Factorio Forums

This is something I've encountered before, and thought of as annoying, but I was reminded of it more aggressively while playing TFMG.

When you have a new vehicle item, its equipment grid cannot be opened in any way, until the vehicle has been placed once, and any (ghost) equipment was placed inside sometime in the past. Empty grids do still open, just uninitialized ones do not.

I expected the character and remote view to be able to open them, so that I could place (ghost) equipment inside before deploying.

Thanks for the report however that’s working as intended. It works this way because the item(s) do not contain a grid in their raw form as it would be extremely wasteful. Every crafted item would have the full grid and no vehicle item would ever stack with another.

The grid in item form only exists if the vehicle had equipment at the time it was picked up.

Is it also not possible to create the grid when the item is right clicked? Having this functionality would be rather nice for specific cases, but it's understandable if it can't easily be made to work.

Theoretically yes, but simply placing the vehicle and configuring it once for use as a blueprint also allows for infinite re-use and is far more explicit that the grid is wanted with a specific configuration.