Factorio Forums

The nearest I can figure out is this:
I create blueprints in a COMPLETELY Vanilla game. These blueprints contain modules.

The mere act of loading a save game with a conversion mod (B/A/Seablock) completely WIPES the modules from the blueprints. I did not even open the BP book within that game!

Not only that, but when I try to go back to vanilla to "Select New Contents for the Blueprint" the blueprint, it WIPES the full Description area AND the title of the blueprint!!!! This is horrifying. If I try to mitigate this by copying these fields to Notepad++, it greys out the Description area, so I cannot copy that part of it at all.

I have lost SO many hours (literally dozens of hours) to this BUG. Can you please fix this issue! Maybe preserve a copy of Vanilla BPs versus modded or something? Why does it CHANGE the blueprints when none of them were created or "Select New Contents" in the modded game? It shouldn't touch them at all! And yet we get this message "This BP was edited in a modded game and cannot be changed". No it was NOT. The player did not edit this BP.

This is so incredibly frustrating and such a waste of players' time.... it really discourages playing modpacks, which is really the longevity of the game. ((

Please fix <3

Check if there is a Blueprint-storage.bak or similar file in your Factorio folder. You can create backups of the file yourself as well for the future. Also check if you have any blueprint items saved in the vanilla game you were playing. In-world blueprint item's can't be modified outside that save file, and the "game blueprints" section of the library might be stored separately.

The Blueprint library in general is a mess and I don't use it. Migrating from one Factorio version to another can corrupt it, modding API events don't fire correctly when using BPs that aren't in your real inventory, it's confusing which BPs are in the "game" library versus the "personal" library, etc. The safest way to store blueprints/books is to export the blueprint string and saving it in a text file (even push it to GitHub). Then you can import each one as an item to any game you want when you need it.

You might check, if there is a "blueprint-storage.dat.backup" in the same folder as "blueprint-storage.dat"

The "blueprint-storage.dat" contains the blueprints and sometimes, a backup is created. Not sure, when exactly though. Maybe only, when you downgrade the game.

Post a save with the mods that let you reproduce the issue please and exact steps on how, see 3638.

Sounds related: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=96852

I've also had modpacks ruin the modules used inside the blueprints library. I think Nullius was one such pack, but it's been over a year since. (Fortunately, I had backups and have tried stepping up my backup game.)

Sorry I havent had time to post. My life has been the tiniest bit crazy. Currently in Sweden.

This issue has been around since at least 2016. I remember Steejo mentioning it on his videos, when he was recording Factorio back in the day.

My guess was that Circuit Processing mod caused of the issue. It replaces some modules with items with the same name. I've just tried it but haven't been able to reproduce the blueprint library corruption. Circuit Processing mod is part of the Sea Block mod pack. I'm the current dev for both.

KatherineOfSky wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 01, 2023 4:17 pm

Not only that, but when I try to go back to vanilla to "Select New Contents for the Blueprint" the blueprint, it WIPES the full Description area AND the title of the blueprint!!!!

Got the same problem here. "Select New Contents for the Blueprint" removes the blueprint name and description. Similarly, "Create copy of this" gives a copy without any name or description.

Here is a simple example of such blueprint (no modules involved, just content from the minibuffer mod):
Copy blueprint
Edit: I had to switch back to modded because "Export to string" is also affected by this bug in vanilla.

By the way, the "Select New Contents for the Blueprint" gives the impression that you can cancel the changes by not pressing "Save blueprint", but it is auto-saved and the following "Save blueprint" only affects the metadata. Not very intuitive.

My conclusion after quite some time is that there has to be something going wrong during start up? So to make this Bug reproduce able try if possible to bottleneck or stress the hardware during [Factorios re]start up after removing Sea Block and I am almost certain it will occur.
The Bug can do a varying degree of damage while seemingly being random indicating that a timing goes wrong. The cut out modded content out of Blueprints function is called to early and thereby damages originally vanilla Blueprints that have not been converted in time back to their vanilla counterpart.
That's my best rough guess of what happend to my Blueprints in which Sea Block changed modules and then removed all T3 modules from my whole library or better said made them into Sea Blocks T4 modules.

See also 109128