Factorio Forums

When placing a blueprint with buildings, recipes or settings which haven't been researched yet, Factorio currently places a blank building or none at all. Please allow placement of such "future promises" and add an indicator that they're unavailable (red tint I suppose).

Construction bots shouldn't attempt to build such "unavailable" ghosts. When placing manually, unavailable recipes/settings should be reset to blank.

Reason: manual construction over ghosts is much more common now that blueprints are always available, and blueprints often contain items that haven't yet been researched. Those items/settings are still valuable for planning though, and I'd like to retain them.

good idea!!!
to plan the factory
>>> build a ghost factory to save space!!! and so on
where usefull!!

What you suggest would add a massive amount of complexity to what is already a complex system to build/rebuild ghosts.

Simply setting recipes when you unlock them takes a trivial amount of time - so what's what you currently have to do.

Not sure about complexity - I mean, the unavailable recipes already show in blueprint preview, and they're already tinted, so at least half of mechanics are already in the game (probably not in the necessary place but still a proof of concept that it can be done). It's a pity if this is indeed too difficult to implement though.

And setting recipes is easy, but it's manual work and requires you to remember where everything is. Meanwhile the situation which spawned the idea is a blueprinted "make everything" factory - if you start building it early in the game, about half of recipes (if not more) can easily be unavailable. And it's easy to remember what recipes you're supposed to have in small dedicated assemblies, but walk away from a large multi-product factory with lots of internal dependencies, come back later after some research is done - and suddenly it's pretty difficult to recall whether this specific assembly was supposed to produce wagons or was it planned for solar panels instead?

And if you have a roboport in the area, this means you can just stamp a blueprint and leave - and as soon as research for some new stuff is completed, your bots will immediately build the corresponding assemblies, and they immediately start producing - without any need for intervention at all. And that's a beautiful dream.