Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Staged blueprints that would place a compatible upgrade of an existing entity should mark that entity for upgrading instead of blocking placement or requiring super force building.

What ?

It's fairly common to make a series of compatible blueprints that are designed to be stamped on top of one another to upgrade or expand it in a sequence. Speedrun blueprints for example, or this blueprint of mine which has a design for production & utility science that can be upgraded from 45-125-250 spm. Lets call these "staged blueprints".

Staged blueprints often need to upgrade particular machines or inserters for the next stage. The upgrade planner would work if you're using bots and you want to upgrade a factory whole-hog, but staging is often much more particular in order to conserve resources (so you can grow the rest of the factory faster, of course). Today speedrunners do this entirely manually by rote memorization. For example this 100% speedrun guide that calls out specific machines to upgrade once AM2s are being produced. If this could be part of the blueprint then you wouldn't have to remember these little details, instead the ones that need to be upgraded would have a very obvious upgrade ghost.