Don't allow construction bots to take last Item from hand

[kosievdmerwe]

TL;DR

When personal roboport construction robots take items from the stack you're holding in your hand, don't allow them to take the last one.

What ?

The idea is pretty simple and I can't think how to expound on it anymore.

Why ?

You're building something and then realise you don't have enough items to finish it. So you decide to place ghosts while you're in the right mindset and the plan is still fresh.

If you have a personal roboport and robots, they'll place items as you ghost them. Which means that eventually they'll take the last item from your hand making it so that you can't place ghosts anymore. Unless you do some dumb and annoying workaround like take off your armor, put the robots in the trash slot or set up a blue print.

[bobucles]

I'll just keep placing some ghosts and OOPS no more items lol. This is also a huge annoyance with "q" placement. You want to copy something and build ghosts but if it isn't in your inventory, welp lol.

I think a superior solution is to let the player place items without having them in hand. If there's nothing in the inventory, it simply treats the command as ghost placement. That way it doesn't matter if robots take your items or not because the cursor is always available.

[mp0011]

How do You place ghost of something without having it "in hand"?

I believe, it can be easily moded into game:
Middle Click in crafting menu, if item is placeable = item ghost in hand - created ad-hoc virtual blueprint with single item, vanishing after seelcting something else, or "Q".

However, You still can not place ghosts of not discovered items...

[ikarikeiji]

+1 to mp0011's post. I'd like to be able to ghost-place items I have researched but not got in my inventory.

But perhaps instead of middle-clicking craftable items it could be implemented as pressing "q" while hovering over a craftable item in the menu just like pressing "q" while hovering over a built entity in the world?

[bobucles]

Hmm? You can definitely place blueprints of any item in the game, regardless of the tech level. Start up a new map and plant down a nuclear setup. It's definitely possible. What blueprints can't do is program machines with recipes that aren't unlocked. This is to prevent an exploit for skipping tech unlocks with blueprints.

I think it'd be a great idea for the eyedropper tool to be upgraded into a form of hybrid "quick blueprint" tool. Tap an item and you can place it or ghost it just like now. If the player's inventory runs out then it just switches to pure ghost mode aka "a blueprint of one thing". To take this idea even further, a bonus upgrade would be to hold Q and drag an area to make a large eyedropper selection. In this way it's a "quick blueprint" mode. In either mode tapping Q again will disable the eyedropper.

I'm one of those players who keep a blank blueprint on their hotbar for quick one shot blueprints. Putting this functionality into the eyedropper tool would be great.

[mp0011]

For now, simplest solution is just to have book full of such one item blueprints...

[Skeletpiece]

+10