Chapter 26 ‐ Worker robots part 3 ‐ Blueprints and planners

Previous page: Chapter 25 - Worker robots part 2 - Logistics networks

About planning tools

Planning tool basics

Planning tools in Factorio are used to manage multiple buildings at the same time. They include the blueprint planner, deconstruction planner, upgrade planner, copy-paste tool, and possibly more. They work by selecting a rectangular area such that all the buildings inside can be selected and have an operation applied, such as copying or upgrading or deconstructing. These tools are available as soon as you crash land, but they have limited usefulness until you unlock construction robots. The blueprint tool is a special planner tool that has extra functions.

Controls for using a planning tool

Using a planning tool requires you to take it into hand using a keyboard shortcut. "ALT + D" gives the deconstruction planner. "ALT + U" gives the upgrade planner. "ALT + B" gives you the blueprint planner. The game also includes the copy-paste tool, which is like the blueprint planner without saving, and the cut-paste tool, which has been repurposed by the mod as the instant mining tool. When you remove a planner tool from your hand, sometimes it enters your inventory and sometimes times it does not so that clutter is prevented.

When a planner is in hand, you can press "LEFT BRACKET" on an empty tile to begin selection. This will mark one corner of the new rectangular area being selected. Moving the cursor during selection will update the rectangle and play a sound to indicate that the selection is ongoing. You can finish the selection and apply the effect by pressing "LEFT BRACKET" again, at the point where you want the other corner of the rectangle. Everything between the X and Y values of the two corners will fall inside this rectangle and will be selected for the relevant planner operation if applicable.

You can cancel an ongoing selection by changing the item in hand, such as by pressing "Q" to empty the hand. You can also undo a selection right after you finish it, if you press "CONTROL + Z". For deconstruction and upgrade orders, you can also cancel a previously ordered operation on a building if you select it again and finish the selection with "RIGHT BRACKET" instead of "LEFT BRACKET".

Deconstruction planner

Entities selected by the deconstruction planner get marked for deconstruction, which means that construction robots are ordered to pick them up and put them away, as well as items that were stored inside them. This way, the tool provides an easy way to clear a large area. Successful deconstruction operations require for the robots to have somewhere to take the picked up items, such as a logistic storage chest in a logistic network, or empty player inventory slots for a personal roboport.

Machines marked for deconstruction stop working. Entities that can be selected for deconstruction include player-built structures but also natural entities such as trees and rocks and cliffs. For robots to successfully remove a cliff, they need to acquire cliff explosives.

If you press "CONTROL + Z" to undo a deconstruction order, the deconstruction marks will be erased from buildings, and already-deconstructed buildings will be restored as ghosts so that robots can rebuild them as they were.

Upgrade planner

Entities selected by the upgrade planner get marked for upgrading, if applicable, which means that construction robots are ordered to find their higher tier versions and replace them with them and put the originals in storage. This way, the tool provides an easy way to upgrade a large area. The upgraded versions of buildings need to have the same footprint size and need to be unambiguously the higher tier versions of the buildings. For example, the upgrade planner works for inserters, transport belts, splitters, assembling machines, and stone furnaces.

Blueprints

About blueprints

Blueprints are planning tools that allow you to save and copy the layouts of factory areas. You can then keep these layouts as blueprint items in your inventory. You are able to add labels and descriptions to them as well. You can work with blueprints straight away after crash landing, for uses such as manual building with blueprints, but their usefulness increases when you have construction robots.

When you take an empty blueprint in hand, you can use area selection over a factory area to fill the blueprint with it. When you have a full blueprint in hand, the cursor starts previewing the placement of the blueprint area onto the world, holding it from the top left corner as with a regular building preview. When you place down a blueprint, this places ghosts of the entities instead of the actual ones, but the ghosts have the rotations and other settings that the original machines had. Construction robots can fill the ghosts using building items they find in logistic storage, or your personal construction robots can do the same using items from your inventory. You can also use the ghosts as manual building guidance for yourself, especially when you use the smart pipette tool (press "Q").

A cool feature about blueprints is that they can be shared outside of the game. This is done by exporting them into text strings that someone can copy and then you can paste a string into the game to turn it back into a blueprint. You can use this technique to transfer your own blueprints into text files and then use them across multiple savegames.

Extensive support for blueprints is a major feature for mod version 0.8.

Planning out areas with blueprints

You can put down a blueprint in a new area to see if it would fit there. Or you can reserve areas for specific future constructions by putting down the relevant blueprints there.

Manually building quickly with blueprints

Consider a situation where you are building a repeating design such as a row of furnaces and their inserters. You can create and copy-paste a blueprint of a repeating part so that you lay out the whole row quickly. After checking your ghosts, you can enter cursor mode and quickly start building the blueprint using buildings from your inventory. You can either go down the row from ghost to ghost or you can use the scanner tool to quickly jump between copies of the same ghost, especially via the "HOME" key. Every time the cursor finds a ghost, you can press "Q" to use the pipette tool and get the relevant item into hand and then place it down over the ghost.

Copy-paste tool

The copy-paste tool is a version of the blueprint planner that creates a temporary blueprint in hand. This temporary blueprint cannot be saved as an item unless you give it a name or a description. The copy-paste tool is activated by pressing CONTROL + C. You are also able to recall the last copied temporary blueprint using CONTROL + V. Furthermore, the game allows using the mouse wheel to across between other recently copied blueprints. The mod is unable to offer much information about them apart from what is already available in the blueprint menu.

Blueprint Books

Blueprint books are like portable folder items for storing multiple blueprints. Factorio Access supports importing blueprint books and copying blueprints into your hand from them. However, there is no support yet for creating or editing blueprint books.

Next page: Missing Link