In my early times I experiented a lot with blueprints (I still do
) and what happened quite often to me was that I accidently erased the wrong blueprint, one I wanted to keep and often worse, one that wasn't currently built somewhere on the map. The only solution out was to reload the savegame or quickly rebuild from memory, which was not always possible or quicker than just loose some minutes from the last autpsave and redo everything that happened in-between.Blueprints have the elusive bahvious to go into inventory when being programmed, so their order in the inventory is not always clear, which adds to the confusion of clearing the wrong one.
My way out was to only use blueprints as a temporary solution. When I built something clever, I blueprint it and immediately have it rebuild somewhere else on the map, so the work is not prone to loss. This works very well and lets me review the blueprints when I walk past them, however they clutter the map, bind resources and many bot stations covering the map. This leads to a world map consisting of 33% active elements, 33% blueprinted factories and 33% overall belt/etc. infrastructure. Not very nice.
So how about blueprins that can e write-protected? So after use just protect them from accidental erasing. This lock can be removed again to reuse the blueprint. this would protect from erases without a second thought or in mental hurry.
Another idea would be WORM (write once, read many) blueprints, which can be progrmmed one and then not altered anymore. Some kind of carbonite blueprint
Anyway, I'm looking for a way that can help me keep my designs without them around on the map and without the risk of a unwanted erase, which might happen unnoticed, which would be the worst thing that could happen (to me).
