Maintainable/modifiable blueprints

[Rinin]

TL;DR / What
Say you have a nice blueprint for rails. You put it in 50 locations already and want to add some lights now. Why do it manually if you could change it in blueprint and see it instantly applied as ghosts everywhere. Same with upgrades, dismantling and redesign. There should be a mode to place a blueprint that you expect to modify later.

Why?
Why changing manual placing to automation is good is probably a strange question in Factorio, so I would rather write why it may be bad and how problems may be addressed.

• Game have to implement blueprint editor
• Game have to keep track if something is part of a blueprint or a "raw" buildings
• When you modify blueprint new stuff may collide with something.
• It may collide with matching entities
• When you dismantle part of blueprint you don't want it to be rebuilt instantly.

First it should be obvious for the player that specific building on the map is a part of a modifiable blueprint. And every destructive interaction with any part should lead to transforming the whole modifiable blueprint into "raw" buildings, with specific sound and ctrl-z available. Removing blueprint from the book/inventory should also transform every placed instance to "raw" state but should require confirmation and support ctrl-z as well.

As for colliding with other stuff - couple buttons like "absorb" and "force" in blueprint editor should be enough to solve most of the issues. And blueprint editor should probably show total amount of unresolved collisions.

[Illiander42]

I'm sure I've seen a post here asking for proper VCS for blueprints that includes stuff like this.

[Murklak]

I'm sure I've seen a post here asking for proper VCS for blueprints that includes stuff like this.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=110662

[Rinin]

I'm sure I've seen a post here asking for proper VCS for blueprints that includes stuff like this.

I'm confident VCS is an overkill for Factorio, it's almost impossible without introducing a lot of extra interface. And I'm confident devs don't like extra complexity. That is why I tried to write a suggestion with minimal complexity.

Biggest part - blueprint editor is something that already exist in the game, and something that would feel natural to be modifiable. There are enough requests already to modify existing blueprints and even mods to do it. And its obvious devs respect those requests since editor became more and more modifiable already. The only thing preventing them from having full scale editor now is likely a fixed size of original blueprint, while proper editor should be infinite. So the biggest change would not increase complexity of the game.

The only thing that would increase mental complexity - introducing two types of buildings to the player "part of the blueprint" and "raw buildings" but again since the only way to place "part of the blueprint" buildings is to use blueprint it would not lead to confusion, it's impossible to do it without being aware of the idea in the first place.

Another problem is collisions. And after some more time thinking about it it seems like one problem is not really easy solvable - intersection with itself. And this one could lead to placement order having impact on the game which is terrible for a good game. A check probably should be done during saving on all placed instances to prevent saving self-intersecting blueprints. Still I believe benefits outweighs the problems. Because for now upgrading blueprints is mostly manual work. And for complex systems like rails it's quite annoying already.

Additional reason to consider - quality. Things like "power station grid" would require total rebuilding and not possible with just an upgrade planner because with better quality distances would change. And player would either not use the benefits of the quality or should rebuild everything manually.