Well that's a novel solution.

Here's a better example of what it might look like:

Hmm. I hadn't thought about the diagonals thing. The extra modifier key could just be used to enable replacing player objects, instead of bulldozing the whole area. For the more aggressive tree clearing, you could just have it expand the collision boxes of the objects by 1 tile.

Oop. Missed those. Guess I didn't search hard enough.

Well, I just used a screenshot because it was easily accessible, but you could make the visible image anything you wanted to. You could make it look more like a blueprint, and include the name and icon. You could even just take a screenshot of the blueprint window, and use that! (Though you'd probab...

I've always been really excited by the fact that PNGs can store arbitrary metadata, and this would be a great use for that feature. However, another way to handle it, which would protect against metadata stripping is using Steganography , and encoding the data in the low bits of the image. As an exa...

TL;DR Holding another hotkey when building blueprints marks all objects in the blueprint area for destruction, instead of just things that are in the way. What? When you place a blueprint, if things are in the way, you can't place the blueprint. You can "force-place" the blueprint with Sh...

MAup wrote:[...] but also have trains go underground.

Actually, the idea of having trains go underground is rather compelling. There would be lots of things you could do with it, and I'm sure I've seen suggestions for subways and underground train tunnels around here recently.

I would think the easiest way to fix this would be to consider item's in robots' inventories to be part of the available items in the logistics network. (Only if they're headed for storage chests.) Robot inventories are considered of higher priority than even storage chests, and instead of sending a...

We could just go full blown programmable trains, and have the extra mode be a window with a Lua script that returns the index of the next train station to go to. Maybe it's a bit much, but I would enjoy it.

This is probably asking for trouble, since the implementation would not be easy, but what if we make it so that changes to remote objects require a bot to implement? So, you open the entity, make the change, but it doesn't take effect immediately. Instead it's queued as a construction order, a bot c...

TL;DR Snooze button functionality (like on an alarm clock) to temporarily silence global alerts. What? I really love the new alerts system in 0.15. It's so great to be able to build a little circuit to monitor things and alert me when things go wrong. ("I'm out of ammo!", "There's so...

There would be no solution to the first case. Some people propose allowing the inserter to "turn around" to fix it, but this is a much more complicated change, and could cause even more problems. (What should a chain of inserters do when it backs up?) All I'm proposing is to have the inser...

You know how the devs love debugging obscure v-sync related issues? I'm sure they'd love debugging obscure multi-window related issues too.

Though seriously, this would be a pretty amazing feature.

Ideally, it needs to support the standard 4 icons, so you can set it up to show two lanes. (top/bottom split for horizontal, left/right for vertical) I was thinking the same thing, but didn't get it put in the mockup. Maybe this is asking a bit much, but it could be possible to rearrange the icons ...

TL;DR Inserters should have a "lazy mode" that makes them not pick up things they don't have room for, and not drop things on the ground, to prevent "inserter jam" What ? Inserters are very powerful, with many behaviors and uses. They can pick things up off the ground and out of...

You could even bind such feature to Shift-Scroll, like the blueprint books are now. (ex. Shift+1 for belts, Shift+Scroll to select belt level.)

Do you think you would be able to set the categories manually, or would the game just have a preset list?

I definitely think at least building ghosts needs to be implemented in some form, whether by tool or modifier key. In my mind, you're still building the structures by hand, the tool/modifier is just a hint to the game to pick the right thing automatically and put it there. I would get a lot of use o...

Yeah, I recently learned that you can use filter inserters to the same effect. It'd just be more clear if the label was on the belt instead.

TL;DR Cosmetic only filters that can be applied to belts to act as labels What ? I'd like to see some way to mark belts with labels. I think this has been suggested before ( https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=38788 ), in the form of belt history, but I have a different, simpler sug...