90 Degrees Arm

90 Degrees Arm lets a robot arm drop to the side instead of straight through.

The game's robot arm only ever moves an item across itself: it takes from one side and puts down on the opposite one. A chest and the machine it feeds therefore have to sit opposite each other, with the arm squeezed between them. This mod adds a button to the arm's own panel that bends it a quarter turn either way.

How to use it

Interact with a placed robot arm to open its filter panel. A third button sits beside the pipette and the eraser:

• Straight arrow — 180° — across the arm, the game's own behaviour. The default.
• Arrow bending right — 90° — the tile to the arm's right.
• Arrow bending left — 270° — the tile to the arm's left.

Each click steps to the next setting. Left and right are read from the arm, which at rest points at the tile it takes from: stand behind it, look the way it looks, and the icon shows where it puts things.

The setting is per arm, and an arm you have never touched keeps working exactly as it did before. Rotating an arm on placement still works the same way — the turn is measured from whichever side the arm takes from.

A bent arm also says so on its base: the power light on the side it drops turns green while the other three stay yellow, so a line of arms can be read at a glance without waiting for one to move.

Applies to the Robot Arm and the Robot Farm Arm.

The animation

No new art. The quarter turn is cut out of the half-turn clips the game already ships.

The arm sweeps a 270° arc in ten steps of 30°, with its four resting poses landing on steps 0, 3, 6 and 9. A quarter is three steps, so every quarter turn is already drawn inside one of those clips — it is a matter of entering one late, leaving it early, or both.

Left and up are the two ends of that arc rather than neighbours on it, so two of the eight corners would have had to travel the long way round. Those flip the arm instead: the game already draws its left pose by mirroring its right one, so a flipped arm reaches the frames the gap left out and the turn comes out a quarter like every other corner.

Multiplayer

The host owns the settings. Clients ask for an arm's setting when they first see it and are told about any change, so every player sees the same corner and the same animation.

Notes

The settings live beside the save rather than inside it, because the world format is a closed list of serialised component types that a mod cannot add to. Restoring a backup of the world does not restore the corners.

Coexists with QuickStackFilter, which adds its own button to the same panel.