Blueprint positioning unnecessarily in 2-tile increments

[Hottemax]

Not sure if this goes in bug reports or here, but it relates to the issue described here:
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=48383

In my case, even the smallest blueprints involving rails only move in 2-grid/tile increments when I try to place them, which is infuriating when designing stations etc. Any way to get an update on this.
I just put this here because it was buried in Modding Suggestions, but pertains to vanilla as well...

[posila]

Rails themselves are aligned to 2 tile grid and this won't change, because rail is 2x2 entity and if was aligned to 1-tile grid, it would be possible to build two rails which you could never connect.
So any blueprint containing rails will be also aligned to 2 tile grid.

[nuhll]

Solution: remove rails from your BP.

[Hottemax]

Rails themselves are aligned to 2 tile grid and this won't change, because rail is 2x2 entity and if was aligned to 1-tile grid, it would be possible to build two rails which you could never connect.
So any blueprint containing rails will be also aligned to 2 tile grid.

Oh I see, ok.

[5thHorseman]

Solution: remove rails from your BP.

This. Note you can still have a station and signals in your BP, so you can lay down station designs complete with signals over an existing track.

I do this all the time for my station blueprints.

[JasonC]

Currently, when pasting / placing bp's that contain train tracks, they are locked to the train track 2-block grid.

It would be very handy if I could place such bp's at odd-numbered locations when I know they are going to be fine. In particular, this would let me place a bp / paste where straight tracks on the ground completely overlap straight tracks in the bp.

I think a good way to allow this would be to let shift-click break the train grid alignment, and simply not place ghosts for items in the paste that require that alignment (tracks, stations, etc).

This comes up frequently when placing train load/unload setups (via bp or copy/paste). Since every other train car is not train grid aligned, single-car setups can't readily be placed along every car because every other one will not line up. The current workaround for copy + paste is to instead create a bp, then remove all straight tracks from the bp to allow arbitrary placement, then delete the bp when finished. For example, a typical scenario:

Factorio 1.1.70 2022-10-21 15-27-54_1-handbrake.mp4

(3.44 MiB) Downloaded 70 times

This shows copying some setup for a single car to three other cars, as well as the current workaround.

If I could break the alignment by e.g. holding shift, then I could paste that without having to create the workaround bp. The straight tracks in my paste would not be placed, but that is fine in this case because I can see that existing track already covers the area and the end result is what I want.

As a bonus side effect, this would also allow signals in copy/paste/bp to be offset by 1 if the player so desires.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older thread with same suggestion.

[JasonC]

[Koub] Merged into older thread with same suggestion.

Thanks, Koub. I do think the shift-click suggestion is significant and am slightly sad that it is not in this title; but I can't think of anything to do about that, so...

[ssilk]

I think the Shift-key is already overused… what I want is some kind of circle menu, which I can use to change the paste parameters while placing the bp.

[JasonC]

I think the Shift-key is already overused… what I want is some kind of circle menu, which I can use to change the paste parameters while placing the bp.

I'd like that too, or anything really.

The reason "shift" seems intuitive (to me anyways) is because when you use it while placing ghosts now it will force the ghost to be placed even if there are conflicts, and this kind of feels the same (there's a conflict with grid alignment, so force it to be placed anyways).