blueprints

[factoriobiker]

i dont know how to use one, are they enabled later on in the game?
or I need to use shortcuts?
I just saw people moving several items together and placing them in new location

[5thHorseman]

Blueprints are available from the very start, though they have limited use before you get at least the first construction robots set up, preferably in a personal roboport.

Ctrl C, highlight an area, and you grab a temporary blueprint of that area. If you then click that blueprint somewhere the game places ghost images of the things you copied.

If you have robots, they'll place the items for you. If you don't, you can place things down over the blueprinted items and just think of it as a template to draw on. The nice things is, if you copy an assembler, manually placing an assembler on top of the ghost image "remembers" what that assembler was originally making. So if you copy your green circuit line (along with wires) and manually place the assemblers over the ghosts, the new line will know it was making wires and green circuits.

That's the most simple way to do blueprints. I cover it more here in this shamelessly plugged video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHwUZvDL3NY

[factoriobiker]

so when will the robots come, i am now at the stage where i have to research with blue bottles so far in the game and i saw only battle bots that explode after few seconds

[Serenity]

Just look at the research tree. It's all there. There is also a search function

Also, it seems after you researched construction bots for the first time you can always use blueprints and copy/paste right away in other playthroughs. They help even when build things manually. And you can use the blueprint tool to count buildings

[Koub]

so when will the robots come, i am now at the stage where i have to research with blue bottles so far in the game and i saw only battle bots that explode after few seconds

You can make a search in the research window. Just Ctrl-F, and type "robot". It'll restrict the view to a few researches.