Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make blueprints and similar concepts (upgrade planners, deconstruction planners) usable from anywhere regardless of their location.

What?

Currently, you can only use blueprints, deconstruction planners and upgrade planners if they are physically in your inventory.
Allow them to be used (and bound to shortcuts) regardless of their position in the world.

So, for example, if you remote view a chest and it has a blueprint inside it, you should be allowed to use it, or add it to your quickbar and have it be accessible.

Even better, decouple them from the inventory system altogether.

Why?

The limitation of not being allowed to bring items on a space platform makes interacting with blueprints, upgrade planners etc. very annoying, because your two options are:

• Laboriously send a rocket containing your blueprints along with you when traveling to another planet via space platform.
• Re-create your blueprints on the new planet, keep a separate list of blueprints on each planet.

Not being able to access your quickbar shortcuts for upgrade planners and blueprints is not ideal with this limitation in place.

Therefore I propose to make them accessible regardless of where they currently are.

Are you aware of the Blueprint Library ?
(And/or of the Blueprint Import/Export function as a character string ?)

I was not aware of the blueprint library. I'm kind of confused now, as by default, your interaction with the Blueprint/Planner buttons is limited to creating a physical item in your inventory, so I assumed that is the extent of the feature.

Why would the primary interaction not be tied into this library system instead? Why is it present as a physical item at all?

Needing its existence pointed out to me seems like a design issue in itself. In that case, I would change my suggestion to promote usage of this blueprint library as the primary action when using various key presses/keybinds related to blueprints, rather than defaulting to the inventory system.

Well, one reason is that the inventory system came first.

Still, the BluePrint Library is the first icon on the top right...

One thing that is missing I guess is a Tips&Tricks page about it ?

Instead of a tips+tricks page about it, I think it'd make more sense to not allow blueprints to exist in the game-world as normal items. Right now, when you make a blueprint and then hit Q so that you can do something else, it ends up in your inventory when that's not really necessary at all. Being able to put a blueprint (or a book) into a chest is even less necessary, unless you're trying to give another player in multiplayer a blueprint directly in the game. But it'd be just as easy if Z dropped a copy of your blueprint or book, either onto the ground or directly into a friend's blueprint library. (Have a cooldown so you can't spam acquaintances on multiplayer servers.) If you hit Q when creating your own blueprints, they just go onto the bottom- or right-most empty space of your blueprint library. Way less confusing IMO.

Koub wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 11, 2024 9:28 pm

[Koub] Moved to Gameplay Help

I don't quite agree, seeing as the conversation pivoted to why the Blueprint Library is not properly embedded with the system.

The problem would still remain that you cannot add "remote" blueprints into the library, etc.