Underground Pipes

• Added underground construction support for the vanilla Pipe Connector and Pipe Balancer.
• Preserved native ports, buffers, configuration inspectors, serialization, unlocks, and save compatibility.
• Added smart connector placement on existing buried pipes. The pipe is modified only after confirmation, using the native validated split transaction without product loss, blocked ports, or U-shaped loops.
• Made buried connectors and balancers directly selectable through their x-ray models. Clicking a Pipe Balancer, including its empty center, opens the native configuration panel.
• Fixed false “Terrain too high” errors during underground Pipe Balancer placement.
• Fixed false “Collision with terrain” errors when connecting pipes to buried connector and balancer ports.
• Added direct ALL / -1 / -2 / -3 / -4 layer controls for construction, visibility, selection, and demolition.
• Clearly separated construction depth from the visible/selectable layer.
• Added cached and batched animated flow arrows to underground x-ray pipes.
• Flow direction and animation speed now follow actual product movement.
• Added clear visual states for empty, stopped, blocked, disconnected, paused, and low-power networks.
• Integrated flow arrows with Depth, Product, and Diagnostics display modes.
• Improved demolition previews and filtering so unrelated underground layers and surface buildings cannot be removed accidentally.
• Preserved hover information for product, quantity, fill level, source, destination, diagnostics, and camera navigation.
• Kept configurable overlay colours and brightness.
• Depth limits remain tied to the pipe tier and local terrain: T1=-1, T2=-2, T3=-3, T4=-4.
• Cheat++ and other mods remain optional and independent.
• Isolated optional UI and overlay failures from normal transport construction.
• Added compatibility metadata for Captain of Industry 0.8.7a, game build 614.

Underground Pipes 1.0.6

Individual depth for every pipe tier

Underground depth now scales across all vanilla pipe tiers:

• T1: -1
• T2: -2
• T3: -3
• T4: -4

Previously, T2, T3 and T4 were all limited to two underground levels.

Underground layer filtering

The x-ray overlay can now display:

• all underground layers;
• only -1;
• only -2;
• only -3;
• -4 and deeper.

The layer toolbar button displays its current mode directly as ALL, -1, -2, -3 or -4+.

Layer filtering also applies to pipe selection, hover information and underground connection lookup.

Network diagnostics

A new Diagnostics view colours pipes according to their actual simulation state:

• moving;
• waiting;
• disconnected;
• blocked;
• paused;
• low power;
• clearing products.

The existing depth and product colouring modes remain available.

Local-terrain depth calculation

Underground depth is now calculated relative to the local terrain instead of an absolute world height.

This improves construction in:

• excavated mines;
• terrain below sea level;
• hills;
• heavily modified terrain.

Improved source and destination inspection

• Fixed stale or incorrect building icons.
• Network tracing no longer selects an arbitrary branch at balancers or distributors.
• Ambiguous routes stop at the branching device instead of displaying the wrong building.
• Endpoint navigation works even when the hover read-out is disabled.
• Clicking the mod interface no longer moves the camera to a pipe behind the window.

Improved Cheat++ compatibility

Underground Pipes and Cheat++ remain completely independent and neither mod is required by the other.

When Cheat++ underground construction is enabled, Underground Pipes still enforces its tier limits: T1 remains limited to -1, while T4 can reach -4.

Stability and performance

• Reduced overhead on large underground networks.
• Added terrain, port and network-state caching.
• Changing the network colour mode no longer rebuilds all pipe geometry.
• Improved cleanup when leaving a game or loading another save.
• Overlay failures can no longer interrupt normal pipe construction or demolition controls.
• Reduced repeated log messages.
• Updated and verified for Captain of Industry 0.8.7a.

Existing saves and already-built pipes are preserved. The mod adds no new buildings, products or required dependencies.

The whole interface now ships with 12 languages including Russian, and it picks up your game language automatically. Thanks for the suggestion! 🙂

What's fixed:

• X-ray invisible after the first save load. On a fresh game start the buried-pipe x-ray (and the hover read-out) stayed hidden until you clicked any build tool. Integer overflow in the tool-active check — fixed, shows right away now. (Thanks warrenc for the repro.)
• Settings gear button missing. Two causes: on save loads the mod grabbed the HUD too early and gave up; and with Speed++ installed the button was placed but instantly hidden by its speed-bar cleanup. Both fixed — the gear now always appears in the top speed bar.
• "From → to" block showed on conveyor belts. The game uses one inspector for all transports; the block now shows only on fluid pipes.
• "From → to" block duplicated after loading a save. The mod re-applied its patches on every load, stacking a copy each time. Patches now apply once.
• Stale from → to info. If you re-plumbed the network while the inspector was open on the same pipe, it kept showing the old source/destination. Now re-checks automatically.

This update fixes the missing settings gear button (the one in the top game-speed bar) - reported on the forum, much appreciated! Two root causes, both fixed:

Fixed: gear button missing when loading a saved game. The mod resolved the game's HUD during early init, which works on a new game but fails on a save load (the HUD is built a few seconds later there). It gave up permanently, so the button never appeared. The mod now resolves the HUD lazily and keeps retrying until it's ready - the gear shows up a few seconds after the save loads.

Fixed: gear button hidden when Speed++ is installed. Speed++ replaces the vanilla speed buttons by hiding every standard icon-button in that row - and the gear matched its filter, so it was placed and instantly hidden (on new games too). The gear is now a dedicated button type that isn't affected, plus a watchdog re-shows it every couple of seconds in case any other mod hides it.

Nothing else changed in this release - if 0.9.15 works for you and you always saw the gear, there's nothing new to see. If you ever lost the settings button, this one's for you.

As always: if something looks wrong, post in the forum thread and I'll fix it.

🔎 Pipe inspector, built right into the game's panel
Click any pipe (buried or on the surface) and the game's own pipe panel now gets a "source → destination" section: it shows the real building that feeds the pipe and the one it feeds — clicking either icon flies the camera straight there. If an end is a storage tank, it also shows how full it is (e.g. from 4/400 (1%) → to 320/400 (80%)), updated live.

It's smart about routing, too: the trace walks through connectors, balancers, zippers and distributors (including Gameplay++'s Pipe Balancer/Connector) and stops at the actual machine or tank — so you see where the fluid really comes from, not the junction in the middle.

🖱 Richer hover read-out
Point at any pipe and you get a clean read-out at the cursor: the flowing product, the real amount, how full the pipe is, and the source/destination building icons on either side. No jitter, no clutter.

⚙️ Proper in-game settings
There's now a gear button slotted into the top game-speed bar (next to pause/play). It opens a native window (title bar, close, pin, draggable) where you can toggle everything, pick a colour scheme (click a swatch), and — by popular request — adjust the overall x-ray brightness with a slider if the pipes look too bright.

🎨 Colour & visibility

• Pick from several ready-made x-ray colour schemes, or set your own hex colours.
• Global brightness/opacity slider for the whole overlay (defaults are dimmer now, so pipes sit nicely in the background).
• Colour the buried network by product instead of by depth.

🧰 Compatibility & fixes

• Full Cheat++ coexistence (one button frees both mods' delete protection).
• Fixed the hover amount (it used to read half), fixed tank fill readings, rounded pipe length, and a pile of alignment/polish fixes.

As always — no new buildings or assets, just your normal pipes routed underground.

Update 0.9.1 — Cheat++ compatibility

• Fixed the conflict with Cheat++ over deleting buried pipes — before, you had to enable it in both mods; now one button frees both, and pipes stay protected by default.
• The "delete buried pipes" toggle now always starts OFF when you load a game, so you can't accidentally bulldoze pipes by leaving it on.

0.8.1 — stability fix
🪲 Fixed an internal error ("collection modified during iteration") that could fire while building or connecting buried pipes — the overlay was reading the game's live pipe list at the same moment a pipe was being placed, which interrupted the toolbar's input handling and made underground connections unstable. The overlay now draws from a safe snapshot, so building and connecting buried pipes is solid.
🔍 Fixed the hover read-out spamming an internal assert when the cursor was near the map edge.

🔧 Depth now scales with your pipe tier (vanilla-style progression, not a free cheat):
• Tier 1 pipe → 1 level underground
• Tier 2+ pipe → 2 levels underground
Since pipe tiers are unlocked through research, deeper routing is something you earn. (A pipe still can't be built below sea level.)

🎨 Colour-coded placement — while routing a buried pipe, the preview is tinted by validity: green = OK, amber = at the depth limit, red = invalid (e.g. it would dip below sea level). The limit is now visible, not guesswork.

🔍 Hover read-out — point at any pipe (buried or on the surface) to see what's flowing through it as a big product icon at the cursor, without digging or opening it.

🪲 Polish — toolbar buttons now line up flush with the rest of the bar, plus stability fixes.