Factorio Forums

Thanks to my little GhostFinder mod I found some wall pieces that were ghosts but clearly were not ghosts when I arrived. After experimenting for quite some time I finally managed to reproduce it.

While these images and instructions are for wall this works with any entity over any other entity! turrets over assemblers, inserters on turrets. etc.

1. img Start deconstruction on entities outside of construction range.
2. img Place ghosts over items to be deconstructed. Manually or with blueprint. Doesn't matter.
3. img Cancel deconstruction
4. img Walk into range of ghosts and bots keep trying to place stuff where they can't.

The workaround is to properly deconstruct the affected area and rebuild.

Yes, don't do that if you don't want them to get stuck.

Ok. I wasn't sure if this was intended or not. Happened during the construction of the outer rim for my "Great Wall" project. I assume I misplaced the blueprint. Deconstructed it, replaced it, then canceled deconstruction on the parts that were actually ok. I have no idea how long the original wall ghosts were there before I discovered them with my mod.

When player placed ghosts had a limited life I could see this being ok but now that they are permanent this poses a real problem. Other than using a mod, such as mine, to locate ghosts or noticing your bots getting stuck placing something when you go by there is the potential to never notice the problem, ever. You can't even see the ghost that is "under" a real entity because the old purple timer health bar thing is no more. I feel like this could be a silent problem for many players.

With so many people running into the issue of the bot-to-ghost-job rate limit I wonder if the "fix" would be to render the ghosts at a higher "z-index" so they appear on top of real entities. Meaning both entity-ghosts and tile-entity. This way players would know that, "Hey, there is a ghost there and it shouldn't be any."

Or perhaps add a key bind that "rotates" the z-index of entities rendering order or turns some overlay on/off so hidden ghosts can be seen? This way ghosts don't prohibit reaching the real entity.

• Default = real entites on top.
• Next = entity-ghost on top.
• Last = tile-ghost on top.
• List starts over.