Hi,
My wife and I are currently working on a 1 per second rocket launch map as we have finished all the achievements and needed something to do
(Acheivements for rockets per hour would be great - 1 per hour, 10 per hour, 100 per hour, 360 per hour!)
We have never put blueprints in chests, however we have multiple blueprint books each for organization. We should be clear, we do not scroll through our book to select plans, but rather pull out the plans we are currently using and put them back in when we move on to a different activity. We do not see any need for blueprints to be real items and in fact would find it very helpful to have a couple of blueprint quickbars to place the ones we are currently using in - or to have slots in these quickbars reference our library.
Option 1 is our preferred option. We would prefer to have pressing Q to place it in a special quickbar slot for last used item - see below.
Option 2, blueprints being items that are linked to the library, has all the disadvantages of the current system of blueprints as an item, with additional complications of keeping track of how they are updating, and no further advantages than having blueprints as quickbar references that are linked to the library.
Option 3 would leave us with too many blueprint bars and a hard time to keep track of all the blueprints. We do love the idea of a separate blueprint bar, though, for plans currently in use.
Option 4, the multiple toolbar idea sounds good to us for items, as long as you allow an item to exist in mutiple bars. A separate and multiple blueprint bar would also be useful. However, for organisation of blueprints, a library with books that these blueprints reference as in option one would be much more preferable that the bars being the only storage.
Having a limit to the number of plans sounds problematic in the long term and we wanted to raise the point that the plans you use at different stages of the game are often very different. This means that the ability to organize a lot of blueprints is really important. (Late game versus early game blueprints, rail versus factory blueprints etc) It is also useful to be able to organise multiple deconstruction blueprints. A deconconstruction blueprint book, or the equivalent under the new organisation, would be very helpful. Option 3, a separate blueprint bar, would be our preference for blueprints. the blueprints on there could be accessed from the library, not real blueprints.
For the slots being assigned on the quickbar and not being actual items, we do find it frustrating to have an item in hand, and try to pick up another item and just get a beep because the item in your hand is not allowed in the slot that the item you are picking up is in. To solve this, we suggest that when this happens the item in your hand is automatically placed elsewhere. In order of preference, it would go into: 1, It's own assigned slot. 2, An unassigned slot on the quickbar (if you've just used it, you're likely to want it again soon). 3, Into your inventory.
For the copy paste and blueprint experience we have a suggestion: Have three special quickbar slots (to the left?) one each for items, blueprints and deconstruction plans. Have these always update to be the last thing you used. You grab an item out of a chest? It's in your most recently selected when you leave and you can drag it into quickbar. You ctrl-c a blueprint? It's in your blueprint slot and if you want to keep it you just drag it into another slot. If you dont, it gets overwritten when you select another blueprint or ctrl-c again.
We would really love there to be an 'undo' for plan clearing. A number of times we have intended to move a plan but mis-clicked and cleared it instead. this is particularly annoying if it is a plan that is modified from the library, and we have also modified what was on the ground after placement of the plan to allow for a particular problem/requirement, and so have no way to get back the exact plan we had a blueprint of. An 'undo' option in a corner of the screen after clearing a blueprint would be good for this, we usually realise right away what we have done. Occasionally we have cleared a number of blueprints at one time, so remembering the last 5 cleared would be even better.
Having a modifier key plus click and drag allowing you to select an area for deconstruction would be very useful. Even better, have it use the current default deconstruction plan so that players can choose which type of deconstruction they want to be automatic, whether that is only trees/rocks, only walls, only rail and signals, etc, depending on what they are currently working on.
We have a lot of plans that are fairly similar, and being able to pick them out of our book quickly relies on recognising them from four tiny pictures. Is it possible to add an option to have a mini picture of the plan displayed instead? And/or text instead of picture? I would love to be able to have some of the plans in my rail book labelled - T intersection, left, clockwise etc without having to highlight them to see the text. It is very hard to make it clear what our dozens of different rail plans are from four pictures, even with single letter/number options.
Adding tagging when making a blueprint would be very useful when placing it and linking belts. Either, automatically tagging the start of a belt with what was on it when the blueprint was taken, or allowing the player to tag it. Often I place a blueprint and then spend some tome wondering where the copper/iron/plastic etc actully entered the blueprint. Which belt was it on? which side? I have used filter inserters to tag plans, but it requires setting the area up with the filter inserters before copying it to a plan.
Along with the above idea, it would be very helpful to add an item to a plan as well as remove. All too often we have an excellent plan with one inserter missing, which we realise after removing a lot of things that we didn't want to include but were inside the selection rectangle, and woudl love to be able to just add that inserter. This could potentially also lead to the ability to plan out factories/stations/etc in plan mode instead of in game, which may or may not be a good feature to add.
fff-191 sounds really good. One of our favorite parts is being able to ghost plan an item not currently in our inventory. Sometimes I want to kill my own roboport bots because they steal things from my hand while I want to place more! I have gotten around this, at times, by making a plan on a single belt or inserter so that I can place more. The ghost plan included in the quick bar is a far superior option to this!
While we (hopefully) have your attention here are some other things that we think would really help:
* Make logistics delivery toggleable or switch off on your characterafter death! Dying is super frustrating and when you have "many" TM trains it happens surprisingly often (3 times each last night). The biggest pain point is dealing with your inventory explosion due to logistics deliveries. One easy solution would be to tie the logistics delivery to some base armour version so that when you lose your armour it automatically stops.
* Make train schedules an "entity" with an id. Have trains set to a train schedule. This would allow two awesome things as "trivial" consequences. 1) All trains with that schedule would update when we change the schedule rather than having to run around like a headless chicken updating 20 trains. 2) Setting the train schedule by id at a station. The opportunities here are awesome
* Red and Green "each" psuedo signals as discussed in
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=56890. This would allow us to do some awesome stuff in circuit networks much more easily.
* Train overpasses! They could be a very expensive, only really possible in the end game item, if this was necessary for balance. We would love to be able to have train tracks cross without the need for the trains to stop for signals. In the very late game (having launched several hundred rockets) we have so many trains running on multiple tracks, they tend to back up where tracks cross and it is very difficult to avoid this problem. They could be limited to straight rail only, or perhaps including diagonal over diagonal in the long term.
* As with train overpasses for trains, pedestrian overpasses would be amazing. All too often we are working in an area with train tracks, and have to either constantly stop to check for trains or go through the annoyance of dying. Having an area we can cross without being hit by a train would be very helpful.
Sorry for the huge post and off-topic bits!