TL;DR
If a blueprint is pulled from the blueprint menu or a blueprint book and the exact same one already exists in the players inventory it should be used instead of creating a duplicate blueprint.What ?
I find myself constantly going to the blueprint menu to grab blueprints instead of searching for an existing one in my inventory. As a result I am constantly ending up with duplicate blueprint templates that fill up my inventory and later need to be purged. This results in a bunch of unnecessary clicks to first open the blueprint and click the delete button.- factorio_blueprint_duplicates.PNG (200.62 KiB) Viewed 1105 times
Notice the duplicates in the image above. I find that my train templates are often a culprit. Observe the train template in the top right is actually different even though that cannot be deduced from the icon alone.
Blueprints can be checked for similarity by comparing their import/export strings.
This suggestion does not intend to cover all use cases for creating duplicate blueprints (such as creating the same one twice). Instead it is to specifically address the use case above of duplicate blueprints coming from the blueprint menu.
Why ?
By preventing duplicates from the blueprint book it reduces the amount of clutter in the players inventory.I see no use case of having an extra blueprint be created when the same one already exists in ones inventory. Transferring blueprints between players can easily be done by either the blueprint book or by giving it to another player and recreating it. Since blueprints are now "free" items that provide no tangible physical items preventing duplicates does not result in any loss to the player.