detailed description
in the main game view, when Alt‐mode is enabled or when hovering the mouse pointer over them, inserters and other direct‐insertion entities show arrows pointing to where they pick up items and where they drop items (as long as the setting to enable these visuals is enabled in the interface settings).in the 2.1 update, these inserters and other direct‐insertion entities were made flippable; by flipping these entities, the player can now choose on which side (lane) of a belt the items are put, so long as the belt is in a relative orientation where the usual “always insert to the farthest lane” rule cannot apply, that is, when the belt’s direction is parallel to the facing angle of the inserter.
in that situation, the Alt‐mode arrow slightly shrinks and moves to point to the belt lane that is the target of this inserter. this is very useful for visualizing the configuration of the inserter, since otherwise, there is no indication or way of figuring out which belt lane is the target other than observing the behavior of the inserter, which is not always an option.
however, in the blueprint editing window GUI (which can be accessed by right‐clicking a blueprint), under these same Alt‐mode conditions, the inserter arrows no longer indicate their inserter’s target belt lane. despite this, the target lanes are correctly recorded in the blueprint and remain unchanged when placing (building) the blueprint.
i believe this is a bug, given that these two visualization styles are inconsistent and that only one was changed in the 2.1 update. either way, i would pretty please like this to be fixed, so that i can tell on which lane of a belt an inserter in a blueprint will drop its picked‐up items, without first building the thing. thanks!
steps to reproduce
- while in‐game, turn on Alt‐mode.
- make a build that uses the “flippable insertion lanes” feature of 2.1. notice that the Alt‐mode arrows move to indicate on which side of the belt (on which lane) the items are dropped:
- an in‐game screenshot in Alt‐mode, showing a build where flipped electric mining drills drop items on different sides of the belts, as indicated by the Alt‐mode insertion arrows becoming smaller and moving to the side on which the items are put.
- Screenshot_20260701_151940.png (471.11 KiB) Viewed 74 times
- make a blueprint with that build as the contents. here’s the example shown in the screenshots:
- notice that the Alt‐mode arrows shown in the blueprint GUI (accessed by right‐clicking the blueprint) do not indicate on which side the inserters put items:
- a screenshot of the in‐game preview area of the blueprint window GUI with Alt‐mode enabled, showing the same build as the other screenshot, and where the Alt‐mode insertion arrows do not indicate the side on which the items are put.
- Screenshot_20260701_152256.png (679.83 KiB) Viewed 74 times
- build the blueprint somewhere else. notice that the arrows on the placed blueprint correctly indicate the insertion lane, just like in the original build.
