Factorio Forums

Some way to be able to declare two pipes as neighbors by whatever side via Index that points at a valid portside.

Use case: There are mods that use multiple surfaces actively that would benefit highly from this, such as factorissimo, or other future mods that want to make use of multiple surfaces.

Being able to declare two pipes as neighbors for the fluid box would reduce UPS killing scripts or fluidbox throughput issues from it. It would make the experience more seamless than having to do math between two specific pipes. Rather you could utilize the same methodology to get the two pipes to just specify them as neighbors directly via an index of the connector slot.

Yes there are interesting points where you could slap down a real pipe at that port, but perhaps a script set port could override default behavior of pipe placement instead, therefore removing that.

Since 0.17 is going to allow access to fluidbox prototype data which contains connections, we could utilize that to control allowable port connections, or make arbitrary custom entities that have specific restricted ports for it.

Unfortunately there is no way to do this even in the C++ logic for pipes. Pipes (like walls and belts) do not save what they're connected to in the save file. They search and connect every time the game is loaded in a deterministic way that always gets the same connections.

Ok, understood.