Walk your character: arrow keys
Move the cursor: wasd
Pick items up from near your character: hold f
Toggle whether the cursor stays in front of you when walking: i
Return the cursor to your character: j
Enter cursor coordinates and jump to them: shift + c
Open fast travel: alt + v
Place the cursor bookmark: shift + b
Move the cursor to the bookmark: b
Place the audio ruler: ctrl + alt + b
Clear the audio ruler: alt + shift + b
Increase the size of the cursor: shift + i
Decrease the size of the cursor: ctrl + i
Announce cursor coordinates and other info depending on context: k
Announce a detailed description of the item in your hand: y
Announce cursor's relative position to the character: alt + k
Build, configure, interact, and perform other "primary" actions: left bracket
Force buildt: shift + [
Superforce build: control + shift + left bracket
Mine: hold x
Instantly mine everything mineable within 10 tiles: shift + x (a cheat)
Clear all ghosts within 100 tiles: ctrl + shift + x (not a cheat--only removes ghost entities)
Get the status of an entity: right bracket
Fast transfer full stacks from the hand to the selected entity: ctrl + left bracket
Fast transfer half stacks from the hand to the selected entity: ctrl + right bracket
Drop 1 item from the hand into an entity: z
Open the offshore pump assist tool or set splitter filters to item in hand: alt + left bracket
Skip the cursor up to 100 tiles or until the first change: shift + wasd
Move the cursor by the size of the item in hand: ctrl + wasd
Move larger cursors by 1 tile: ctrl + WASD
Teleport to the cursor: shift + t
Teleport to the cursor when enemies are present at the destination: ctrl + shift + t
Trigger Kruise Kontrol: ctrl + alt + right bracket
Cancel Kruise Kontrol: enter
Rotate item in hand or selected entity clockwise: r
Rotate item in hand or selected entity counterclockwise: shift + r
Flip horizontal: h
Flip vertical: v
Empty the hand: q
Announce the contents of the hand: shift + q
Pippette: q with an empty hand
Cycle through all entities on a tile, announcing them: shift + f
Do the appropriate action for the item in hand, for example equipping equipment: ctrl + shift + left bracket
Enable/disable build lock: ctrl + b
Cycle your cursor through vehicles near your cursor: shift + v
Open the tutorial: control + t
The mod replaces the mouse with keyboard commands. We call this the cursor. This is the mod equivalent of the sighted cursor.
The Factorio world is continuous, but all buildings in Vanilla build on a tile grid. The mod takes the continuous world and turns it into a tile grid for you. You navigate this grid with WASD.
Walking always remains "smoothe", e.g. your character can be at x = 1.2323. Most mod users do not walk much.
If you want to directly center your character on a tile, shift + t can be used to teleport. This works for long range teleports (a cheat) as well as short range "move me a couple tiles and line me up perfectly" teleports.
For those who wish to avoid teleporting long distances, place your cursor on an empty tile and press ctrl + alt + right bracket to trigger Kruise Kontrol.
The keys for the cursor are not logically arranged because of ergonomics. By putting things on different hands, most operations are a "drum roll". For example, d left bracket over and over can build a line of stuff, and because it's both hands you can press it much, much faster.
You can think of brackets like the mouse buttons. They roughly match vanilla, and you will often see left bracket referred to as clicking on Discord and when discussing with other players.
Your character is your body. You always have one, unless you are dead or in other advanced situations that do not come up much in the base game.
You mostly do not need to be concerned with it, especially if you teleport, but it must be in range of building unless you place ghosts (10 tiles by default)
Your character is also what you "pick things up from". For example, putting your character on a belt and holding f picks up from that belt, approximately. This is not precisely announced due to API limitations.
To remember this, your character is the thing with arms. If you need your arms, then the position of the character matters.
For convenience, Factorio does not require you be close for everything, thus the larger building radius and the ability to place ghosts anywhere.
Unfortunately, however, API limitations mean that we cannot precisely announce when the problem is that you are out of range. If you get an error bonk and can't figure out what else it could be, try moving closer.
The following sections elaborate on mod features. Not all interactions are covered because many are very simple. See the key list above for the full list.
The cursor is where you are looking and operating. As the cursor moves around, the entity you are operating on changes with it. This is called selecting an entity.
The most basic use of the cursor is mining. To do so, get your character within a few tiles of an entity like a resource and hold x. This is also how you remove placed buildings.
Note that some entities take a while to mine. An example of such is the rocket pieces in the initial crash site, all of which may be removed.
What the game calls the hand is not your character's hand, but your virtual hand. Your hand's position is always at the cursor.
To build, you click with left bracket with something buildable in hand. This will place the entity. You are holding the top left corner. It is important to note that the sighted build from the center. This isn't keyboard friendly, so we changed it, but it sometimes matters when reading things or discussing with the sighted.
See the page on blueprints and blueprint books for more info on those special cases.
To place a ghost, add shift. Ghosts are entities that mark where something will be built later, and can be placed at any range. This is useful in the early game because Kruise Kontrol can build them for you; ctrl + alt + right bracket on a ghost starts building all ghosts. In the late game, this is how you interact with construction robots.
For a few items, the mod adds special behavior:
- For underground belts, the underground belt will become an exit if it was going to match an entrance.
- For the offshore pump, which has weird placement rules, you can get a menu of proposed locations with
alt + left bracket.
Build lock is a system which lets you quickly place lines of stuff. For example, you can run around and belts will put themselves down behind your character. To trigger it, press ctrl + b with something buildable in hand.
For most buildings build lock places them as close together as possible, facing north. But we offer a few special cases:
- For transport belts, the belts are set up to face the way you are moving, and will properly form corners
- For electric poles, each pole is placed the maximum distance from the last pole.
It is important to note that you are effectively running two build locks at the same time. One is on the cursor, and one is on the character. So for example if you move the cursor east while running west, you'll get a line of belts going east from where the cursor started and a second line going west from where the character started. These are entirely independent. best practice is to use only one or the other.
The cursor build lock is used by some players to place small numbers of entities close together. By far the most useful is the version while walking. You can place a long line of belts like this:
- Move the cursor to where you want it to start
- Press
shift + tto teleport - Put a belt in hand and turn build lock on
- Run your character in a straight line to where you want the belts to stop
- Empty the hand or turn build lock off with
ctrl + b
The mod provides two closely related features: a cursor bookmark and a ruler.
The bookmark is a fast way to rememver one position on the map. You set it with b and move it with shift + b.
The ruler is like the bookmark but for alignment. You place it with ctrl + alt + b and it forms an audio cross. When your cursor or character crosses it, it plays a tone. Clear it with alt + shift + b.
You can use rulers to quickly place large numbers of items. For example, to place a belt going east, find where you want it to end, arrow a few tiles north, and place your ruler. Then, you can turn build lock on and run in a straight line until your character hits the ruler, like hitting a wall. IMPORTANT: build lock does not disable itself at the ruler, these are still separate features.
"multiple bookmarks" is fast travel, accessible with alt + v. Fast travel is like your browser's bookmarks menu, but for map locations.
For larger distances, the mod offers cursor skipping. Holding shift plus the cursor movement keys will move up to 100 tiles in any given direction, stopping at the first "change". Change is somewhat ill-defined. Examples which count include water to ground, belt corners, and rows of entities beginning or ending.
Many entities are larger than 1x1 and moving 3 tiles to place the next one is annoying. For this reason we also offer skip by preview. ctrl + WASD moves the cursor so that, if you built the item, it would form a perfect row or column. For example an assembling machine is 3x3, so pressing ctrl + d would move you 3 tiles east. This also works on blueprints.
Exploring the map one tile at a time is annoying, so the mod offers larger cursors. Larger cursors are boxes, for example 3x3, 5x5, etc. They perform two functions:
- As the larger cursor moves, a summary of everything in the box is announced.
- If building tiles such as landfill, clicking fills the entire cursor box with the tile (not a cheat--vanilla offers a similar function)
To change the size of your cursor, use shift + i to increase it and ctrl + i to decrease it.
In larger cursor mode, your cursor is at the center of the box and the box is always odd in dimension. So for example 3x3 is 1 tile in every direction from your cursor.
Two control changes happen when your cursor is larger than 1x1:
WASDnow moves by the size of the cursor instead of by 1 tilectrl + WASDmoves by 1 tile instead of performing skip by preview
This is a vanilla function but deserves brief coverage. Pressing q with an empty hand on a tile or entity puts "the most appropriate thing" in your hand. For entities, this is the same entity if you have some in your inventory. For tiles it depends: water, for example, is an offshore pump, and resources are drills.
It's not complicated at all, but it's important to know it exists
Kruise Kontrol is a mod that we forked which provides some automation functions. It is useful because it can make up for not being able to use the mouse.
Place your cursor on a tile or item and press ctrl + alt + right bracket to trigger it. Pressing enter cancels.
What happens depends on what the cursor is on:
- If an empty tile, you walk to it
- If a resource, rock, or tree, you mine it
- If a ghost, you build it, crafting as needed
- If an item marked for upgrade or deconstruction, you upgrade or deconstruct
- If on something that takes fuel, you refuel it
- If on an enemy, you fight it.
Kruise Kontrol supports vehicles, and can thus be used to easily drive places.
It will continue the current action until there is nothing else to act on close by. Triggering on a ghost for example will build all ghosts until it can't find any ghosts or can't find the items to build it.
Belts are explained in the tutorial and mostly match vanilla but there are some specific notes that should be coverred here.
The mod provides the belt analyzer. This is a 4-tab interface:
- This belt is a 2x4 grid, showing the current belt discretized into 8 slots
- Upstream is a summary of all belts behind this one ("toward the source of the river")
- Downstream is a summary of all belts ahead of this one
- Total is both upstream and downstream, plus this belt
The reason it deserves documentation is because of some edge cases which you may need to be aware of.
First, note that it stops where the circuit network would: at a splitter or a pouring end. It also doesn't traverse loops more than once, and may give somewhat nonsensical results in that situation (which part of the loop is upstream?)
There are two odd behaviors you may observe, both happening for roughly the same reason: percents over 100% and seeing two items on the same belt slot.
This can happen for two reasons. The first is that you are playing space age with stacked belts. In that case the percentage is a measure of how "stacked" the belt is.
The second is a bit more subtle. Belts have 8 slots for items in the steady state. But when inserters or drills place items on them, they form corners, or they feed a splitter this stops being true by a small amount. This happens because the game allows things to temporarily crunch together by a little bit to keep things running. The specific rules for when this occurs are not straightforward, but in general the easiest way to see percents over 100% is to turn a belt segment to the side so that it becomes a corner, then turn it straight again after it fills up.
This said, if you are playing in 2.0 base or space age without stack inserters and see numbers significantly over 100%, you may have found a bug; please report it to us.