The current map editor is terrible

[Up&Up]

The original map editor was simple to use, intuitive, and did just about everything people wanted. Now this new editor sacrificed so much ease of use for features like cloning, some features like being able to place items in their pick up form have been completely removed for no reason. If I wanted to test out artillery in a scenario normally I would just drop/place the artillery guns, and drop a ton of shells on the ground so they could be picked up, now I have to spawn the actual artillery gun entity and fill my inventory with INDIVIDUAL artillery shells. I swear using the current map editor makes me want to get a vasectomy. Why fix something that wasn't broken? I can't be the only one who thinks this.

[Fel]

For your shells on the map as entities (not sure why you even want that but I'm not a map maker), just by spending a few minutes I managed to find a way to put a massive amount of them on the ground.
First, drop one item from the inventory, then use the clone tool to select it and the area around it with only "entities" selected.
"Paste" it a few times in the zone you selected (it will paste more and more each time), then use that to put as much as you want on the ground outside of the selected area.


For the most part the old map editor was not exactly user-friendly.
The new one does require some learning for people that were used to the old one, similar to the new hotbar, but it is significantly easier to pick up for those that didn't use the old one (or barely) and it finaly uses similar controls to the rest of the game.

There was a fairly long opt-in period for 0.17, and it was the best time to get in contact with the devs for any questions or requests for changes, but if you make a constructive post with developed arguments on each point, with explained examples of each case on the factorio forums there is at least a good chance that the devs and other map makers would answer you, either with future changes to the editor or with tips on how to achieve what you want.
After all, just like with modding there are quite a few people that have used the map editor a whole lot during the experimental phase of 0.17 (shown by the fact that there were frequent bug repport on very edge-case uses of the editor very frequently to the point where the map editor was the principal factor that pushed back the release of 0.17 to the stable branch for more than a month).

[posila87]

If you want to have an infinite supply of an item, place down Inifinity Chest (it's in the "question mark" category in Entity Editor) and set its filter to the item you want (artillery shell) and set how much should be kept in the chest inventory. As you take out items out of it, the chest will respawn new items to fullfill the filter settings. So then you can Ctrl + click the chest and top up supplies in your inventory instead of having to pickup items from ground.

Also, did you know you don't need to save scenario and create new map, you can just type /editor in the chat/console and it will switch you to character mode? Type /editor again to switch back to editor mode. This also works in your existing saves (will disable achievements). Or you don't need to bother with switching to character mode, you can setup inserter to feed artillery turret from infinity chest and unpause time in the editor mode.

We make the editor for ourselves to develop the game. During development of 0.17 we started to work on the new campaign so we rewamped the editor to fit our current needs. Big problem of the original one was that its logic was completely separate from normal game logic, and when new things were added to the game, we often didn't add them to the editor until somebody needed them, so it was in many aspects inferior tool to actual freeplay with cheats. Problem of the new editor is that it's completely undocumented and not very used element of the game, so there is not good knowledge in the community about how to use it.

[Up&Up]

Thank you guys for the posts, I'm starting to get the hang of the editor more although there is a bit of a learning curve. But most of the reason why I made this post was because I had played this game back in 2017 and put it down until now, so when I wanted to try all the new stuff that was added to the game I was a bit bewildered by the new editor. Thanks for the help!