Factorio Forums

When you pick landfill you can use "+" to make it bigger.

Why can't you do the same with tiled bluprints?

I.e when you pick landfill it's 2x2 you press "+" to make it 4x4.

When you pick tiled blueprint - it's one tile (say 6 miners), then you press "+" and now you are holding 4 tiles, i.e. 24 tiled miners.

I personally did not think it was even possible to achieve such a thing as blueprints are stored statically within the game data. Perhaps one day a dynamic storage space in this game will be possible.

I do not think this makes any sense. It would be only usable with a small subclass of blueprints which can be built next to each other in both axis and the brush would be effectively only a "square" like 2x2 or 3x3. If a blueprint is reasonably large then having brush anything larger than 1x1 means you may not even see parts of the blueprints placed around. If you would have a standard smelter blueprint that is 11x51, having a brush to build multiple of those in parallel could make sense but then it would also build them in series. Building multiple of those in parallel is simple to do with a simple mouse drag and does not require brush logic as it will snap correctly anyway due to drag building. I will reject this idea.

boskid wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 21, 2023 1:59 pm

I do not think this makes any sense. It would be only usable with a small subclass of blueprints which can be built next to each other in both axis and the brush would be effectively only a "square" like 2x2 or 3x3. If a blueprint is reasonably large then having brush anything larger than 1x1 means you may not even see parts of the blueprints placed around. If you would have a standard smelter blueprint that is 11x51, having a brush to build multiple of those in parallel could make sense but then it would also build them in series. Building multiple of those in parallel is simple to do with a simple mouse drag and does not require brush logic as it will snap correctly anyway due to drag building. I will reject this idea.

You are right indeed: quite few blueprints would need this feature. However consider that thouse blueprints may be used much more often than other blueprints. So if you count not blueprint types but their uses it becomes not so obvious that this feature isn't needed.

Blueprints where it would be useful:
- Mining setups - used very often, maybe the most used type of blueprints ever
- All multiline factories

I think this would be great with a modification. Instead of just + increasing grid size by one in width and height, a dialogue option that lets you write what multiplier you want directly for each axis.

boskid wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 21, 2023 1:59 pm

I do not think this makes any sense. It would be only usable with a small subclass of blueprints which can be built next to each other in both axis and the brush would be effectively only a "square" like 2x2 or 3x3. If a blueprint is reasonably large then having brush anything larger than 1x1 means you may not even see parts of the blueprints placed around. If you would have a standard smelter blueprint that is 11x51, having a brush to build multiple of those in parallel could make sense but then it would also build them in series. Building multiple of those in parallel is simple to do with a simple mouse drag and does not require brush logic as it will snap correctly anyway due to drag building. I will reject this idea.

My modification to the suggestion gives you the option of only multiplying in one axis if that's what you want.

One reason few blueprints work well in a grid is the lack of tools. I often make grid blueprints and making a 32x32 square of some small chunk blueprint for each modification to test out is quite annoying, always requires manually making several larger and larger multiplications to get the right size and thousands of instances somewhat quickly.

Blueprints becoming big when you multiply them so you can't see edges isn't a uniqueissue with the suggestion, it's just Factorio being bad at handling any big bllueprint well. With this suggestion making a big grid placement wouldn't destroy alignment settings, like manually making larger and larger grids do. And with alignment you can place from map and see all of it.