Deconstructed entities that have an identical blueprint placed on top should have their deconstruction orders removed.

[Avacado]

TL;DR

An entity that is currently marked as deconstructed, but has a identical ghost of that entity placed on top should just have their deconstruction order canceled.

What ?

Currently, if you deconstruct an area (say with ctrl+x) and then place a blueprint of that same area on top in the exact spot, bots will come by and pick up every single entity and place down a fresh one. Oddly rails are an exception to this and will have their deconstruction orders canceled and bots won't come and pick up the rail and replace it. I understand that this might be a desirable behavior for some entities, for example maybe poles if your goal was to have connections refreshed or chests if your goal was to empty that chest to the logistics network and place a fresh empty box in its place.

Why ?

I've been working with a lot of big blueprints, and if I mess something up, I'd like to be able to deconstruct the whole thing and then place a copy down (because this is the only way to get entities to remove blocking entities), but because the blueprint was already mostly in place, it causes a lot of unneeded and unhelpful work for the bots to do. They simply don't need to pick up every single item and place another one down in its place.

[tehfreek]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GhostBuster

[slippycheeze]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GhostBuster

I support and encourage this suggestion, because that has managed to crash-to-desktop Factorio for me a couple times now. I ended up giving up because it was too annoying (and hard to reproduce) for the benefit it provided me. Which, yes, any CTD is a bug and should be fixed, but also points to there being some need for internal synchronization that isn't available to mods in lua, to my mind.

The mod did prove to me that I would rather like the feature, though, as I thought I would.

[Skjolbir]

+1