Can I make landmines snap to a grid?

Solution 1:

As pointed out by @Chris Hayes in the comments, if something doesn't exist in Factorio, there's probably a mod for it. I haven't tested this one out myself, but quick search found there's at least this mod by Camedo that makes mines snap to grid.

The best I managed in vanilla game was through the blueprint system, particularly though the Snap to grid feature that blueprints have, which makes the entire blueprint snap to an arbitrary multiple of the game's coordinates. The downside that remains is the mine within that blueprint will still have to be manually placed, but at least it won't accumulate additional error.

An easy way to line up the relative placement to the world grid is surrounding a square of the desired dimensions by conveyor belts and placing the mine in center by eye.

You can then blueprint the mine in the center. Be sure to

• enable Snap to grid,
• set the appropriate Grid size (in my case it's Width: 2, Height: 2) - this will make the blueprint snap as if it had the respective foorprint (2x2 is equivalent to e.g., turrets),
• choose Relative snapping - this will make the blueprint snap to the position of the cursor, instead of the multiple of the world grid. Absolute snapping is useful for blueprints that need to line up no matter where you start building them (think tile-based railroad networks).

You'll be then able to use this blueprint to place evenly spaced mines in front of your fortifications (which you can then further add to new blueprints).

You can read more about blueprints and their features on the official wiki.

Solution 2:

I did it similarly to Marty's method, without a mod. I went slightly more accurate however and used a 1x1 tile boundary instead, in my case the debug mode. Then I blueprinted and set the snap to grid, 1 by 1. If you mouse over the flag and the mine in the blueprint preview, you will see green and yellow selection borders.

Move the mine a few pixels back and forth until you see no difference between these two borders, and you'll be set.

Make sure to save the blueprint somewhere in your library. I have a book called "Misc" for this kind of stuff. If I ever need to place mines for some build, I use that print as the basis for the initial setup, which I can then easily multiply.

Be aware that mines do not rotate visibly, but if you try to paste rotated mines over each other, they will show up red. The game does in fact track rotation of these mines, so you'll need to deal with that if you want to overlap prints of fortifications that can go around corners, etc.