Factorio Forums

The problem:
When blueprinting or copying an Assembling Machine 2 or 3, Foundry, or Electromagnetic Plant, whether the rotation of fluid connections is copied or not depends on the selected recipe. If it has no recipe selected or a recipe that doesn't involve fluids, the rotation isn't copied. If it has a recipe with fluids selected, the rotation is copied.

That has been the case for a long time, but it never used to matter because recipes would be set before blueprinting stuff. Now that recipes can be changed by circuit or blueprint parameters, it's far more likely that a blueprint will be made with no recipe or a non-fluid recipe selected and then given a recipe with fluids after placement.

Reproduction steps:
The attached save makes it easy to see. Otherwise:

1. Place an Assembling Machine 2 or 3, Foundry, or Electromagnetic Plant.
2. Set the recipe to one with a fluid input or output.
3. Rotate the machine and set up the pipe connections.
4. Set the recipe to one with no fluids.
5. Copy and paste the setup elsewhere.
6. Set the recipe back to one with a fluid.
7. The direction of fluid connections is reset to the default on the copy, but the original remembers the way it was rotated.

[2.0.14]
It also rotate when you change the recpie in the foundry per circuit ... i looks like it always on the oposite site.
When i rotate it to the right its switch between right and left.

Looks like a duplicate of 119491 Copying a rotated assembling machine doesn't copy the rotation if no recipe is set.

I will consider this a duplicate of 120686 even when it does not strictly mention using "set recipe". In general if a machine has no recipe or has a recipe that does not require direction, machine is allowed to not preserve direction while in blueprints.

Yes, that did cover about half of what I was talking about. I mentioned that the behavior is mainly a problem when the recipe changes due to circuit control or as a blueprint parameter. 2.0.17 fixed it for circuits and it seems to work fine with blueprint parameters as of some other update since I last tested it that way. So while the behavior is still odd when manually setting recipes, it's back to not being a problem in normal use, since it works as expected in the situations where you just paste a blueprint and expect it to work without changing anything.