Name: Terraforming
Description: Adds terraforming equipment - bridge builders, moat diggers and drawbridges
Tags: defence, cheat, bridge, moat, logistics, robots

Machines that terraform the planet: building fords and bridges, digging moats and drawbridges for safe passage across the moat.
Deliberately slow and ponderous machines. Low technology machines need constant attention and feeding of materials, but at higher levels can sustain long distances without intervention.

A new technology discovery has allowed the development of heavy terrraforming machines. Place them down, load them with the ingredients and watch them slowly inch their way across the landscape ... until they run out of materials or fill up with empty barrels. Keep those speed modules handy if you're in a hurry. These machines are talkative - complaining if not placed right, whinging if they collide with something important and gloating when the job is done - sorry about that, it's a fault in the programming.

Turn on detailed info with ALT or select the machine, and it shows an arrow (stolen from the liquid connection graphics) at the centre of the face it works on -the squares affected are the ones immediately in front of that. When working with water, remember that the last grass square is the "half grass, half water" graphic. The bridge builder moves forward over the bridge it is building, and the moat digger moves backwards away from the moat it is digging. You can stop the machines at any time, rotate them, reposition them etc to get any shape you want.

The moat digger works in any terrain but won't damage your placed entities, resources, players, enemies or enemy bases :P
To mine through unimportant resources, just place the moat digger directly facing a resource (or rotated to face it) - perfect for cutting through stone or superfluous coal. Just mine it & repeat or rotate it again to cut through multiple types of resources

Oh, and when your factory needs to expand, just fill in the moat with the bridge builder ford recipe and make a new one. Or perhaps in the other order if you don't want unfriendly visitors. :o

Fully multi-player compatible and tested and supports robot construction / deconstruction

The machines currently use and abuse the old chemical factory graphics - updated graphics are a work in progress.
(Anyone willing to assist, please contact me ... graphics is not my strong suit)

Built to minimise performance overheads - tick handlers are only registered when machines are actually in use.
Railway bridges are even free, using only vanilla Factorio code once they are placed.
The mod can be removed from a world with no issues leaving the terraforming behind ... except that the drawbridges will no longer cover the moat :(

See the forum post https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=93&t=34957