Automatic deconstruction upon placement

[Harkonnen604]

Case1: You target precisely at where roboport should be placed with big zoomout, but it gets over some buildings. You remember them, zoom in, deconstruct. Then you have to repeat it all over again and see that you missed a tile and dropped wrong inserters from your smelting line.

Case2: You place that famous blueprint with substation, solar panels and accumulators. But some big power pole gets in the way, and even right-click does not work when you are placing a blueprint. I know about shift-click to place what may fit from a blueprint, but in this case you want to replace that power pole with a grid.

Suggestion: Ctrl-click to automatically remove all the stuff below what you are about to place (hold mouse button pressed until stuff is mined one by one). In case of blueprint this stuff should be marked by deconstruction planner if player has one. This should also help laying out rails and belts in the woods, with ctrl-hold-left-button all those trees would be farmed automatically.

[British_Petroleum]

I like this idea. I don't know for sure, but i think it would be possible with a mod. Developers are more likely to implement if they see it is a popular mod. There is an automated blueprint placer mod that has the option to deconstruct anything in the way.

[ssilk]

I think this issue includes that the general difference between placing ghosts (shift-place) and placing blueprints is reduced somehow.

[Harkonnen604]

It's not just about blueprints. It's also about pre-blueprint stage of the game when you run belt or rails through the forest. and chop every single tree in the way. Before you run ores over that belt and see some pieces missing. or run the train and see glorious "no path" over its head