Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Don't restrict the placement of BP from the map, as long as chunk has been revealed.

What ?

Currently placing BP is limited to the area you can see or is revealed by radar, but radar ranges are quite minimal and thus remove the entire point of placing BP on the map.

Why ?

The new update with placing blueprints on the map is a very good idea, but severly limited by the fact that you already need to have pre-existing radar coverage in the entire area you want to place something in.
Which is often something you would want to use the blueprints for.

There are mods that increase radar range. I enough player use them it’s half the way to bring it into the game.

thats exactly what i tried - viewtopic.php?f=6&t=87388

There is a linear UPS cost for each chunk highlighted by radar caused by a repeated quick nearby "scan".
So without a fix to radars thats a definete NO on larger maps and the feature only really makes sense when you have reached a certain size.

+1 to the original post. Personally I prefer to play close to Vanilla with only a few QoL mods around preference saving, reference, blueprint manipulation/expansion; blueprints on FoW make perfect sense now that they can be placed from map view - particularly if your blueprint is (in my example) a self-assembling outpost or city block. If the area is explored and free of obstruction, It does seem to defeat the point of automating large-scale deployment if the player has to be there to do it.

EDIT: This mod works an absolute treat. No additional radar research - simply allows you to toggle FoW. Some strange radar effects on the map while active but otherwise functional. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ClearSkiesOfPeace/

TL;DR

Allow blueprints to be placed through Fog of war

What ?

You should be able to place Blueprints in the map view regardless if an area is currently revealed by radar or not.

Why ?

1. It is no fun having to overlap a blueprint with one you previously placed, just because fog of war cut off a small part. It is also no fun having to designate radars, just to remove them again afterwards, especially since the radar may well go exactly where you want to place the blueprint. Neither should you have to micromanage a spidertron to get the vision exactly right.
2. It is inconsistent, since in regular player vision, blueprints can be placed with no consideration of fog of war; The entire blueprint will be planned out regardless of size. this leads to very odd situations, where I can move my rail section far enough horizontally to line it up with the last piece while sitting in the locomotive, but I can't move it far enough vertically to line up, and need to go to the map view.... where half of the blueprint gets cut off.
3. It is in the end the players judgement if they want to place blueprints outside of vision, Roboports themselves don't require vision to operate. The only unexpected thing one can encounter are biters, and if biters eat your robots because you didn't look, well that is too bad. It is not a risk the game has to protect you from
4. As an user experience, I understand placing down a blueprint as a declaration of intent. You something to eventually happen, and tell the game so. The game should not tell you, you can't want that yet.

I would bet, this idea is older.
But i kind of agree now, considering the new feature to place blueprints from zoomed out map view.

TL;DR

Allow the placing of blueprints in the fog of war in map view, as long as at least a part of the blueprint is placed in a part that has active vision.

Current situation

Currently, it's impossible to place any blueprints from the map view in places where there's for of war. The entities that overlap the fog of war will simply not be placed. This means that when placing blueprints from the map view, the size of your blueprint is limited to the visible range of a radar, which in many cases can be a very real hassle (for example with sufficiently large solar blueprints).
Interestingly, this limitation does not apply when placing blueprints in the regular view. There is no fog of war at that point, and the blueprints can be placed anywhere regardless of size, as long as the center point of the blueprint is on your screen. This makes it much more difficult to see where you're actually placing down your blueprints, which is something map view is very useful for.

Now I understand why it's not possible to place blueprints in the fog of war in map view. It's probably a bad idea to allow players to place blueprints all over the map everywhere, even though they can't see where they're actually building or whether there's biters currently in the way.

Proposal

I feel like a good compromise would be to make it possible to place blueprints in the fog of war, as long as at least a portion of the blueprint is not in the fog of war. This would more or less emulate the way you would place blueprints in the regular view. You would still be unable to just randomly place blueprints all over the place, but you'd be able to more easily use large blueprints without having to fiddle in the regular view while not seeing the bigger picture.

Another way of doing it would be to check if the center of the blueprint (aka, where your cursor is) is not in the fog of war. This would be analogous to placing the blueprint in the regular view, where everything you see is not in the fog of war, and you can place the center of the blueprint anywhere in that area, with no restrictions to the overall thing.

Of course all other restrictions would still apply (building on water, cliffs, etc, and not being able to build in undiscovered/non-generated chunks), as they also do in regular view.

I made a similar suggestion, but didn't see this thread before posting (my bad).

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=91356

@mods feel free to merge the topics if necessary.

I also think this is an unnecessary restriction: it adds one more slightly frustrating step to every map action. +1