Paint Brush Mode

[dudeTheory]

TL;DR

Paint brush mode; allows you to only place real items on top of ghosted images.

What ?

Paint brush mode. Holding the mouse down while “painting”, to place real items over ghosted images. As long as you have the necessary items in your inventory, they will be placed with the correct item type, rotation, recipes, filters, etc. Will not place real items on non-ghosted areas.

Why ?

You gave us the pipette tool, now it’s time to take it to the next level with paint brush mode.

I really like the engineering aspect of the game, making blueprints and improving them over time, so that your next playthrough is more epic than the last. Once I have it blue printed, I don’t like re-building them a piece at a time. To save on clicks; I use the pipette tool, copy recipes, click run belts and power poles.

Currently my early/mid game strategy is getting to construction bot technology as soon as possible. Why? All the clicking, rotating, occasionally making a mistake, removing it, doing it again is driving me mad. I want the bots to do it.

This is a list of most of the items I need to get to the bot technology. It’s not a minimalistic build but it’s not a big setup by any means.

6000 belts
260 underground belt
583 inserters
206 long insterers
264 fast inserters
158 medium poles
374 electric poles
372 underground pipe
272 pipe
210 assemblers
144 steel furnaces
132 splitters
124 electric miners
78 lights
40 steam engines
20 boiler
28 chests
9 refineries


That’s a total of 9265 items, that needed to be placed and rotated. That doesn't include the very early game when you are running around manually transferring coal, iron, and copper. I’m just guesstimating but there are probably 14,000 input commands that I have made before I’ve gotten my first bot. And I think I'm being very conservative with that estimate.

Paintbrush mode can:
--Minimize mistakes when building blueprints
--Relieve repetitive stress injuries
--Less clicking more thinking

Thank you for your consideration

[ssilk]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GhostPlacerExpress

And similar:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Bluebuild

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/autobuild

[JasonC]

TL;DR

Paint brush mode; allows you to only place real items on top of ghosted images.

What ?

Paint brush mode. Holding the mouse down while “painting”, to place real items over ghosted images. As long as you have the necessary items in your inventory, they will be placed with the correct item type, rotation, recipes, filters, etc. Will not place real items on non-ghosted areas.

This sounds a lot like having bots without having to research bots. Do you think that if you were able to do this, it would sort of make construction bot tech less valuable in the vanilla game?

[conn11]

The desired result, no manual placing and true utilization of ghosts and blueprints before getting to con bots, is already done by mods.
To ad to the ones ssilk mentioned.
Technically the same result would be achieved by those two:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots
and
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones

Granting you effectively bot technology from the beginning.

[darkfrei]

Also https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ConstructionCar

[dudeTheory]

This sounds a lot like having bots without having to research bots. Do you think that if you were able to do this, it would sort of make construction bot tech less valuable in the vanilla game?

I didn't think of that one, but I can see how it can diminish the value of construction bots.
>>> Maybe what we really need is type early game construction technology. <<<

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GhostPlacerExpress
And similar:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Bluebuild
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/autobuild

I know I know there are mods out there... but that only supports my case.
The way I see it... many people wanted some sort of early building assistance. A select few of them have coding skills to produce a mod, have the time, and motivated enough to write and debug it. So the more mods I see that solve a problem in one way or another could be a justification in adding *something* to the core game.

Maybe Compilatron could be researched/built. Maybe it's only capability is placing belts.
New players wouldn't benefit much as they shouldn't have blueprints (unless they got them from somewhere).
New players might just like it as a cute pet that follows them around.
Experienced players will at least have some building assistance from Compilatron.

I understand that probably more often than not, player desires don't match the game designers vision. I also understand that player requests don't always result in a fun game play experience.

In the meantime... I have lots of options at my disposal, I choose to play without mods. So, if I really wanted to, I can just drop into the console and gift myself construction bots early.

Thanks for listening!

[ssilk]

I really love this mod. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones