Easy placement patterns

[thepuddleboy]

Hello!
Bought the game recently and I'm loving it!

Thought it would be nice if there was an easy way to place items in a pattern, similar to the way you can click and hold power lines and they will place at their maximum distance from eachother.
My first thought is placing the first item, then moving the cursor to whatever spacing away from the first item that you want (three blocks for example) and holding click to keep that pattern (while moving to place the items at the pattern interval).

I hope this makes sense, does this seem plausible?

[Gandalf]

Sounds kinda complicated to use. Holding down the mouse button will place items right next to each other, which is a lot less confusing.
Also later on you get blue prints which make the whole thing trivial.

[thepuddleboy]

Thanks for the reply, I don't think I explained myself properly though.
If for example I want to add a turret every 5 blocks, I would place the first one, move my mouse cursor five blocks over and click/hold while moving.
This would keep placing a turret every five blocks.
Sorry if you did understand and I'm just explaining it again, it's just a nice feature I would use early on

[ssilk]

Some links:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 9&start=20 About Ornaments
Ornaments are a mathematical well researched subject and that would be really useful to make patterns.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=6162 Blueprints: Mirror/flip
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=2198 Recursive use of Blueprint

Very old:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=1575 Thoughts about blueprints

Somehow related:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=1759 Game Of Live: Biomes/Land generation/changes

[thepuddleboy]

Thanks for those, very interesting!

[DraculBloodaxe]

I've recently been thinking about this so I'm sorry for reviving this old thread. Anyway, While blueprints do help there are situations before you have access to them or even when you have access where it doesn't quite do the trick.

Hello!
My first thought is placing the first item, then moving the cursor to whatever spacing away from the first item that you want (three blocks for example) and holding click to keep that pattern (while moving to place the items at the pattern interval).

I myself was thinking of something similar as this but would add an other key to hold (like shift) to initiate the process. So hold shift then place first item next place second item (because of the shift modifier it will have counted the distance) then move with this distance and mouse click pressed (keep it pressed since placing the second item)

This seems handy for the times before blueprints but I'd also like to add a small special case. The railway. You'd often want to place signals to create blocks the size of your train. By holding shift I would hope it could somehow count the amount of wagons in between an take this distance. While you could use a blueprint for straight lines. if for some reason you need to make a small curve (let's say water and you are all out of stone to create landfill) a blueprint fails.

This is just an idea though