Swap input on chemical factory

[Sparkysam]

One thing that is very frustrating about oil production is the outputs, would there we a way in which moving which port they come out of? As one side is good and then you rotating the Building and the ports change so i don't have to do this Jenga game just for oil

see pictures below

[Koub]

Very old suggestions : viewtopic.php?f=80&t=15472

[Jap2.0]

And input switching as well.

[Tekky]

What I find especially annoying is that it is very hard to remember which pipe will be for what liquid. It is very hard to deduce that from the order of the ingredients in the recipe, because, with respect to the order of the ingredients, the position of the individual liquids is not consistent; chemical plants behave very differently when compared to refineries.

For example, if you rotate the chemical plant/refinery so that the input pipes are to the top and the output pipes are to the bottom, then, with the chemical plant, the first ingredient of the recipe will be in the left input pipe and the second one will be in the right input pipe. However, with refineries, it is the exact opposite: The first ingredient will be to the right and the second one will be to the left.

This inconsistency is very confusing. Therefore, I am strongly in favor of fixing this inconsistency. One way to do so would be to allow the user to change the order of the pipes.

This issue has already been discussed a bit in the following thread:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=45475 Advanced Oil Processing and Coal Liquification input resources

[bobingabout]

An interesting thing is that a long time ago the order in which ingredients apeared for a recipe was changed to be defined by the order in which they were declared in the recipe. This was recently upturned, but it broke factories that used fluids, because they were suddenly in a different order when you loaded your savegame.

I don't sugest that this behavour should change, or go away, however, it wouldn't be as important as it is now if you were allowed to choose which input/output could be used for which fluid.

Although I don't have a solution to sugest for this problem, I do believe it is something that can be done.

do I not have a spellchecker running here? Seriously, I bet you can tell when I am, or arn't using one >.>

[EstebanLB]

Does anyone knows a mod that does this? Allow refineries to take any required fluid from any input slot

[Koub]

The mod listed 2 posts above yours. Probably needs to be updated to 0.17 though.

[Dixi]

Since 0.17 situation with inputs become worse then before.
Now oil refinery can "turn water to oil", if switched from advanced recipe to basic (if there are no water in pipes or you loaded old save) - viewtopic.php?f=7&t=65224&p=400658#p400658 thats a reference to bug report.

[jasper-bear]

We already have a "rotate" button... why not just add a "flip" button for all buildings?

It's easy to flip a sprite, just scale the x axis by -1.

[Oktokolo]

It's easy to flip a sprite, just scale the x axis by -1.

The shadow would probably look odd for flipped sprites (with and without also flipping the shadow).

[ssilk]

We already have a "rotate" button... why not just add a "flip" button for all buildings?

It's easy to flip a sprite, just scale the x axis by -1.

You cannot flip everything: train stops or rail signals for example...

And I don’t think it will come until 1.0, because currently you need a second entity with the flipped inputs (there are mods, that do that), but for a real solution you need one entity which allows to flip the inputs.

Along with the (sometimes not so useful, but they solve parts of this problem) current implementation of the pipes this also makes no sense.

(Until there are tools to empty a pipe and swap inputs on many selected devices at the same time).

[Xoriun]

I really don't like the idea of smart fluid inputs. It takes away much of the planing for fluids and, like discussed above, might be a nightmare to implement.
However I would really appreciate a simple mirror key/function for refineries and chem plants. It would allow for somewhat nicer designs for fluids without taking away all challenges that come with fluid planning.

[EstebanLB]

For thos who didn't knew they existed:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GDIW
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fluid_permutations
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/omnimatter_permutation

[ickputzdirwech]

[ick] Merged six topics about switching inputs and outputs of chemical plants.