Factorio Forums

When you rotate an inserter, its selection box moves a little bit. In a few cases this affects circuit wire reachability. You can create the wire and then rotate the inserter away so that it’s out of reach. The wire will still exist, although you can’t wire it up like that directly and blueprints also fail to capture it. Wire reach probably shouldn’t be affected by orientation to avoid ending up in these ‘impossible’ states with ensuing inconsistencies.

The specific case I found is between an offshore pump and an inserter. With the inserter in your hand, put the cursor on the tile where you placed the pump. Move 7 tiles onto shore. Then move 8 tiles perpendicularly. Rotate the inserter to face away from the pump if needed and place it. Now try to connect a circuit wire from the pump to the inserter. It won’t work. If you rotate the inserter to face the pump, it will work. You can then make it inconsistent as described above.

Demonstration video

Thanks for the report. Unless one of the other developers wants to go and mess with the wire logic I don't consider this worth changing. Rotation does matter for entities without perfectly square centered bounding boxes but preventing the entity from being rotated or disconnecting the wire are not viable options.

I'm going to put this into minor issues.

Just wanted to share a little more for whoever takes a look at this one.

There are very few player-usable, stationary entities whose selection_box doesn't match their tile size. They're among the only ones which seem to have this inconsistency with the problematic inserters' asymmetrical selection_box. It might be helpful to be aware of these in the event some end up being circuit-connected in the future.
I didn't bother including player-unusable entities, such as corpses, or moving entities, such as trains.


Here's a quick image of the rotation problem existing with the small-electric-pole, showcasing the inserter's asymmetrical selection_box moving around: