Auto rotate when placing over a ghost to match the ghost's rotation

[Sh0keR]

TL;DR

QoL: When placing over a ghost (inserter/belt as an example) auto-rotate the placed item to match the ghost rotation.

What ?

Simple QoL feature, if you place an entity over a ghost, for example, an inserter, it would change its rotation to match the ghost's rotation.
Saving the player from the hustle of frequently switching rotation in complex builds and mistakenly placing it in the wrong rotation.

Why ?

Often I find it annoying when building repetitive patterns, especially in the early game and sometimes even in the mid-late game.
One of the most common early builds is this:

Untitled.jpg (194.98 KiB) Viewed 4168 times

You have to place inserters on one side then rotate it and place it on the other, this inconvenience is almost forcing you to build this horizontally instead of vertically causing you to backtrack.
The issue is much more noticeable when building more complex things like this:

Screenshot (4).jpg (302.09 KiB) Viewed 4163 times

Inserter and belts are placed in different rotation, constantly forcing you to change rotation.
In addition, this is very error-prone, especially with belts which are harder to notice visually.

[boskid]

No. It would be quite huge buff allowing easier blueprint placement without construction bots. Ghosts are for construction robots for placement and any help for player here would make them less useful.

[Sh0keR]

No. It would be quite huge buff allowing easier blueprint placement without construction bots. Ghosts are for construction robots for placement and any help for player here would make them less useful.

I see.. the idea was to help a bit with the early game. But I don't agree ghosts are just for robots. I usually like to build a stackable design and then copy & paste as many as I need, in the early game, it's just a bit inconvenient.
But I could totally see it as a way to "nerf" bots.

Thanks for the quick replay.
I might make a mod for this just to test the concept and see if it really feels this way.

[Sad_Brother]

No. It would be quite huge buff allowing easier blueprint placement without construction bots. Ghosts are for construction robots for placement and any help for player here would make them less useful.

Robot less useful? IMHO it would be "robot start" mods less useful.

This suggestion keep for player the need to place each entity and not prevent him to place on wrong place.
I would like it in game.

[NotRexButCaesar]

To make rotating easier, you can bind it to control scroll wheel.

[Koub]

No. It would be quite huge buff allowing easier blueprint placement without construction bots. Ghosts are for construction robots for placement and any help for player here would make them less useful.

I was sincerely hoping there would be something one day to ease the tedium of automating blue science, now that construction robots have been pushed back to blue science. I found that late green science for construction robotics was the perfect sweet spot, as the step from green to blue science implies the first significant scaling step up in infrastructure.

[Ajedi32]

FYI, if you use the pipette tool (bound to Q by default I think) to select a part, the selected part matches the rotation automatically.

Not sure I agree with this suggestion, but there is _some_ precedent in that placed machines already do automatically inherit the configuration of the placed ghosts. Why not rotation as well?

Others do make a good point though; you're not really meant to be manually building ghosts in the first place; that's what construction bots are for. Making that process easier seems a bit unbalanced.

[Impatient]

@Sh0keR: FYI There are several mods which fill in blueprints automatically if you hover the mouse over them and have the respective items in your inventory.

Also if you want to get up to speed, to do some advanced experimenting in your base and not be bothered by the early handicaps, you just give yourself the full treat with MK2, fusion reactor and personal roboports right from the start.

This goes to the console then (disables achievements):

Code: Select all

/c 
game.player.insert{name="power-armor-mk2", count = 1}
game.player.insert{name="fusion-reactor-equipment", count = 2}
game.player.insert{name="battery-mk2-equipment", count = 5}
game.player.insert{name="personal-roboport-mk2-equipment", count = 8}
game.player.insert{name="construction-robot", count = 200}
game.player.insert{name="exoskeleton-equipment", count = 3}
game.player.insert{name="night-vision-equipment", count = 1}

[Sad_Brother]

Others do make a good point though; you're not really meant to be manually building ghosts in the first place; that's what construction bots are for. Making that process easier seems a bit unbalanced.

The best way to plan what where should be built is to use ghosts. And who would be meant to build that? Myself ofc.

This goes to the console then

Exactly wrong way.

It would be quite huge buff allowing easier blueprint placement without construction bots.

Add separate research to allow it. It is so less than construction bots.

[ptx0]

I might make a mod for this just to test the concept and see if it really feels this way.

or just use GhostPlacerExpress mod.

[Koub]

[Koub] Moving this to "Won't implement".