Factorio – Can Landmines Snap to a Grid in Factorio?

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When playing Factorio it seems that landmines are the only object I can place where it doesn't snap to a grid. I want to make a dragon's teeth barricade with land mines interspaced but the inconsistent manual landmine placement makes it difficult to cleanly place the mines between the walls.

I tried using drones and blueprints to automate the process but very minor inconsistencies grow when scaled up using drones. I've seen pictures of other people who have their mines placed in a grid format, I just can't figure out how to do so myself.

Best Answer

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.

Lining up the mine for blueprints

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).

Blueprint configuration example

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).

Example fortification with equally spaced mines

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

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