Okay I got it now. Essentially my error was thinking my puny little Nauvis-rockets are capable of much longer travel. There's no lore shown when planets are "discovered" so I have no idea if Nauvis-to-Gleba is akin to Earth-to-Mars vs. Earth-to-Alpha-Centauri. Did I miss an explainer somewhere ...

I'm still confused on one particular point (and I know it's a basic thing, hence why I'm in the 101 thread rather than making a new topic):

for my 1st ever platform, I built the starter pack, launch it on a rocket, and "hey presto!" - there's now a space platform above Nauvis.
Works well, all ...

A screenshot helps visualise how a blueprint is meant to work - even more so given the various belt tricks that are possible.
A small screenshot covering the same area as the blueprint boundary could be part of the blueprint string and travel with it.

Mock-ups attached showing the 'create blueprint ...

Alas, Ctrl+Shift+F4 also hides the montage that runs behind the main menu GUI -- I was hoping to leave it running for a while, akin to a screen saver.

Edit: There should be a hidden button to "jump into" a save game matching the montage being displayed... hell of an easter egg.

Far too many hours played, far too few involving circuits. ;)

Now with 2.0 and filtering built into all inserters, it feels like splitters should be able to support some kind of circuitry. I know the Wube folks aren't afraid of complex code: my guess is they don't want to implement it one way, then ...

Just to round out the discussion: running the old version (unpacked the zip, so it didn't impact the current Steam version) replayed the aforementioned save file just fine. No need for any dev work. Thanks again.

Use the standalone version
Excellent; problem solved! Thanks!


(Some thoughts below, out of curiosity only...)

...the only way for the game to "run as" another version is if it kept all of the data (game files) from that version to use (uses a lot of space).

A delta-based approach would be ...

I stumbled across the replay feature and figured the 1hr 21m 56s speedrun would be cool to watch. When I went to replay the save file, however, the disabled play icon shows a tooltip: "Cannot play replay: it was created in version 1.1.88, but current version is 1.1.104"

Cue the disappointment. Can ...

Okay, my bad for not finding the various idea posts. Thanks for the polite merge.

For the benefit of others seeking some kind of solution, two work-arounds I've found are either:
(a) paste your blueprint into this offline viewer to view all recipies -- http://fbpviewer.trakos.pl/
(b) create a ...

TL;DR
When laying down a complicated blueprint, any recipes not researched yet are missing from assemblers. Can this be enabled just for ghost assemblers? I am * not * suggesting built and active assemblers should be checking if their assigned recipe has been researched or not.

What ?
Similar ...

Looks like this is a long-standing request -

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=20960 (restrict/prevent high ping connections; join game ``timeout)
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=27186 (ping column on server browser)
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t ...

Reading over the earlier brainstorming in this thread, I like the idea of the number position changing from bottom-left (stock) to top-right (craft).

I'd further suggest the font colour changes, too. The existing white number indicates how many you have; and (maybe green?) number means how many you ...

If you only want to prevent the excessive cloud storage -

Take the save files you want to archive from the standard folder -
%APPDATA%\Factorio\saves\

...and move them to a new folder that is not a subdirectory. Some examples:
%APPDATA%\Factorio\save-archived\
%APPDATA%\Factorio\save-archived-0 ...

I held off on 0.16 - finally got the automatic upgrade to stable 0.17 release, so I did the introduction campgain. Thoughts below -

* A very, very basic introductory message might explain to press W, A, S and D (maybe if the player doesn't move for 30-60 secs?). Not sure if this is already built ...