Factorio Forums

What the point of managing underground belt direction when there is a connected normal belt? The direction can be taken from the normal belt automatically.

Additional benefits:
1. It also solves the issue that placing blueprinted UB in wrong order makes different direction.
2. Since rotation key is not used anymore you can make possible to swap to-underground and from-underground belts without having to remove them and placing again.

Note:
If there is no connected belt around 1 UB end you can take the direction from another so that using UB for taking only 1-lane from its side won't break. If both ends have different directions then consider them not connected properly.

What if you have inserters on both ends and no other belts? (ex. one end is a yellow belt assembler and the other end is a red belt assembler)

What if you are side-loading onto an underground to extract half a lane from a belt? There are use cases for both directions.

I am not sure what you mean with the rotation key. It already reverses the direction of an underground when it is already placed. Why do you need to remove it and replace it?

Strong Objection

You're (presumably) trying to "fix" accidentially placing underground belts in the wrong direction. The easiest fix for this is: pay more attention. Trying to make "smart" belts that guess what the user wants is neither desirable nor feasible.
Also in tight assembly lines there are usecases where both ends of an underground belt go into opposite directions of the belts directly adjacent to them precisely to prevent them from connecting with the rest of the belt. (Similar to what @Jap2.0 describes)

Actually I think this would be useful. Consider the case where you have built an new production line, and are now running belts to connect it to your bus. You are already standing beside the new productionso you are building belts from the production line to the bus. When you get to the bus you want to use undergrounds to cross a gang of 4 belts. When you want to build the underground belt you would prefer to place the exit first, because that's adjacent to where you have already placed a piece of belt. In order to place the entrance first you may need to move, because the entrance may be outside your reach distance. (I often end up building these in the wrong order, even knowing that it will result in them having the wrong direction, because it's more convenient to place the exit, move myself across the belt, place the entrance, then reverse the underground). Under the Wvlad's suggestion things would just work.

eradicator wrote:Strong Objection
You're (presumably) trying to "fix" accidentially placing underground belts in the wrong direction. The easiest fix for this is: pay more attention. Trying to make "smart" belts that guess what the user wants is neither desirable nor feasible.
Also in tight assembly lines there are usecases where both ends of an underground belt go into opposite directions of the belts directly adjacent to them precisely to prevent them from connecting with the rest of the belt. (Similar to what @Jap2.0 describes)

As long as you could manually reverse underground directions then in the few cases you want undergrounds going different directions, you can easily create them.

Zavian wrote:Actually I think this would be useful. Consider the case where you have built an new production line, and are now running belts to connect it to your bus. You are already standing beside the new productionso you are building belts from the production line to the bus. When you get to the bus you want to use undergrounds to cross a gang of 4 belts. When you want to build the underground belt you would prefer to place the exit first, because that's adjacent to where you have already placed a piece of belt. In order to place the entrance first you may need to move, because the entrance may be outside your reach distance. (I often end up building these in the wrong order, even knowing that it will result in them having the wrong direction, because it's more convenient to place the exit, move myself across the belt, place the entrance, then reverse the underground). Under the Wvlad's suggestion things would just work.

eradicator wrote:Strong Objection
You're (presumably) trying to "fix" accidentially placing underground belts in the wrong direction. The easiest fix for this is: pay more attention. Trying to make "smart" belts that guess what the user wants is neither desirable nor feasible.
Also in tight assembly lines there are usecases where both ends of an underground belt go into opposite directions of the belts directly adjacent to them precisely to prevent them from connecting with the rest of the belt. (Similar to what @Jap2.0 describes)

As long as you could manually reverse underground directions then in the few cases you want undergrounds going different directions, you can easily create them.

The obvious solution is spaghetti.

Zavian wrote:As long as you could manually reverse underground directions then in the few cases you want undergrounds going different directions, you can easily create them.

Except (as far as i understand) the OP suggested to completely remove direction on underground belts and replace it with an entirely automatic system. He also states that "the rotate key is no longer needed". Which contradicts your compromise of manual correction. I know the situation where one wants to build an ug-belt in reverse order, and i guess in that case only it might be benefitial to have some sort of auto-correction (though personally i'd prefer something like "hold shift to reverse build"). But i remember some dev somewhere somewhen say that they didn't want to include too many "pseudo smart" automatisms.

I can see the motivation behind this, but it also assumes a lot of conditions that might not exist.

And if you don't know what I mean, take a look at some of the sorting machines people design using only Belts, UG-Belts and Splitters. They basically exploit the way splitters decide how to split, but work well, and would be a lot harder to do if UG-belts auto configured.

here, look at this stuff. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=56248

Automatic non-changeable setting of underneathie direction would break the use case of feeding multiple ingredient from opposing sides to one assembler, when the underneathy comming from one direction hits another belt comming from another direction as the endpoint at the assembler would become disconnected. For me this is a relevant use case and therefore i am against removing the ability to manually change underneathy direction.