Tutorial:Keyboard shortcuts

Factorio has a lot of keybinds, and players often miss some of the "quality of life" shortcuts that make your work easier. The following are some tips relating to the less obvious shortcuts in Factorio.

Entity manipulation

• Factorio has copy and paste functionality for almost any entity that has settings. Shift + RMB will copy a entity's settings, and Shift + LMB will paste the settings to another entity. Holding down Shift + LMB and dragging will paste to multiple entities with a single stroke. This works for:
  • recipes for assembling machines, chemical plants, oil refineries and centrifuges
  • filters for filter inserters and requester chests
  • settings for circuit network connections and combinators ^[verify]
  • recipe requests. If a recipe is pasted on a requester chest, it will request the recipe's ingredients; the quantity requested depends on crafting speed and modules.

• Entities marked for deconstruction can be unmarked. With a deconstruction planner in hand, hold Shift + LMB and drag to select the entities to be unmarked.

• Electric poles can be disconnected with Shift + LMB.

• While "empty-handed," Ctrl + LMB grabs everything from a container without having to open it. For furnaces and assembling machines, this shortcut will grab all items in the output slot(s). For entities with no output slots but with other slots, this shortcut grabs all of the items; this includes fuel from boilers, and science packs from labs.

Inventory

• The pipette tool (elsewhere called "eyedropper" or "picker") is used to quickly put an item in hand without searching the inventory. To use it, hover over a constructed item and press Q. If any of that item in the inventory, it will be picked up, ready to place.

• To lock an inventory slot to a certain item, use Shift + MMB (middle mouse button). The slot's background will change from grey to blue. If the slot is empty, a prompt will appear to select the item to filter. This works for slots in the player's toolbelt, car trunks, and cargo wagons. ^[more?]

Display

• In order to see entities' recipes, filters, and inventories at a glance, use Alt to turn on the detailed information view. The detailed information view will also show directional arrows over inserters that makes their orientation more obvious. (It might be a good idea to rebind this, due to accidental activation during an Alt + Tab sequence.) ^[more?]

• Many systems in the game can be visualized with the customizable debug mode. This can display color coded rail blocks, current FPS/UPS, and many more informative overlays.