When placing smelting zone. Usually I place furnaces first, and then belts. And then, the disaster comes, inserters and poles. I have to say, Inserters should be placed automatically.
1 F F
F F 2
1 and 2 are inserters, in and out, F represents furnace. When I place the furnace, I would like some aiding tool to place the 2 inserters automatically for me. Also the same for assemblers.
A A A
1 A A A 2
A A A
And even oil refinary
R R R R R 3
1 R R R R R
R R R R R 4
2 R R R R R
_ R R R R R 5
1 and 3 are pipes. 2,4,5 are underground pipes.

In this way 2/3 of building time is saved. And this brings peace to internet games. I talked this idea to my bros before, but I didn't know the api could do this.

Hi YagaoDirac,

While what you are looking to do may certainly be possible to program as a mod, it is unfortunately beyond the scope of this mod. I hope you still enjoy the mod with its current, albeit limited, implementation. Thank you for the feedback!

You are welcome. I'm still on learning the modding scripting.
btw. the typesetting doesn't work. It removed some symbols and spaces. If x represents space or void, the first one should look like:
1 F F x
x F F 2
the second:
x A A A x
1 A A A 2
x A A A x
It should be better now.
OK, anyway, I'll keep up learning scripting.

YagaoDirac,

I believe you could accomplish what you are looking for with relative ease. You could wait for an event such as "on_built_entity", see: https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/events.html#on_built_entity

You could then utilize "cursor_stack.set_stack" and "build_from_cursor". There may be some complications setting up who's cursor, what itesms, and what off-sets/location to build. But it should certainly be doable.

Ultimately, however, I feel such an automated building script would be more of a headache than it would be worth -- blueprints would solve 2/3 of the problem with 1/3 of the headache. Best of luck either way!

Thanks. By the way, I evaluated the blueprint system as a fetching up to its bad parts of game design and balancing. I really appreciate a game well designed which doesn't force people to need the blueprint system.
Good luck.