Factorio Forums

The direction of the entrence of fluids for an assembling machine is unclear while building. Please show the same arrows that are showen for the Chemical Plant.

Regards Jonathan

Hello Jonathan,
thank you for the report.

We could show the arrows while building, but we were unsure about that, as in most cases, and mainly in the early stages of the game, player doesn't use the assembling machine with the pipe connected, and those arrows might be misleading.

What do you think?

A humble jumping into this:

I see three solutions.

1. A small visible sign marking the direction of the assembly. Not that big arrow needed, a simple dot would be enough. This dot can be added also to other buildings, later, or can be exchanged with another mechanism.

2. have some arrow available, if there is a pipe as neighbor.

3. With my last assemblies I set, I had also the feeling, that the assembly was already automatically rotated to the neighbored pipes, if there was any, because the chance, that the neighbor pipe is the right pipe is very high.

But I couldn't think all situations through yet.

kovarex wrote: We could show the arrows while building, but we were unsure about that, as in most cases, and mainly in the early stages of the game, player doesn't use the assembling machine with the pipe connected, and those arrows might be misleading.

What do you think?

It would also be ok, if you had to press a key to have the arrow visible.

This is not really a bug. Rather an idea / suggestion. So moving it there.

I have a question - why does the assembly machine need an output pipe anyway?
Presumably only a chemical plant can create a fluid product, so an assembly machine, while it may use an input pipe, would never need an output pipe. If this is not thought to change in the future (i.e. - assembly machines will never produce fluid products) I see no reason to have 2 pipes. With only 1 pipe the arrows become unnecessary.

A different concern may be allowing an assembly machine to pass it's input fluid through to allow for an "assembly line" - currently this is not possible, and personally I don't think it should be made possible as it doesn't really make sense (and maybe will complicate matters? which assembly machine gets the fluid first?).

So maybe a solution would be simply removing the (currently redundant) "output" pipe?

Edit: Silly me - of course they need it - for emptying oil barrels! Forget I said anything
Edit2: Then again, the only recipe which has this "problem", i.e. - output pipe, does not need an _input_. so maybe having only 1 pipe is a good solution, and for emptying it is an output, while for all other recipes - an input.

This can be modded. I don't know, if there is some mod, which uses that now, but it is possible.

sillyfly wrote:A different concern may be allowing an assembly machine to pass it's input fluid through to allow for an "assembly line" - currently this is not possible, and personally I don't think it should be made possible as it doesn't really make sense (and maybe will complicate matters? which assembly machine gets the fluid first?).

I disagree, I would really like to see this work as it could make this kind of arrangement much more compact:
This: Becomes this: If the passthrough is just a pipe then the normal fluid takeup rules should apply and "which machine gets the fluid first" wont be an issue.