Blueprint alignment pins

[Uristqwerty]

TL;DR

A structure to cause blueprint snapping.

What ?

I've seen numerous mentions of grid snapping, but that relies on a meta-game characteristic: the coordinates of game tiles.

Instead, how about a 1x1 structure that does nothing meaningful in-world, but when you are holding a blueprint ghost with one or more, will nudge the ghost up to (say) 100px to maximize the number of pins that would line up with those already placed? No GUI or hotkeys needed to set the grid size, no toggle for whether to try snapping in case you have blueprints that align by coincidence, and I'd expect it to be far more performant than trying to snap all contents which if nothing else would let it try a larger radius at further zooms and bigger blueprints.

Why ?

It would only be a minor convenience feature, but after seeing a youtuber carefully lining up power poles, having to slow down cursor movement and/or zoom in each time, it feels like the sort of thing that would help a decent chunk of the playerbase.

[mrudat]

There's a mod that does blueprint alignment in coordinate space, with a per-map global offset, but you have to set it by carefully editing offset numbers.

In theory, it should be simple enough to extend it so that if a player builds a pin ghost, it changes a per-player offset for blueprint alignment, based on the last pin built by that player.

[Gebus]

I came here to post this very idea. It is a pain in the neck when you are running along trying to quickly place blueprints that should align. Normally you need to run parallel to the blueprint and stop, zoom in a bit, check something is overlapping, move left a bit... oops you have accidentally moved it one tile at the last second and need to redo it!

I agree with your recommended implementation, though I would call them magnet points. In the blueprint creation screen you would have an option to set a tile to be a magnet and this till would be pulled towards other magnet tiles during placement, perhaps with configurable pull distance/strength, and option to rotate around the point if it is currently puling to another.

Miss placement is a minor inconvenience, but Factorio is shaping up to be a game full of prestige features and I believe this one is worthy. It may save several seconds per use, and on tileable designs and rail blueprints this adds up to potentially minutes per hour.

[tehfreek]

I think rather than setting it when finalizing the blueprint, it should be an item selectable from the blueprint UI that can only be built as a ghost. If a blueprint is made including it then it becomes a magnet point within that blueprint (if not explicitly removed), and it also acts as a magnet point for those already included in an existing blueprint.

[SupplyDepoo]

I've thought of some kind of anchoring feature like this before. I think it would be really cool if done right, especially if it could be integrated with an automated blueprinting system (like recursive blueprints), similar to the jigsaw blocks used in Minecraft structure generation.

[5thHorseman]

If this could just work with, say, big power poles, that would be awesome.

[tamanous]

I'm using refined hazard concrete to put either a border or at least a triangle shape at the edges of the blueprints I need to align carefully.


But this feels rather clumsy. I'd like an upgrade in vanilla, too!

[ssilk]

Wouldn’t it be enough that there is a function when placing (e.g. alt-key), thattriesto find best correlation between existing entities on ground and blueprint entities. Say if I haves blueprint 50x50 it tries to “snap” the bp in a radius of 5x5 to already existing parts.