My expectation is that the mysterious pole should not be placed under the condition that you see there. If I slow down and place these entities slowly and with precision using the exact same mouse movements and button presses, these poles do not seem to appear. They only appear when the player is placing the entities at full speed, which might make this extremely hard to reproduce.

This isn't causing any serious issues as it is only an extra pole, but Bakerstaunch thought it would be a good idea to report anyway in case it is causing other issues.

In my experience mouse switches fail way too often. Mind humoring me and trying a site like https://www.onlinemictest.com/mouse-test/ ? Not the most accurate test, but if you see an unexpected change in the left click while left clicking then it would be the mouse. Moving the finger around the button while it's clicked will usually find a bad spot if there is one.

This happens to me as well, especially when placing pipes and powerpoles without ever letting go of the mouse button, just switching items. Sometimes an extra power pole gets placed in the 2-wide gap between the 2 sections of 4 pipes. (standard steam engine layout)
Basically i do the exact same thing showed in the video above, except that i use pipes instead than inserters. The only big difference is that i never let go of the mouse button.

I second this report. It has been problem for me when dragging poles very fast, specifically in highly obstructed areas like smelting lanes and assembler lanes. This isn't a hardware issue.

Thanks for the report. I tried to reproduce it but so far I haven't been able to. If this happens again and you play with replay enabled, could you attach the save file?

Also, clear reproduction steps, where you manage to encounter the issue repeatedly, would help a lot because at the moment this is very hard to reproduce.

Pretty forced in this replay. You get it rarely when you keep pressing down the mouse button all the time while then swapping the entity to place between poles and inserters. Not sure it's exactly the same case. Replay attached.

Thanks. I don't know if it's the same issue (or just closely related) but I've managed to implement a test which reproduces it.

The process of changing item you build while still holding the button was never meant to be supported.
I will fix this issue, but probably not the way to your liking, I will make it, that changing item in the cursor will always cancel the building process, so you need to start building again to build something else.

Ok, in the end I could be little bit more forgiving, the drag building state/process is only interrupted once the cursor doesn't contain any buildable.
This mean, that switching from item to item still works, but once the cursor is empty, the building is stopped, and subsequent switching to another item will not resume building until the build key is released and pressed again.

I would prefer no change over the current planned change, ngl. It is messing up more speedrun tech by fixing the bug. Is this a bug worth fixing?

Speedrun tech is cool and important and though I both speedrun and enjoy watching speedruns, I must reluctantly admit that a dev fixing a weird small bug is better for the game overall even if it's worse for speedrunning. If it were fixing eg a cutscene skip that forced us into a timed on-rails set piece I might feel differently, but it's not.

We can still drag inserters over furnaces and assemblers.

You can still switch between poles and inserters as long as you don't run out of one of these things.