Factorio Forums

Something like ctrl+left click (you guys can pick the best method) to force a blueprint to deploy despite any obstacles, and simply not ghost or deploy items which have obstacles in the way. When there's an obstacle during a normal left click, show a tooltip that suggests the forced deployment ("use ctrl+left click to deploy around obstacles/obstrctions"), and also show it in one of the campaign/tutorials.

Helpful situations are when I don't want to remove certain trees (need them for pollution reduction) or landfill water (using one tile automatically fills surrounding tiles, which is still preferred) for walls, mining, or transportation lines, and I've already cleared the absolutely necessary paths of trees/water. In many situations, I'm willing to do without certain items in the blueprint, or can simply build around obstacles manually, but I'd rather not frequently edit a blueprint for unique deployments, then re-edit them back to normal. It would be very helpful!

Try shift+left click.

Good to know, thank you, however it seems that for any particular item which has an obstruction, zero of those items will be deployed.

A quick test with one of my mining blueprints showed that when there's an obstacle in the way of one mining drill, none of the mining drills get placed. I won't have a use for the current shift+click unfortunately, because if rails, pipelines, or transport belts have an obstruction, that means the entire, complex layout of those can't have blanks filled it, so you'd have to manually place the entire thing rather than one piece of the 100 piece puzzle.