Factorio Forums

Currently, you have to run over to an item on the ground and 'Pick up' (F) to grab it, which makes sense, but something is missing there:
- You can mark ground items for deconstruction, as with other placed items.
- You can hover mouse over ground items and see their info, as with other placed items.
- You can even mine fish (provided they are within range of your character).

Recommendation:
- Mining (right click) with the cursor over an item on the ground should mine (pick up) the item. Provided it is within mining range, of course. That action currently does nothing.

This will help later in the game where you have a bunch of exoskeletons and keep running past the x/y of the item you are trying to pick up. It will also help if you've accidentally dropped (Z) too many items and spilled off of a belt, etc. It also 'just makes sense', since you can right click to mine anything else within range of your character.

Thoughts?

+1

malventano wrote: It will also help if you've accidentally dropped (Z) too many items and spilled off of a belt,

Today I was dropping coal on a belt and a few dropped on the ground. Then I picked them and accidentially some from the belt up. I tried dropping them on the belt and some spilled. I picking them up but you know what happens. And so I was stuck in a loop for hours over hours.
True story

LOL! Actually, that's a good point. Dropping onto a belt should only drop as long as it can. It shouldn't start sprinkling items all around it once the belt backs up, and it absolutely shouldn't start feeding onto the opposite side of the belt from where the player was pointing.

malventano wrote:LOL! Actually, that's a good point. Dropping onto a belt should only drop as long as it can. It shouldn't start sprinkling items all around it once the belt backs up, and it absolutely shouldn't start feeding onto the opposite side of the belt from where the player was pointing.

you are not dropping on a belt.
you are dropping items on the ground which spread out. There just happens to be a belt.

mophydeen wrote:

malventano wrote:LOL! Actually, that's a good point. Dropping onto a belt should only drop as long as it can. It shouldn't start sprinkling items all around it once the belt backs up, and it absolutely shouldn't start feeding onto the opposite side of the belt from where the player was pointing.

you are not dropping on a belt.
you are dropping items on the ground which spread out. There just happens to be a belt.

Agreed, but the mechanic does such a good job at feeding a specific lane of a belt (it has to pace the dropping just right to saturate a yellow belt, for example), it almost seems intentionally focused.

Any other thoughts on this one? I did notice the box around items on ground always appears red (as opposed to yellow for fish).

This has bugged me too. I liked being able to hold a stack of Iron/Copper/Coal/Ammo that I'd stumbled across in my travels and place it back into the supply system simply by holding z and dropping it onto the appropriate belt.

Since .15 hit, I'm finding that I have to be very careful about when and how much I drop or it spills across the ground, ends up on the wrong side of the conveyor or even flows over onto a neighboring belt.