Factorio is a game all about automation. Why not allow blueprints to be placed for you? This could allow for astonishing levels of automation and possibly even truly self-replicating factories. I hope the exciting possibilities of having a blueprint projector in the blueprint being projected* are worth the considerable development cost to realise it.
*exciting idea, but should probably be read afterwards
*This idea gives me goosebumps. Ideally, any blueprint projectors in a blueprint would be constructed already configured. This would either require the blueprint projector to be pre-built and configured beforehand in order for it to be added to a blueprint manually... or for the triggering projector to "copy" itself onto any projectors in its blueprint.
I believe it to be a natural addition to the roboport since robots build onto blueprints, here's how it could work:- Visualisation of the blueprint projector being edited
- blueprint projector GUI illustration.png (401.69 KiB) Viewed 2744 times
There are also buttons to "set placement" of the blueprints, click them and the player is given the blueprint in hand to manually show where the blueprint should be placed, the blueprint projector remembers this position relative to itself.
Once set up, if the cirucit or logistic network condition is true the blueprint is placed. Robots would then try and build it the same as any other blueprint. This is the simplest form of the idea, I imagine a few toggleable options would be needed to further guide this behaviour (a start is shown below, but these are open to further suggestions and refinement).
Behaviour Options
- - Whether to "shift-click" place the blueprint, forcing placement even if not all entities are placeable
- Whether new "blank" blueprint projectors in the blueprint should be overwritten as a copy of this blueprint projector
- Whether or not to delete the projector itself after completion
- Options to rotate blueprints?
Thanks for reading
