Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When you have a building's recipe set to any of the 'Parameter #' items, the building should display its fluid input and output pipes.

What?

Many production buildings have 'optional' input/output pipes, which appear only when a recipe that needs them is selected. (Indeed, pretty much all production buildings other than the refinery and chemplant work this way.) Currently, the recipes for the 'Parameter #' items act as if they have no fluid inputs or outputs, so such pipes are not displayed.

These pipes should be displayed when those recipes are selected. Additionally, each input should be labelled with one of the other 'Parameter #' items, so that the building can be flipped as well as rotated.

Why?

Currently, it is not really possible to make a parameterized blueprint that works properly with recipes that have fluid inputs or outputs, because there is no way to tell where the fluid pipes will show up. Worse, most of these production buildings are perfectly symmetrical when the pipes are not present, which means you can't even select a recipe that does use fluids to set up the blueprint, then convert that into a parameter later, because the game doesn't seem to track or store rotation or flipping information for symmetrical entities.