Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When the player is holding a mining drill in their cursor/hand, all existing drills should show their mining range/coverage.

What?

Some entities, when held in the cursor/hand, show a shaded overlay for already placed entities of the same type. This should be implemented for mining drills, so the player can see which tiles are covered by drills and which are not.

Current state:
Proposed future state:

Why?

• Several other entities already work this way, so it would create more consistency. Notably: all types of military turrets; roboports and all logistic chests; electric poles.
• While the burner and electric mining drills can be easily estimated since they extend 0-1 tile beyond the edge of the entity, the addition of the Big Mining Drill makes coverage and overlap much harder to distinguish at a glance.
• New players are often confused about the feature of larger mining range, since the burner drill only mines the 2x2 underneath it. Highlighting all drill coverage is much clearer and instantly communicates more information than shading only the area around the cursor entity.

Sounds good to me. I often find my self musing over a big mining drill and try to find a good landmark to focus on at the edge of its range befor I switch over to trying to place the next drill. This would help with that (very mild but still) annoyance.