This mod is now officially outdated. It will not be updated for Factorio 0.15. Use Factorissimo2 instead, it's much better!

Mod spotlight by Xterminator

Features:

• It's a building you can enter! Just walk through the door!
• Inside the 6x6 building is a 36x36 construction space. Fantastic!
• Route items and liquids in and out through ports at the sides!
• The entire interior has access to energy from outside! No electric poles are necessary inside!
• All pollution will leak out of the building, so be careful!
• Need to move? Pick up the building and deploy it somewhere else! The interior will stay intact!
• Not enough space in there? Build some factory buildings... inside your factory buildings!
• Entirely multiplayer compatible!
• Now configurable!

Example applications:

• Build custom production machines for all your production needs! Achieve new orders of magnitude of organization!
• No space for 60 assemblers, or 90 furnaces? Yes space for a factory building instead!
• Need 120 assemblers, or 180 furnaces? Use TWO factory buildings! Use blueprints to copy-paste! All interiors are congruent, or your money back!
• Want a mobile base? Build a building, and put everything you need inside! Recursion makes it easy! Just don't get your building attacked.
• Want a challenge? Don't build anything outside!

Detailed guide:

Study the Architecture research to unlock factory buildings. Place one down and just walk into the entrance to enter it. Each building has twelve possible connections: four west, four north and four east. Place any transport belt (no splitters or underground belts), or a pipe or underground pipe, on the OUTSIDE of the building, and a corresponding belt or pipe will appear on the inside to be connected to. If not, make sure your belts and pipes are facing the correct way. Each of the twelve ports can be used for both input and output. You can input from any side, and output to any side, depending on the direction you place your belts in.

Resources are automatically transferred from inside to outside and vice versa, depending on the direction of the belt. Pipes work both directions.

Factory buildings can be placed inside any other factory buildings by default, however there is a config setting to disable this. There are also config settings for power throughput, internal lighting, energy transfer loss, and pollution reduction or increase.

There are two kinds of building: factory buildings, and power plant buildings. Power is only transferred from outside to inside in factory buildings, and from inside to outside in power plant buildings, with a maximum throughput of 50MW. All pollution is transferred from inside to outside.

Picking factories up will remove their connections to the outside world, and will stop power from being transferred in or out. However it will not stop the machines inside from working (at least until the power inside runs out).

I do not recommend placing factories using robots. Nothing will break, but you don't have control over which factory the robot places.

Picked up factories are unfortunately very hard to distinguish in your inventory, especially if you have autosort on. If you pick up multiple factories at once, store them in your hotbar so you know which is which until you redeploy them.

Note: Connecting a factory to a power grid will suck up nearly all the available power until its internal 20MJ buffer is filled. This will not be an issue if the factory is redeployed, unless of course the buildings inside have used up a significant part of the existing buffer in the meantime.

FAQ:

• My power plant buildings are flashing red "out of power" signs! What's up with that?

That's because their production can't keep up with the current electric network demand, so their internal buffer is empty. This does not mean you are not producing enough power, it may just mean that your accumulator banks outside are charging.

Issues:

• Placing factories with robots can crash the game. Don't place factories with robots.
• Personal construction robots will sometimes completely stop working when you leave them behind while walking through factory doors, instead of just waiting for you to come back. Wait for your robots to finish and return to you before going through another door.
• There is no way to tell the contents of a factory from the item.
• Pipes do not look like they connect to the factory building from outside. This is merely graphical. I recommend using underground pipes instead.
• It is not possible to have more than 255 factory buildings in total. Attempting to place further buildings will crash the game.

Known incompatibility:

• Mods that autorepair deconstructed buildings or items in the player inventory (I abuse the item's damage value to store information about the factory in the item)
• Mods that abuse an item's damage value to store information in the item (Ironic, I know. Passing through a factory port will erase an item's damage value)
• Flow Control pipes do not connect to factory buildings

Potential incompatibility:

• Mods that deconstruct or construct buildings themselves

Future plans:

• Define connections from the inside instead of the outside
• Different tiers and sizes of factory buildings (need better sprites for that)
• Pollution filter upgrades
• Factory trains!

Version history:
0.2.1
- Final release
- Added advertisement for Factorissimo2
- Fixed crash when running out of surfaces anyway
- Thanks for playing!

0.2.0
- Updated to Factorio 0.14

0.1.9
- Hotfix: Picking up a factory no longer destroys the belts outside

0.1.8
- Fixed connections not updating when belts are upgraded
- Made connections minable from inside
- Fixed API

0.1.7
- Major performance improvements
- Added API for custom connection types
- Made factory ports walkable
- Recursion config option!
- Changed default power plant output limit to 500MW
- Added german locale

0.1.6
- Config changes now update daylight settings of existing buildings
- Minor performance improvements
- Players will no longer enter or leave buildings while inside vehicles

0.1.5
- Added power plant buildings (which transfer power from inside to outside instead). They are dark inside by default.
- Added config options:
-- Power I/O limits and transfer loss (separate for factories and power plants)
-- Daylight settings (separate for factories and power plants)
-- Pollution multiplier

0.1.4
- Fixed crash when placing factories far from spawn

0.1.3
- Fixed huge issue due to API changes in 0.13.10

0.1.2
- Fixed electrical network showing wrong icon
- Fixed significant framerate drop when hovering over electrical buildings
- Better error message when people try to use this with Factorio 0.12
- Fixed factory throughput being 25MW instead of 50MW
- Fixed rare item duplication issue

0.1.1
- Added the ability to connect to factories using modded belts and pipes
- Fixed belt teleport not having full throughput
- Significant performance improvements regarding unconnected ports

0.1.0
- Initial release