Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When a building is destroyed, a ghost of it should automatically be placed in the location where it was destroyed. This already happens when you have construction robots, but I propose it should happen always (via a setting)

What ?

I tend to find that, especially in the early game, when I am first building my factory, I will often be attacked by biters who will take out 1-2 buildings. While the notification very helpfully tells me what was destroyed, it doesn't tell me where, and I generally feel annoyed having to figure out exactly where a building was. Especially if multiple buildings were taken out, it could be hard to remember exactly where everything was.

I propose a setting be added to the options menu to automatically create a ghost for any building which was destroyed, at it's location.

This is already existing behaviour for logistics networks.

Why ?

This will both decrease the memory hassle when rebuilding a base, and will also increase the speed as it's much easier to simply press Q a bunch of times rather than having to replace everything manually.

This is already a feature unlocked by Construction robotics research, which also enables their automated replacement and can be researched relatively soon after acquiring oil.

I would say it is a deliberate choice (much as you must unlock assembling machines to enable automated crafting, which can be seen as a QoL improvement) so I am not sure about this in the base game, but it is something that can be introduced by a mod, eg
even Earlier Entity Ghosts (I have never tried it, it is just the first one I found).

The way I see it, Quality of Life features that make automating things easier being tied to research == good, as it is essentially the way progression in this game works. Things that were previously manual are now automatic.

While I can see your point that it's somewhat similar here, I feel like the general level of annoyance isn't really worth it, and you're already getting the benefit of construction bots by researching construction robotics. "Double dipping" by automating construction AND automating entity ghosts seems like a bit too much, especially given than by that point in the game, players are far more likely to have a proper base set up which will be more able to withstand biters.

I guess that automating stuff that the player used to have to do manually as a form of progression == good, but wasting their time after they get attacked == bad, but obviously this is somewhat subjective.

I will check out that mod, thanks.

I could imagine, that an argument is also, that it's not obvious to new players, what those "weird transparent things" are.
So, it should at least be an option, which is default "off" to don't confuse new players. New player experience is kinda important for such complex games.

Otherwise, I like the idea and can help massively to rebuild a destroyed sections by hand. Esp. in deathworld settings
+1

It could be coupled to previous games like the blueprints and deconstruction and upgrade planers in the toolbar. Once you researched the tech they are available in all future games.

The nice thing about ghosts is that you can just place the entity over them and they will automatically resurrect their recipe and circuit programming. So even without bots they are quite useful.

It should really be a toggleable option, like the research queue.