Better mechanism for hand building over ghosts before robots

[deer_buster]

I don't think any solution should replace construction bots, or do anything automatically, even within reach.

What it should do is act like it does with ghost power poles, and that is to place the item in hand ONLY on the ghost that matches the entity type, if a key is pressed, like shift, alt or control, to tell the game you are in ghost replacement mode, since entities other than power poles don't already have the autoplace logic built in.

You still have to have the item in inventory, you still have to touch the spot to build, and it is doing nothing that you cannot do by doing things more tediously.

If I had to choose development effort, I'd take this over early construction bots, if I am being honest

To the people that say "blueprints/ghosts are too powerful already"...just, don't use them. Nobody is trying to tell you how to enjoy your game. Quit trying to tell the rest of us how to enjoy ours.

[Ranakastrasz]

@OP : I feel this should be merged to that other topic Better mechanism for hand building over ghosts before robots
The mod you linked is a very valid way to try and address the gap between how useful early game blueprints could be, and how of little use they are. Are you OK for the merging ?

Go ahead, merge it.
And I haven't tried the mod, but it really looks like the way to go.

If this was added to vanilla, I'd rather have the "easy" placement :
- no need to choose manually the orientation of the items when brushing over ghosts.
- no way to accidentally place a building where there is no ghost.

My reasons : with very linear builds (like a smelting array) it's quite easy to be careful of the entity orientation, it's mostly a run and plonk.

However on more exotic blueprints, where you have inserters everywhere, complex belt layouts, ..., it would be quite punishing to spend one's time rotating and brushing with entities until the right rotation is achieved at the right place.

I understand that view. I would point out that this encourages you to use simpler blueprints until you get robots. If you want massive complexity, you will pay for it with extra complexity in building it, at least until you outsource to robots.

[Koub]

@OP : I feel this should be merged to that other topic Better mechanism for hand building over ghosts before robots
The mod you linked is a very valid way to try and address the gap between how useful early game blueprints could be, and how of little use they are. Are you OK for the merging ?

Go ahead, merge it.

[Koub] Done (sorry for the delay)

[Iggy_OG]

I'm sure this has been discussed but I would like to mention how unplayable I felt the game is in it's current state. I've started countless games now and in short, I don't see why I can't place numerous items at once. I get the idea how robots are supposed to work and OK that is cool. I don't see how basic UI/UX design needs to be gated behind tech. I've played a number of games like this that build production lines and scaling in pure terms of telling the game you'd like to duplicate something was a really trivial thing to do. I feel this gets in the way of figuring out throughput, ratios, and the real deeply fun aspects of this game.

I was very excited to see a suggestion about copy/paste blueprinting being added but was really disappointed to see it as ghosts. There's a lot of tedious aspects of maintaining construction robots as well, including strongly needing the plasma generator.

I am using a wonderful mod called Bluebuild which partially does what I want and I simply wouldn't play this game without it anymore.

I would like destroyed buildings to be easily rebuilt as well. I don't quite find it fun or fair to not be able to easily see things that may get destroyed and then have to analyze everything when it could just be marked with at least a big dark red X that stands out over countless corpses where you can't see if a belt is still there or not.

I think the need for quality of life improvements like this necessitate it becoming part of the main game over being a mod.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged suggestion in an existing thread discussing the same issue

[Death_dx]

-Make it so blueprint phantoms can't be overwritten by item placement (barring deconstruction/right click), for those long lines of repeating but alternating long/regular inserters on furnaces or such.
-Snap item placement direction to phantom's direction
-Snap to the phantom when the item's placement is 1-2 spaces off

There you go, just some small changes that would make blueprints a little useful early game and reduce a bit of tedium.

[Koub]

[Koub] Once again, did a merge of a suggestion relevant in the "handbuild over blueprint QoL" topic

[Darinth]

I think I'd probably be good with adding some degree of 'snapping to ghosts' for to the current order of improvements for using blueprints for manual building. Still doesn't break the general concept of having to build things manually, just makes the manual building a bit easier.

[Paulusss]

Greetings wonderful Factorio developers

First i want too compliment you on the great game that is called Factorio, got over a 1300 hours into this game and i am still not done with it! keep up the good work!

I am a big builder right from the start, all the way up to megabases, and after i finished a megabase i start over from scratch to test out new ideas.
The way i build in the beginning all the way up the a new megabase with new designs and possibilities.
Altho there is one thing i run into when starting over, i use allot of blueprints right from the get-go, you know the usual stuff, metal-copper-stone smelting setups ect ect. But since i start big from the beginning before we get construction robots i have placed thausands of power poles, inserters and transport belts. It would be one hell of a convenience if there would be a shortkey too either disable temporary by holding the shortkey or toggle placement outside of blueprints. Now i have to manually place it one by one, instead of holding down a shortkey and run over a blueprint and only the blueprinted items gets placed!

I would LOVE if this is possible to realise, it would make my life and i bet a hole lot of people's lives way easier ^^

I'm sorry if this idear has been pitched before and answered.

Edit: In edition to the latest Friday Facts #304 the construction robots have been pushed abit further back into the research tree, so this makes it even more of a convenience.

[Koub]

[Koub] Moved to Ideas and Suggestions.

[Darinth]

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=65741

Probably should be merged in there. I think at this point most of us would like to see it setup so that if we place an entity over it's ghost it

1: Auto-rotates the entity to match the ghost
2: If we then click & drag, it'll only place the entity over existing ghosts, continuing to auto-rotate as necessary.

This means that blueprints still don't automate construction, but they do make it faster and less error-prone because we're guaranteed to only put things where the blueprint actually has them as long as we can manage to get the initial placement. We'll have to wait and see if Wube gives us anything.

[Koub]

[Koub] Indeed, didn't take enough time to actually read the suggestion. Merged into similar older suggestion.

[Oktokolo]

Klonan did black magic, breeding biter/conbot hybrids?
(EDIT : Black magic indeed.)

This is, how bots should have worked in vanilla from the start!

[AileTheAlien]

TL;DR

If you start placing buildings on a blueprint, additional placements should snap to the rest of the blueprint.

Why ?

Placing buildings over a blueprint is tedious, because you constantly have to press and release the mouse, and slowly manually align the buildings with the blueprint, so that you don't get a mess of mis-aligned buildings. In contrast, power-poles snap their placement at the maximum distance, just by holding down the mouse and running, so they always look tidy.

What ?

When you're running and holding the mouse to place buildings, they should snap to the nearest building of the same type in the blueprint, similarly to how power poles snap to their maximum distance when they're placed.

[nethus]

you can already do that by activating the snap to grid option. After you do, a blue rectangle will appear around your BP and you can choose between relative (to start anywhere you want whilst dragging) and absolute (helps ensure that if you start placing blueprints from different positions, that they will line up if they ever meet). Test them both, It'll make more sense if you see it in action.

If needed, you can manually change the width and height. For example: If there are big power poles on the edges of your BP, and you want them to overlap if you drag instead of being place right next to each other. Shrink the size by 2 in the relevant direction, and move the rectangle so both big power poles are half in the blue rectangle. (shift + left click in the BP, or fiddle with the X and Y coordinates).

[ChefOfRamen]

you can already do that by activating the snap to grid option.

I don't think that's what they were asking for. I think they were asking to be able to manually build the blueprint faster, by just dragging the mouse over it.

[AileTheAlien]

you can already do that by activating the snap to grid option

I'm not talking about placing blueprints, but placing the buildings after you've already placed the blueprints in the world. This is for when you've already made blueprints, but before you've researched construction robots.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.

[nethus]

I'm not talking about placing blueprints, but placing the buildings after you've already placed the blueprints in the world. This is for when you've already made blueprints, but before you've researched construction robots.

My bad, Sorry I've misunderstood you. That makes a lot of sense indeed.

[Amegatron]

TL;DR

Early game QoL improvement which will allow to place blueprints easier in a form of quickly placing the objects by clicking on ghost entities.

What?

Consider such typical early-game smelting

10-26-2024, 22-40-12.png (2.7 MiB) Viewed 167 times

Currently such blueprint at this stage of the game can only serve as a visual guideline about what to place where, but you still need to place each entity manually, and you can always make a mistake by placing a wrong thing or in a wrong position, etc.

What I suggest is a QoL improvement which will allow you to place entities still manually, but with restriction to the blueprint. For example (two variations):

1) You take an inserter in your hand, and with a special key-bind (smth like Ctrl+LClick) or a special toggleable mode, you can place it only where the blueprint allows, and it will be placed in correct direction. In this case, I could just walk as usual from left to right and just "paint" the inserter over the blueprint, and inserters will only be placed in accordance to the BP. In case of assemblers, for example, the assembler will already be put with the recipe defined by BP.

2) Another option is to just have a separate "blueprint paint" mode, when I click with a mouse on a ghost, an entity from my inventory will be placed according to what the ghost is. So that you don't need to take each item in hand manually or with a pipette.

These two variations can also be combined. For example, if I'm "Ctrl-clicking" with an empty hand over the ghosts, a corresponding entity will be placed from my inventory. If I have a specific item in hand already, only it will be placed when I "paint" over the ghosts. All of these will still take the distance into account, so that I can only "draw" entities close to myself. In other words, I's still manual placement of objects, but quick and reliable in the context of blueprints.

Why?

Such thing will significantly increase the usefulness of blueprints in early game. It will also allow for more experienced players to bootstrap their initial base much quicker. For me personally it's the most annoying thing at early game to just manually place all the entities after I have done it many times already in previous games. I believe such QoL would be truly in the mood of Factorio which intentionally does not punish players for building and rebuilding things.