Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow placement of blueprints to remove the missing cable connections on the existing setup.

What ?

When you place a blueprint down, any cable connections that are missing, but are in the blueprint, are added to the setup. I would like the inverse of this to be the case as well, removing any connections that are not in the blueprint. This will only apply to entities fully in the blueprint, so if a power pole is not in the blueprint, no connections will be modified on that pole.

Why ?

I have a number of setups which currently exist, which have tangled messes of cables. I may create setups in the future without first untangling the cables, due to time constraints or mistakes, and then build many instances of those setups. I may have setups that involve multiple setups built on top of each other. In each case, I would like to be able to simply drop a refined blueprint on top of the old blueprint, and have the cables fixed, to look neat and tidy, and not have to deconstruct the entire setup and rebuild it from scratch to avoid random connections I do not want.

IMPORTANT: Have a setting to disable this feature if it's ever implemented.

We do not want a repeat of the mess "blueprint saving copper cables" feature has caused. If I don't want to deal with it I should have the option to turn these kind of features off.

Blueprint saving copper cables?
As in how copper cables, red and green cables are annoyingly inconstant because they cost resources if you put them in manually, but free if the blueprint does them? I still think that it should just be a tool, instead of consuming an item. Power lines already have cables in their cost, after all.

I would say, if ever implemented, it should be part of a mode that I would call “blueprint overwrite”.
Described here viewtopic.php?f=6&t=59554 Hotkey to replace existing structures with blueprint

And the illogical red/green cables
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9092 Free cables/wires (Poles contain all)