Factorio Forums

I've been running into an annoying issue lately. I have made all these blueprints that I want to reuse in new maps, factories, simply moving around or whatever. But every time I have to ask myself what the 4-8 or more different resource inputs are supposed to be and where exactly on which belt or half-belt they are supposed to go. This makes me have to reverse-engineer my own blueprints and clear up the mess when I get things wrong.

Is there any way to mark my blueprints with this information somehow? If not, how do you guys keep track of this information and do you think it would be a worthy addition to the game?

Ideally I'd want to be able to add a non-entity ghost image of the material to the blueprint that will also show up in the world when the blueprint is placed but not be built or placed by any construction robots.

Filter inserters.

Or the other thing I have seen people do is put combinators with the resource selected which supposed to be inserted. Obviously this would require modifying a working setup before blueprinting it.

I use the constant combinator approach.

But the approach has some minor flaws:
- Constant combinator don't show their contents by default. You have to change an option to make them do it.
- The option is not granular enough. When you change it, it affects the display of all combinator and the display for arithmetic and logic combinator is less than ideal... making the blueprint harder to understand.

Still, it is better than nothing.

zOldBulldog wrote: Mon Oct 22, 2018 6:56 am I use the constant combinator approach.

But the approach has some minor flaws:
- Constant combinator don't show their contents by default. You have to change an option to make them do it.
- The option is not granular enough. When you change it, it affects the display of all combinator and the display for arithmetic and logic combinator is less than ideal... making the blueprint harder to understand.

Still, it is better than nothing.

I actually have that always on.

There are also mods to have player placable signs. Maybe adapt on of them for marking inputs.

Super ghetto method is to include it in the title.

Eg "Red chips, iron/plastic top, copper bottom"

DaveMcW wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:34 pm Filter inserters.

I've come to use this method, it's a bit annoying with the blinking "power off" sign or running pointless poles to them but it works well enough.

mrvn wrote: Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:05 am There are also mods to have player placable signs. Maybe adapt on of them for marking inputs.

I see this as the ideal solution, it feels like such a core issue though that everyone with larger blueprints seem to run into that it shouldn't need a mod to do.

Grynet wrote: Tue Oct 23, 2018 1:28 pm I see this as the ideal solution, it feels like such a core issue though that everyone with larger blueprints seem to run into that it shouldn't need a mod to do.

Well many blueprints don't need it. eg Solar power, boilers + steam engines, nuclear, generic load/unload stations, smelter arrays. For most of the rest it's simple to just examine a few of the assembler to work out what needs to be where. That said if the devs want to implement something, I wouldn't object.