Factorio Forums

Hello All,

A suggestion concerning the controls of blueprint placement:

• I think it would be beneficial to implement the current blueprint control scheme
• Currently: Shift-click with a blueprint sets natural obstacles to be demolished and adds ghosts for construction of new items
• New: Ctrl+Shift+Click with a blueprint to set ALL natural and player obstacles to be demolished and add ghosts for construction of new items - no boundary logic required i.e. any unexpected belt or pipe behavior would need to be fixed by the player manually.

Why: The [relatively] difficult keyboard shortcut is a safety precaution which would ensure that people don't accidentally run this command. The command itself would be used for the removal by blueprint of lower tier or outdated blueprints. For example, a furnace layout could be quickly replaced with a steel furnace layout with fast belts. An array or inserters could very quickly be replaced with fast inserters, lower tier balancer designs can be replaced with fast or express versions very quickly (more implementations could surely be provided by players).
Concerning the objection that the demolition planner can already be set to filter whatever items are required to be replaced: 1) this is a convenience that skips the creation of custom demo planners. 2) This allows for flexibility that a filtered deconstruction planner does not - a filtered planner would remove ALL items of a type within a boundary, even if you were to want some to stay, whereas a blueprint could be very specific in what items would be removed/replaced.