FR: Introduce "blueprint instances"

[wrygiel]

As a computer engineer and I love blueprints, because they resample procedures/functions. Using blueprints lets me avoid a lot of repeated work. At some point however, blueprints - as they are today - still become sub-optimal: When you want to upgrade your blueprint, you need to manually update all of its previously placed instances (and update planner is not enough for some types of updates).

What I would really love to see in Factorio is the ability to take blueprints one step farther: To be able to edit a blueprint *definition*, and expect all its *instances* (places on the map in which this blueprint has been placed) to update themselves.

This would also mean that such instances would not be directly editable - the only way to change the entities in such places would be to update them in the originating blueprint definition. (Instances would probably need to be displayed a bit differently to reflect that.) If, at the same time, you could add the ability to *nest* such functions inside each other (put blueprint instances inside blueprint definitions), then playing Factorio would truly allow me to achieve another level (of complexity)!

Thank you.

[ssilk]

Highly recommended to use some mod.
What I use myself: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Edit-Blueprints
But I found it is not always stable...
What I saw lately, but not tested:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BlueprintLab_design