Tweaks

• Inserter placement restrictions: See the pictures above. If you try to place something where it's not allowed, the mod will prevent that by returning the item to your inventory. If you rotate something into a forbidden position, the mod will rotate it back. If you order a robot to build something where it's not allowed, it will be returned to the inventory of the robot.

• Special loaders/inserters and machines: Prevents you from using certain loaders/inserters except with certain machines. For example, you could only allow loaders into or out of chests, or stacking/crating machines, and forbid using them anywhere else. This is meant for balancing modpacks; see the explanation below.

• Shorten underground belts: Shortens all underground belts so that the lowest tier only has a 1-tile gap between the undergrounds, the next tier of belts has a 2-tile gap, and so on. Also reduces the number of belts in the recipes for undergrounds, to match the new length. Works with all modded belts.

• Remove long inserters: The long inserter is no doubt the most controversial building in Factorio, with many experienced players going so far as to call it "the only mistake Wube ever made". Now, 9 years after the release of Factorio, there is finally a mod to remove it.

• Speed multipliers for belts, splitters, and inserters: Can increase or decrease speed. You can make splitters much slower than the corresponding belt to encourage weird designs.

• Ingredient multipliers: Increase or decrease the ingredients required for certain categories of recipes relevant to basic logistics.

Each tweak can be turned off, and will have zero in-game performance impact if disabled.

Mod compatibility

It should be compatible with all other mods, including overhauls. I've tested vanilla, Industrial Revolution 3, and Bob's Logistics. Compatible with Picker Dollies. Not compatible with Bob's Inserters.

Adding/removing in an existing game

It should work fine. If you have inserters already placed in a way that is banned by this mod, it's fine, you just can't place any new inserters that violate the rules. The mod hides the recipe for long inserters, but doesn't remove existing long inserters in chests, player inventories, or placed in the world; if you've managed to "smuggle" some long inserters into a save game in this way, they will ignore the placement rules in certain situations.

Why make/use this?

Factorio often boils down to building the same designs repeatedly: a row of assemblers, between rows of belts and inserters. It gets boring. So I'm trying to find simple constraints that will make base design more interesting. My other mod Build Without   Rhythm was an earlier attempt at the same thing, but the constraints it created were too unpredictable, which made them annoying.

Also, for the IR3-based modpack I'm working on, I want to make belts and inserters less convenient so that you have a reason to use cool stuff like Intermodal Containers, IR3 Ingot Stacking, and lubricant-consuming AAI Loaders.

Why have special loaders?

The "special loaders" settings are intended for modpack makers. For example, let's say you want to make belts and inserters 3x slower, in order to incentivize the use of stacking machines or container packing/unpacking machines, as the only way to achieve good throughput. You don't want to have loaders in your modpack, because they would make slow inserters irrelevant - people will just use the loaders instead. But now you have a problem, because to get your stacking/packing machines to actually work at a reasonable rate, they need fast input and output, faster than the slow inserters can provide. But the only way to give them fast input/output is with loaders, or special faster inserters, and that defeats the purpose of having slow inserters in the first place.

So this mod gives you a way to solve that problem, by letting you forbid use of loaders anywhere except with stackers/packers. You could have multiple different loaders in your modpack, for example both the IR3 loaders and the AAI loaders. Then you could restrict the IR3 loaders to stackers/packers, while the AAI loaders can be used anywhere, but have some other tradeoff (like consuming lubricant). Or if you don't want loaders from different mods, you could write some code to clone the loaders from a mod, increase the cost of the clones, and make the original loaders only compatible with some machines.

Obviously, if you make a modpack with this, you need to pick all these settings, and communicate all this stuff to the player somehow, like by adding info to the tooltips of items and technologies, renaming certain loaders, etc.