Building belts by dragging mouse should choose belt direction.

[ruspartisan]

It seems to me, that when I build the base I spend 30% of the time just pressing R to rotate the belts. It's especially obvious when building corners for 8 belts.

I wish there was a method to place belts by dragging the cursor, e.g, I drag the mouse from bottom to top, and the belt gets placed going upwards automatically. Or, even better, dragging the cursor along any path should result in a continuous belt: I drag 6 tiles right and 5 tiles down and get a nice corner without needing to rotate the belts. Something similar already exist for rails.

The old method have it's place, but, in my opinion, should be either used with a modifier key (ctrl, for example), or be accessible by a toggle.

One downside that I can see, is the fact that it slightly decreases the value of early bots.

[Koub]

Like so https://mods.factorio.com/mod/automatic-belt-direction ?

[ruspartisan]

Looks like that, yes. Thank you. There is always a mod in Factorio for [place your suggestion here] Vanila could have been nice though.

[Koub]

A mod is always a good place to start. Once you try it, you might refine your suggestion into something like "like the mod, but more of this, and less of that", or even decide that despite the fact the mod does what you wanted first place, you don't like the experience (this sometimes happen to me : I have a suggestion, try a mod implementing it, and find that I liked vanilla more).

[ruspartisan]

I tried the mod. I prefer to use it now, but have a couple of problems with it:
1) It doesn't work with ghost building.
2) It doesn't replace already existing belts, so if I made a mistake, I have to deconstruct it and rebuild the belt.
3) It feels a bit laggy: say, I want to place three belts (each 1 in length) parallel to each other and do three separate clicks, but the mod probably has a small timeout, and treats this situation as a drag-n-drop still.
4) I think, the mod should ignore the dragging input, if the dragging direction completely contradicts the current belt direction: For example, I want two long line of belts running from left to right, and I drag the first line from left to right. Then I run back from right to left and drag a belt with me, but the mod reverses those.

So if Factorio developers will ever consider implementing this idea, please have this problems in mind. And thank you once again for pointing out this mod.