Grid aligned blueprint trick

[urgency]

I'm not sure if there's a more appropriate place to post this, but I've reached the "Factorio is now a blueprint-making game" stage and wanted to share a neat trick I recently discovered. I'm working on blueprints for a highly planned base and extensively using the snap-to-grid feature to take the guesswork out of aligning things. For this example I'm using Nilaus-style 100x100 tile city blocks but this should work for whatever grid you like. It works like this:

1. Take a blank, properly aligned grid cell and exactly fill it with landfill. I use the ChunkyChunks mod for custom gridlines to make this easy.

Step 1

Blank Cell.jpg (284.22 KiB) Viewed 15951 times

2. Build or copy your blueprint in the landfill cell, aligned how you want it to be aligned within the cell.

Step 2

Filled Cell.jpg (709.38 KiB) Viewed 15951 times

3. Use the blueprint tool and grab an area at least containing the full grid cell. It doesn't have to be exact at all, as long as you don't grab any entities/tiles outside the cell.

4. Finally, under "Filters", check the "Tiles" option, then check "Snap to grid", then uncheck "Tiles" (unless you want the landfill in the blueprint). It's important to do it in this order. We want the landfill on when we enable "Snap to grid" so that it will use it for grid size + alignment. You should have a perfectly grid aligned blueprint. Easy!

Step 4

Blueprint.jpg (300.05 KiB) Viewed 15951 times

This technique is even helpful if your blueprint extends outside of the grid cell. In that case you still need to do some manual work to set the grid size and alignment, but you can use the landfill tiles to align the grid border.

[pichutarius]

im guessing u can do it without landfill?

place 4 burner inserters (or anything not used) at 4 corners of the square, after snap to grid remove them. (i did not test it, i think that should work.)

edit: doesnt work if your blueprint extend beyond the grid.

[jamiechi1]

This might be helpful for lining up large blueprints on a large factory where your 'chunk' size is different than 32. And overall, seems like less work in the long run.

I posted this elsewhere about using larger blocks or virtual 'chunks'.

There is a mod, Shortcuts-ick, that has a shortcut that turns on a grid. This grid may be adjusted in size.
I modified it from the mods default 32 tile 'chunk' to allow it to give me a 48 tile 'chunk' display.
I posted details on how to do this here: viewtopic.php?f=190&t=88439
I place a pole that I modified to reach 48 tiles and a roboport at every 48 tile intersection. Every 3 of these positions I place a Radar.

One could change the settings option that I added to the other mod in the post mentioned above to 100.

Edit: The Shortcuts mod now allows you to change the chunk size. The default is 32 to match the game.