Better mechanism for hand building over ghosts before robots

[OldVamp]

I was thinking about this today, "It would be nice to just hold q (pipette) and click drag over the blueprints."

[Koub]

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

[BlueTemplar]

Hmm, I'm surprised nobody mentioned Picker Ghost Reviver from Picker Extended ?
(Auto-places entities when you have one like it in your cursor and hover over a ghost of it.)

[tpaine]

Ghost Construction Mode

A mode where only ghosted items or tiles can manually put down on the map. The player must select the right item from their inventory (ie yellow belts) but anywhere the player clicks, if there is a ghost of that item then it will put the item down in the correct orientation. Anywhere there is not a ghost of that item, or there is a ghost of a different item, causes the cursor to act in a similar fashion to attempting to place an item too far away from the player.

Boring backstory

I'm a little over a 1k hours into the game and I've just started my third base. This time I'm not skipping any tech trees and instead trying to move through each tier in as organic a way as possible. One thing I found a but frustrating is the early game use of ghost building and blueprints. I didn't even see the point of using them without construction bots with my first two factories but I now appreciate the value of building with ghost first so that you can really plan things out. Yet it's pretty tedious to go through all the effort to plan everything out only to have to constantly reset your tool for each twist and turn of a belt never mind trying to build a wall thats more complicated than a straight line. Obviously there has to be some friction which is why I added the requirement that the proper item be selected. This might even be handy in late game when you don't have the patience to wait for your bots but you don't want to mess up delicate blueprints.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into the "QoL for hand building on ghosts in early game" thread.

[hurricup]

For example:
Make a ghost for loading/unloading station with steel boxes, inserters and stuff.
Personally take a steel box from the inventory and start filling the ghost keeping mouse down.
Move a mouse pointer to the nearby other item (inserter, for example)

Expected:
- steel box won't be placed instead of inserter ghost

Actually:
- it does

Would also be nice if mouse is pressed with item in the hand and i'm dragging through the ghost, cursor behaved smart, not just moved wherever my hand flinched.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into the "QoL for hand building on ghosts in early game" thread.