BlockFactory:Controls and Building

Controls and Building explains how you place, rotate, pick up, operate and upgrade factory parts, and how floors and landfill work. Block Factory adds no new keys; it uses Hytale's own bindings. On this page, Use means Hytale's binding Interact with a Block, Pick means Pick a Block (middle mouse button by default) and Crouch means Crouch/Slide/Roll.

Quick reference

Action	How
Place a part	Right click with the part in your hand
Rotate before placing	Hytale's rotate key while the preview shows
Pick up a part	Hold left click on it for 0.5 s
Open a machine, chest or portal	Use
Take the same part into your hand	Pick on a placed part, with any factory part in your hand
Quick transfer	Crouch + Use on a machine
Copy a recipe or splitter settings	Crouch + right click
Paste them	Crouch + left click
Upgrade to another tier	Place the new tier directly onto the old part
Put an item on a belt, or take one off	Use on the belt

Placing

Hold a factory part and right click, as in vanilla Hytale. A preview shows where the part will go. Parts larger than one block need all their cells free. While you hold a factory part, your reach is 10 blocks.

Only Block Factory parts can be placed. World blocks (soil, stone, sand, water) can neither be placed nor broken.

Rotating

Rotate a part before you place it, with Hytale's rotate key. To change the direction of a part that already stands, pick it up and place it again.

Direction matters: a drill drops its output in front of its front left corner (the front faces you while you place it), a grabber takes from one side and drops on the other, and belts run the way they face.

Picking up

Hold left click on a part for half a second. The crack on the block shows the progress. The part and everything inside it (fuel, ingredients, products, chest contents) go into your inventory. What does not fit drops on the ground.

• It works no matter what you hold.
• The half second keeps you from picking things up by accident.
• In Creative mode Hytale breaks the part at once. You get its contents back, but not the part itself.
• Parts of another team cannot be picked up. With raids enabled you damage them instead; see Teams and Raids.
• Fixed parts cannot be picked up: the bunker fittings (capsules, lockers, terminal, gate, power connector), the Portal of the Ancient next to the bunker, and Death Chests.

Taking the same part into your hand

Look at a placed part and press Pick while you hold any factory part. If that part type is in your hotbar, its slot is selected. Otherwise the stack moves from your backpack into a free hotbar slot, or swaps with the active slot when the hotbar is full. In Creative mode you get one if you have none.

Opening and inspecting

Press Use on a machine, chest, portal, research building or the Bunker Terminal to open its window. Machine windows show fuel, ingredients and output, and state the machine's status in words, for example No fuel – add coal or wood.

You do not need to open a machine to see what it does: look at it, and a panel under the crosshair shows its product and remaining time, its fuel or power, its inputs and its output. See Field Manual and HUD.

Quick transfer

Crouch and press Use on a machine:

• With a stack in your hand, the stack goes in: ingredients to the input, fuel to the fuel slot. What does not fit stays in your hand.
• With an empty hand, the output comes into your inventory.

Crouch + Use also delivers materials to the Portal of the Ancient, and with an empty hand takes the summoned creatures out of its output.

Copying recipes

• Crouch + right click on a Fabricator copies its recipe; on a Splitter it copies its priorities and filter.
• Crouch + left click pastes onto another part of the same kind.

The same works on the other machines where you choose a recipe: Chemical Plant, Oil Processor and Tree Farm. Each player has one clipboard; it lasts until the server restarts. Without crouching, right click places as usual and left click starts picking up the part.

Upgrading in place

Hold a part of another tier of the same family and place it directly onto the standing part. The part is swapped on the spot: the direction stays, and the old part and its contents go into your inventory. No goblins are needed.

This works for these families, as long as both tiers have the same size:

• Belts, Underground Belts, Splitters
• Grabbers (Grabber T1 to T3 and the Mass Grabber; not the Coal Grabber)
• Pipes, Reinforced Pipes, Underground Pipes
• Fabricators
• Small and Medium Power Poles

To upgrade, copy or tear down whole areas at once, use the Goblin Planner. It works with ghosts: planned parts appear as transparent previews, and hob-goblins build them.

Belts by hand

Press Use on a belt to put the held item on the lane you aim at. With an empty hand, Use takes an item off the belt into your inventory. See Belts.

Floors and Landfill

A small factory on the steppe

Floors make you walk faster around your factory, and Landfill turns water into ground you can build on.

Floors

Icon	Floor	Epoch	Research	Recipe	Walking speed
	Iron Floor	2	Concrete	1 Iron Plate → 2	+20 %
	Concrete Floor	2	Concrete	1 Concrete → 1	+30 %
	Asphalt Floor	3	Asphalt	2 Asphalt → 4	+40 %

• Place a floor on the ground like a block. It sinks in and replaces the grass, so it lies flush with the terrain.
• Floors can only be laid directly on the ground, not on top of belts or machines.
• Buildings, belts and machines stand on a floor as on normal ground.
• Pick a floor up again and the grass comes back.

Concrete is made in a Fabricator T2 or T3 from Stone Brick, Iron Ore and water. Asphalt comes from the Chemical Plant, made from Heavy Oil and Stone. See Fabricators and Oil Processing.

Landfill

Icon	Item	Epoch	Research	Recipe
	Landfill	2	Landfill	20 Stone

Place Landfill in water. The water in that column disappears, and the column fills with dirt up to the surface, with grass on top. Each Landfill fills one column. Use it to build across lakes and rivers, or to lay rails over water (see Railways).

Landfill placed on dry land does nothing. It stays there as a block, and you can pick it up again.

See also

• Getting Started
• Gathering and Crafting
• Goblin Planner
• Buildings