Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add a way to automatically update existing structures.

What ?

Imagine a 5000 tile long stone wall which was built with the help of bots and blueprints.
The blueprint which was used to build the wall consists of a 100 tile long stone wall.
Imagine all the infrastructre to build the 5k wall was already in place (robo ports, radars,...) so the player only had to
click 50x to place the 5k tiles long wall. Think about the process of adding laser towers,rails and mines to the now existing 5k long wall.
You have to create a new blueprint with all the new entities and upgrade the wall. Imagine the game had remembered that you placed
the first(100 wall) blueprint 50 times and you only have to upate your first blueprint after that the game would automatically update the already
existing 5k long wall.
This was a simple example but imagine a similar situation where you had to upgrade every single roboport in your megabase with a passive provider chest

Why ?

There are often repetitive tasks in factorio especially later in the game when the player has to upgrade/update already existing structures.
I know my suggestions is more of a QoL improvement but it might add a neat little feature which will help a lot of people later in the game.

Like .... erm .... an Upgrade Planner?
Maybe @Kovarex can do such thing.

steinio wrote:Like .... erm .... an Upgrade Planner?
Maybe @Kovarex can do such thing.

Planned for 0.17.

you guys seem to be putting a lot of faith in the upgrade planner.

bobingabout wrote:you guys seem to be putting a lot of faith in the upgrade planner.

I mean, it's already been implemented as a mod, the devs have stated that it's happening, and it's fairly simple - I imagine it would be difficult to screw up. What are your expectations?

As I'm reading this, it's distinct from the upgrade planner in that it's talking about being able to scale blueprints up to the desired size based on how many times a related blueprint has been used. I don't see how that would ever be possible, short of being able to somehow upgrade a blueprint into one that's been tiled X times in Y direction, or have the game remember where you've placed blueprints and update them to a newer version automatically (which would be a substantial amount of extra data to store, especially as bases get bigger). There are just too many variables to consider. Even in the example given of adding rails and turrets that follow a long wall that you built with a blueprint, you'd have to account for any bends in that wall, or slight variations in how it was placed down, and that's probably the place where it'd stand the greatest chance of being viable.

Instead, you can approximate this yourself by remaking the blueprint every few iterations. Place down four copies, blueprint that, place down four copies of that blueprint (16 copies), blueprint that, and so on until you get something that's too unwieldy to try and use as a single blueprint. Exponential growth goes pretty quickly.

Does this need a new type of blueprint, or just a new tasking feature for construction robots?

point the robots at a continuous/contiguous linear structure, such as a wall, a path, or a set of conveyor belts, and direct them to upgrade the structure. they follow the linear structure to it's terminus, or back to the beginning, upgrading as they go (subject to materiel availability), then stop.

Jap2.0 wrote:

bobingabout wrote:you guys seem to be putting a lot of faith in the upgrade planner.

I mean, it's already been implemented as a mod, the devs have stated that it's happening, and it's fairly simple - I imagine it would be difficult to screw up. What are your expectations?

I have no expectations anymore. I expected we'd be able to pump oil into boilers as a fuel by now, since when I first started modding, it was promised for 0.14 (which became 0.15 due to what 0.14 was) as part of the fluid overhaul.

we got fluid wagons, that's all.

+1

I think this screams for a mod.