Factorio Forums

TL;DR
Treat them as obstacles for manual building, inherit rotation/type, lock on ghost when click-and-run so you don't spam over empty tiles.

Why?
Currently ghosts interact in no way with manual building and frequently get in your way as you can erase them with a single left-misclick. In the end even devs (like me or kovarex) are not using them as they are just like a decorative, as you have to click every single entity anyway, perform rotations, etc.. and you have a setup of already built 2-4 smelters/assemblers as a reference. The idea is to make Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V useful in early game, and to make ghosts your friends by providing snapping to them in a Click-and-run Factorio way of doing things. I know there's ghost builder mod out there, but it's a bit OP and does not require clicking. Those early smelting and circuit assembly lines are the main thing I frequently don't want to start a new game from the scratch - it's just too tedious, and not meditating because of a lot of tile-precise clicks and rotations with frequent mishaps - all those things we try to avoid via pole-dragging builds, auto-undergrounds, etc...

Details
So, let's start with this one If you misplace a furnace, it will show that there are ghosts underneath. But it will still allow you to place one. It shouldn't, you can always clear out ghosts by sweep-right-clicking. So if you are forbidden to place over ghosts (unless same type), that will solve the problem. There is another issue though - even with this limitation it's easy to spam a lot of unnecessary inserters or power poles on empty tiles which are not supposed to be in there. So this situation will end up with this situation To avoid this situation here comes the kung-fu when during manual building first successful drop was over a ghost - the rest of the build is locked on that entity type untill left mouse button is released! That will solve the problem completely. Also, when manual build enters this state all heuristics like power pole connection/coverage and belt assistant should be turned off. On par of belts - I'd say that holding belt entity type should also be applied to undergrounds and probably splitters (also for pipe/underground) to resemble the way they work during manual build. Inserter types shouldn't - it's would to be too OP, so you still have to make one run for basic inserters, one for fast inserters, one for long inserters, and another one for inserters on the other side

Another situation is that you may have several inserters, but with different directions The remedy for this - when building over a ghost inherit not only recipe/filters, but also flipping/rotation. It works like that for assembling machines, chem-plants and refineries (for some reason not for drills), but it should be like this for everything, esp. belts/splitters and inserters. This is extremely important feature for manually building over belt balancers - just hold belt item in cursor and click-hover over entire setup, and get everything ready. Currently you have heck of a headache performing every rotation manually and rotating/connecting undergrounds properly.

So, I guess that's it. As for initial example, after 1st run for yellow inserters, 2nd for red ones, 3rd for furnaces it will result in this with just 3 click-and-run: So, to recap:
1. Ghosts are your friends, and if it's there - entity is already there in space-tick continuum, so respect it.
2. Do not allow building over ghost by off-by-one tile errors or wrong entity type.
3. Enemy ghosts are enemies and should not interfere and be deleted just like friendlies now do.
4. Inherit rotation/flipping/tier of a ghost as well
5. When successfully building over ghost - lock onto just ghosts of that type, skip empty tiles.
6. ???
7. PROFIT!

From what i remember this is intentional by design. Ghosts are for construction robots and any attempts to make ghosts easier for manual building is rejected because buffing this would mean that construction robots would get a relative nerf (lower impact of having them researched).

boskid wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2026 8:02 am From what i remember this is intentional by design. Ghosts are for construction robots and any attempts to make ghosts easier for manual building is rejected because buffing this would mean that construction robots would get a relative nerf (lower impact of having them researched).

Yes, I remember that. This suggestion is to minimize that nerfing while still removing annoyances.

There is a difference between nerfing by making things less time consuming, and quite another is doing that by imposing annoyances. This solution addresses removing annoyance of off-by-one-tile adjustments, and frequently hitting the 'R' button. This falls in line with automatic power poles for max-distance (kovarex), later for power coverage (so that no mining drill stays unpowered, was me btw). Then underground pipes auto-flipping, and "recently" highlighting best spot for underground pipe/belt with green hint. So think of it as of yet another best spot snapping augmentation. Bots are as cute as biters, they shouldn't be nerfed of course.

Comments:

From what i remember this is intentional by design. Ghosts are for construction robots and any attempts to make ghosts easier for manual building is rejected because buffing this would mean that construction robots would get a relative nerf (lower impact of having them researched).

1) Construction bots are so extremely useful that making ghosts the slightest bit convenient would not noticeably detract from their immense usefulness.
2) Ghosts right now have a number of annoying properties (like those mentioned in this thread) which make them exhausting to handle in the early game. That may be fine in one's first campaign, but in new campaigns my #1 priority is always making a beeline for construction robots because of how comparatively unusable / painful blueprints feel without them.

This falls in line with automatic power poles for max-distance (kovarex),

3) I'll add here that I was really confused by ghost behavior because I knew that I could place power poles by dragging power poles over a ghost blueprint, tried to do the same with stone furnaces with 1-tile gaps in between, and got the off-by-one problem instead. I must've tried that 5+ times until I realized that what I thought was universal behavior, wasn't. For UI consistency alone, it would make a lot of sense to have all attempts to build over ghosts follow the same logic as the power poles.

There is a difference between nerfing by making things less time consuming, and quite another is doing that by imposing annoyances.

+1

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Finally, I posted a somewhat related thread here: 134277, "Ghost rails lack train placement previews".

Bots not just useful, right now they are bit less than irreplaceble as soon as you get some real playtime.

I quite literally get a few people who had whole new experience after I FORCED them to make some bots

Any QoL improvement of pre-bots level cannot "nerf" bots in any way. From lowes level of play (litteraly zero exprirance) to speedrunner/megabasers improvement to pre-bot ghosting will just made road to bots bit smoother.

boskid wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2026 8:02 am From what i remember this is intentional by design. Ghosts are for construction robots and any attempts to make ghosts easier for manual building is rejected because buffing this would mean that construction robots would get a relative nerf (lower impact of having them researched).

I will add here that for anyone who thinks this quoted argument holds water (I don't), that Space Age has further strengthened construction bots relative to ghosts in several ways. For instance, campaigns are way longer than before, so players spend proportionally less time in the pre-logistics ghost phase. And Space Age introduced various UI improvements, like the improved remote map view, which are all but required to play on multiple planets, and that play style absolutely requires using construction bots.

So from this perspective, Space Age gave construction bots an enormous relative buff over ghosts. And thus, if we follow the initial argument to its conclusion, ghosts need to be "buffed" just to restore the previous status quo.

This struggle is mostly about manual building over ghosts vs. pre-logistic-network personal construction bots

+1

I would love to see this suggestion implemented into the game. I think this type of feature is important for new and unexperienced players. Having there be a major newbie filter (in this case, pre-robot gameplay) is something no developer should aim to maintain.

Something curious about Factorio is that Rimworld is about 2 times better at converting owners to players than Factorio (More concurrent players in between updates, less ownership). Rimworld is by no means a simple game, especially with its DLCs. I find the games similar in a way that they're both about DESIGN.

In that regard, RImworld wins, because you can start designing from the very start and it's as simple to use in the beginning as it is in the end. In Factorio if you want to design without exploding from frustration, you'll have to work towards bots or play with a sandbox mod... or just play with mods like smart cursor, nanobots, lazybuilder, etc.

After playing with a mod that instantly constructs things around you and getting to robots... the robots still feel like a major and amazing upgrade. Because in the end you are still walking around, having to carry everything in inventory and be limited by your hand range. Your base is now bigger - you have to run for way longer (and navigate more obstacles by car or tank), so the problem balances itself out. Hand-placement will always be incredibly weaker no matter how many crazy buffs to it you have.

Now, we can all wave it away and say it's a skill issue. It is. But why should aiming at tiles be an important skill in a DESIGN game in the first place? Clearly feature like smart belt placement and smart pole placement demonstrate that it does not detract anything from the game.

So, I fully support your suggestions. I even have one of my own here (134483), that only aims at fixing the ghost placement by introducing snap to buildings bigger than one tile. Which is (relatively) easy to implement, has almost no difficulty impact but will pay off for early game frustration.

boskid wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2026 8:02 am From what i remember this is intentional by design. Ghosts are for construction robots and any attempts to make ghosts easier for manual building is rejected because buffing this would mean that construction robots would get a relative nerf (lower impact of having them researched).

In my experience it always felt like Factorio has the opposite problem - blueprints for manual construction are not incentivized enough, it's a great tool, but it's underutilized.

boskid wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2026 8:02 am From what i remember this is intentional by design. Ghosts are for construction robots and any attempts to make ghosts easier for manual building is rejected because buffing this would mean that construction robots would get a relative nerf (lower impact of having them researched).

Well, if at least 1st thing gets implemented (forbid building over same-force ghosts unless same type) would already be helpful and it's like 1-line-of-code changer.

Inheriting rotation for belts/pipes/inserters - I'd say yes for the sake of conformance with how it works for assemblers/chems/refineries, and for the same sake of not overwriting your original intentions with something different (orientation is as important as filters/recipes).

Locking on ghost type for running is probably OP, so skip that one.

+1 for the countless times a tree, a belt, a inserter or SOMETHING moves me one tile away when placing a chain of something and then i have to undo it and then it undos the whole chain i just did, so i have to get my deconstruction planner out to undo the undo because of it.

Just have it so when your placing down blueprints to not have it override other blueprints or something, i have came to a point where i just cheat in robots because of how obnoxious it is to place manual blueprints because of this.

or lock it to that item

or have it like poles where when you have it over a blueprint, it only places that item over that same item where its blueprinted.

I can not stress how often that has happened.

I also can not move my mouse perfectly horizontal or vertical to place blueprints, due to disabilities, as accessibility is incredibly important for any game

+1million