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Comment by eCa | Hacker News Reader

The fact that belt building wasn't done in line (and not possible to do in line) was actually one of my big pet peeves[1]. In a game done with so much attention to detail, this always felt like a big omission.

[1] Before I stopped playing due to it taking so much time

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Pro tip: to build in a line before 1.1, click to place a belt and then move the character in a cardinal direction with one of W/S/A/D while holding the mouse button down. You can lay a straight line of any item this way (including e.g. pipe, etc)

Trees will bump you around and knock you off line. It's rare, and it was really the spidertron that made this an issue

Unless you're in the spider, sometimes it will change lanes on you.

The problem is that its super slow because you're limited by walking speed. Its also problematic for ghost prints

Just get 8 exoskeletons.

It takes only 4 + a concreted base to get to the point where it will skip some belts as you're moving too fast.

Belt spraying is actually a valid building strategy especially if you're doing something like building a bus

Yeah, this is definitely a situation where both UX approaches are completely valid, and it's hard for me to justify one over the other all the time.

Would be nice if they had a setting that was like "straight lines only in spidertron." By the time I've got a spider, then I'm usually laying buses down via blueprints

Agreed, I would probably have hidden this behind ctrl (or similar) to give the player a choice.

I have enabled the mod which lets you place items as far as your screen shows. So you can spray far into the distance (without having to be nearby).

Can anyone explain how exactly this is different? I’m having trouble visualizing it.

there's a gif that illustrates the issue in the linked article.

but belts, like any other entity in factorio, have their orientation set before they are placed. so if you have an up belt and you click and drag left-to-right, you get a long line of parallel belts that don't connect. this is useful when you're trying to create a parallel bus, but very annoying when you just wanted to make a long belt.

the new behavior is that the game will ignore any mouse movement that's perpendicular to the direction of the belt being placed.

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