Factorio Forums

Context: I was allow refined-concrete "rotate" through all the colors, to make alternate colors buildable without items.
Collision: The tile can only go through three rotations, because it (from a dev) has rotation cooked into it - north / east / south / west, an unexpected artifact

Recommended "solution": remove the direction from the context entirely

Why I think it would be ok: a LuaTile has no "direction" exposed, and as far as I can tell, the sense of "direction" to a tile is entirely artificial. refined-hazard-concrete for example rotates the tile by switching tile prototypes. Direction is currently not visible as being possessed by the tile concept itself.

Other attempts to workaround weren't possible: I was considering assigning a different tile by detecting rotation, but the engine currently doesn't expose the behavior of a different tile linked to the item being built. Even if I could assign the item with a different direction (not possible currently), the direction is still the problem.

Alternate solution: Currently train-tracks allow up to 16 directions, which might be simpler. It would have a "limitation" of 16 rotations per tile, but it would be above the amount of rotations I want to do (10).

Here's a mod which exposes the behavior:

Edit: Also, a second weird note of the behavior is the directions are "restarted" at each tile, so if you copy existing tiles and rotate, they rotate "twice". The directions are sort-of non-linear, that there's no "constant mapping" of direction to tile. This would be a complicated fix, because the 90-degree-only rotations works if you have exactly 90-degree or 180 degree tiles (that are 180-degree symmetric), but doesn't for any other values.

A side note is tile-rotation is an always-on thing for blueprints. There is "already a problem" where if someone rotates a blueprint with hazard concrete, the lines are now going the "wrong way" and would be out of place, when one only wanted to rotation the position of tiles, not the direction. I don't care in my mod case, because I'm misusing the rotation system and it doesn't make sense to apply direction logic. It would be a thought that there could be an option to "Preserve tile direction." for rotating more than a single placed thing (like picking the tile item and rotating it rotates direction, but holding anything more rotates the position only, or, direction too, if such an option existed and probably enabled by default).