Factorio Forums

PacifyerGrey
This is actually what I meant. You draw a rectangle (anywhere on the game view, no need to be close to it), it just won't let you stretch past 10x10 tiles. After you release left mouse button - you immediately get to interface similar to placing ghosts with a blueprint (and that's where analogy with blueprints ends). You can drag it and rotate it. If you are close enough and have all items in your inventory - you can place it with left clicking. If you are not close enough - everything will be shown in red. If you are close enough, but do not have some items in the inventory, lacking entities will be shown in orange. You still can shift-click to perform partial placement like with usual blueprints, so entities that cannot be placed due to something beneath them or due to lack of items in the inventory will be omitted. After left clicking, that "blueprint" still remains in your cursor as with usual blueprints, so you can run ahead and place several copies (you can even hold left mouse button and keep running, so they will be automatically placed as long as there is space/inventory-items), or you can run to another corner of the map and place it there if you want so. But while it's in your hand you can't do anything else (as if you were holding real blueprint or a piece of iron). Once you hit Q - cursor returns to empty. I see it as a "copy-paster" or something like that in your toolbelt, similar to deconstruction-planner.

As for reach distance - I agree that 7x7 would be too small and with 10x10 you would be able to "cheat" and place items 10 tiles afar which you normally can't. I like your criteria that if you can reach any item - you can place all of them. This way you will not be able to use copy mechanism to copy single entity and place it 10 tiles afar - it will be limited to reach distance of that single entity, and cheating through adding fake proxy entities to copy-from region to make a reach is too tedious to be worth it.

PacifyerGrey wrote:However such an idea would prevent early game usage of a blueprint library (if its good or bad) but the feature would be useful anyways.

Good. I would use this much more often than blueprints... they're pretty much useless anyways until you have the power armor and personal bots.

Zeblote wrote:

PacifyerGrey wrote:However such an idea would prevent early game usage of a blueprint library (if its good or bad) but the feature would be useful anyways.

Good. I would use this much more often than blueprints... they're pretty much useless anyways until you have the power armor and personal bots.

They aren't useless to me. I know you can't place them without bots, but even setting basic lines of underground pipe is annoying to me without first using Blueprints. Laying long tracks down of pipe or belt underground without them is tedious.

My suggestion would be to make the Blueprints request pieces only be placed the way they're intended until the Ghost print is removed. If I lay a pipe facing left blueprint, my character placing a pipe there should face left regardless of direction it's placed. This would make blueprints far more useful as filling them in is what is troublesome and feels like building the object twice as you have to readjust every piece, twice.

MKNZ wrote:Laying long tracks down of pipe or belt underground without them is tedious.

It'd be pretty convenient if placing pipes and conveyors worked more like placing rails works. With conveyors especially it'd help prevent the ever annoying "bump into another conveyor while trying to lay your line and now you've accidentally placed several tiles-worth in the wrong spot and have to pick them back up and try again".

MKNZ wrote:My suggestion would be to make the Blueprints request pieces only be placed the way they're intended until the Ghost print is removed.

Please, THIS!

To be honest, I wish the idea for "Simple" recipes would have been kept! I really liked them when I'd heard because of the idea of "Hey, here's a mode for if you want to try and complete a play through in less time", or potentially adding a new category for people who do speed-runs (I still remember watching a sub 2 hours speed-run of the game on YouTube, it was quite a sight to behold!). That's just my two cents though.