Factorio Forums

I've repeated this twice now.

I loaded up an uncommon (probably irrelevant but just in case) spidertron with a full equipment grid. Gave it a name, custom color and logistic settings. Loaded it on a nauvis rocket, sent it to a platform, sent platform to gleba, and queued an orbital drop. While in transit I grabbed a ghost of my spidertron from the orbital drop slots. Went to Gleba and placed a ghost of my spidertron. Then proceeded to wait impatiently for my precious baby to land.

Platform arrives and sends spidertron to the gleba landing pad. In the landing pad I can see my spidertron is still good. Everything is fine still. Bot picks up my baby and places the spidertron. Only now the spidertron is 100% stock. Default color, no name, empty grid and even the logistic settings are gone.

I think it might be a "ghost" problem. Even though I took a ghost of my pre-setup spidertron the ghost itself was stock....I did open the ghost is that what did it? Eitherway I would expect my setup spidertron with existing gear to, well, not suddenly lose everything when bot placed even if I did open it.

Well now. That is weird. I totally missed it. Everything got reset back to stock but the items appeared in a random storage chest...I never saw any bots take them away on the first time it happen because I was else where. 2nd time I place the spidertron right over the storage chests by the landingpad so they ripped the gear out so fast I didn't see it. The reset is annoying by at least nothing of value was truly lost. It isn't bad game-breaking bug but definitely something that is incredibly annoying especially with all the new remote interaction stuff.

I have 4 full sets of equipment for only 2 spidertrons on gleba now time to ship those back now. lol

I would say this is a bug. This is not the behavior exhibited when performed by a player.

A player can pick up vehicles and retain their equipment grid. They can then re-place the vehicle with its grid intact.

Bots always strip the vehicle of modules and place them in the network. I don't believe this should happen, as it's breaking convention with the player's actions.

This also happens with the Tank, not just the Spidertron.

Picking a ghost picks a completely clean version of whatever entity you have selected. If you want to copy equipment, colours, logistics you can create a blueprint and then paste that blueprint.

This has been reported before and deemed Not a Bug (118257, 120235). But I think I have identified the behavior that is actually tripping people up and could be improved.

If you have the actual item in your cursor, you can shift-click to place ghosts of spidertrons with custom name and equipment loaded. You can also take a blueprint of the spidertron before loading it into the rocket, and place the blueprint to have the settings remain when bots place it on the other end. Also, you can place the ghost of a "fresh" spidertron and manually configure the equipment as it will be when the configured item is placed.

The issue is that when you pipette a spidertron item (or entity) to get a ghost rather than an item, the resulting cursor ghost is not actually a blueprint and does not receive any of the settings or equipment from the item or entity you pipetted. Thus when you place the ghost spidertron, it is a "fresh" one as you said. When the bot places the customized one to revive the ghost, the spidertron requests that bots remove all this extra equipment that wasn't in the "blueprint" that placed it. That's why you find it in a random logistic chest afterward.

So the short answer is, don't directly pipette spidertrons. Take a blueprint before you launch it and place that on the planet where it ends up.

The intuitive solution on the game side would be for pipetting a customized entity to include that in the cursor blueprint. This might have unintended side-effects but is worth considering.

I thought about ways to implement this in a mod, but unfortunately there is no way for mods to know what LuaItemStack the player was selecting when they pipetted. So another potential solution for the game is to make that information accessible to mods so that the pipetted item can be converted into a cursor blueprint in desired situations.

I've just worked around it by making two spidertrons. Set one up the way I want. Do the right-click copy-paste. Send the "duplicate" to another planet. Then after placing the spidertron ghost do the right-click copy-pasta again to get the settings back. After that the nauvis one is ready for another config. Though I really just have 2 configs for the spidertrons. One that has shields and requests rockets and one that doesn't have either (fulgora). Seems like a lot of steps but it is quicker/easier for me than having to manage "temporary" blueprints cluttering inventory space for this.


Honestly, with all the custom crap you can shove on itemstacks in inventories now the pipette *should* ghost the exact item you pipette in an inventory *if* said item actively has custom itemstack data otherwise use the "generic" itemstack that it, currently, always uses.


Found this by Rseding91 on one of the threads mine is a duplicate of.

Rseding91 wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 07, 2024 3:57 pm

The copy-paste tool won't by default but if you hold shift while selecting it will.

I didn't know that you could hold shift with the tool. Will have to remember that!