Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow individual blueprint ghosts to be built with an empty hand click.

What ?

IIRC, there were some dev blog stating that it'd be cool to see blueprints be more useful in the early game. There are a couple of mods that attempt to do this by replicating the action of construction bots, such as a gun that shoots entities, or a mod that gives a small radius auto constructor. My proposal is to allow the construction of ghosts via clicking on the ghost. Holding the click and dragging over entities within reach range would also place the entities touched directly by the pointer.

Why ?

I've been watching some speed runs, and the most annoying thing is to watch them struggle with rotation. Even a masterful speed runner such as Nefrums spend a significant amount of time worrying about rotation when building a blueprint he has placed. Its not fun to watch, and frustrating when something is missed. I'm more interested in the builds rather than the individual entity building. While I understand that devs shouldn't be replacing what can be done in a mod, I think this would be a great addition to vanilla that fills in the early game usages of blueprint libraries. I feel it somewhat matches the idea of filling an assembler's several ingredients by clicking in your inventory, and I believe that a vanilla solution to the idea of "restarting, but with my improved blueprints" helps drive a core game loop. I've seen many players ask for a way to improve the initial new game feeling, and while it can be answered by mods, it being part of the core experience makes it important to expose to all players.

We specifically talked about some feature like this internally and decided that: no. We don't want to encourage people to do blueprint-a-base builds. Construction robots do exactly that.