Single items for placing multiple related items; the quality life mod that fundamentally changes some item interactions. Please check the FAQ before posting any threads.

The general idea is that similar groups of items now have one “component” item that is used to craft and place all of the others. For example, instead of needing to have separate transport belts, under ground belts, splitters, loaders, etc… you now only need to have belts on your character to place all other belt tile entities.

This isn’t limited to belts! Logistic containers, power poles, pipes, circuit network items, and more also use this idea for placement.

As a general rule, bots can even place these “afforded” tile entities using just the component item, and when one of these items is mined, the component item is given as a result. There is also another way to turn an afforded item back into its component: smelt it. The smelting time for getting component items back, as well as the crafting time for acquiring afforded items is near-instantaneous.

There is one unfortunate down side to all of this: due to limitations with the modding API, the pipette tool is broken and will always select the component item used by any given tile entity. I don’t believe there is a way to fix this, but please do reach out if you know of a way around this. If you still want to play with item affordance but find this too annoying, then you can fix this in the mod settings by disabling the bots’ ability to place with component items directly.

As of this moment, several popular mods are supported, and as time passes I might work to add even more native support for other mods. However, I am only one person who does Factorio modding as a hobby, and I can’t be expected to support every mod that has ever been released to the mod portal. Please be patient if you want a specific mod to be supported, or maybe even write your own mod to enable support.