Unlock Blueprints Factorio
Reggie Lamborn
Blueprints are items that contain building layouts. Blueprints are used to 'copy & paste' parts of a factory. Built areas can be selected for inclusion in a blueprint. When a blueprint is placed, a ghost of the layout appears on the ground. This can be used as a guide for manually placing factory pieces, or, more commonly, handed over to construction robots for automated completion.
Blank blueprints can be crafted by clicking the ( ) button in the shortcut bar. The blank blueprint can now be used to 'copy' a set of buildings. For example, copying this small gun turret defense setup:
To create a blueprint select the blueprint item out of the toolbar or the inventory.With the blueprint icon shown next to the mouse cursor, click and hold the left mouse button and drag a box as large as needed (which can be cancelled by pressing Q).
All player-placed entities which will be included in the blueprint will be highlighted with a green square.Once everything you intend to 'copy' is inside the drag box, release the mouse button and the 'Blueprint icon setup' menu will open.
On the top left of the "Setup new blueprint" menu there are four icon slots. These are displayed on the blueprint's icon and can be used to quickly identify a blueprint. When creating a new blueprint, the game automatically selects some of the icons representing the entities in the blueprint.
The green "Create blueprint" button creates the blueprint. Additionally, blueprint creation can be cancelled by clicking the X in the top right corner. Canceling the blueprint does not consume the blueprint item. The created blueprint will replace the empty blueprint in the player's cursor.
Placing a blueprint creates ghost entities. If these are within the green (or orange) 110110 tiles area of a roboport, or within range of a personal roboport installed in modular armor or spidertron, construction robots may be able to build them using available materials.
After the blueprint gets placed somewhere, the buildings are placed as ghost buildings.Construction robots will now start to pick up the needed items from the construction network/the player inventory (if using a personal roboport) and place them at the ghost buildings.
It is possible to export blueprints as a text string and import said text string to create a new blueprint. This makes sharing blueprints between players very easy.
Clicking the Export to string button ( ) in the top right of the blueprint edit window will pop up a window containing the Blueprint string. This string can be copied to the operating system clipboard, from where it could be saved to a text file or uploaded to a website.
To import a blueprint, the player can click the Import string icon on the shortcut bar ( ). A dialogue box will appear into which the string can be pasted. This will result in a blueprint appearing on the hand with the same setup as the one that was exported.
The text string itself is a base64 encoded, compressed JSON string which contains all the information of the blueprint. It is therefore possible to decode/decompress the text string, change attributes of the blueprint in the JSON text and finally re-encode/compress it back to the known text string format. This basically allows blueprint editing outside of the game itself.
Hello,
I'm going to cover a feature I only just finished.
I was thinking about this idea for years already.
I always thought the feature is too hardcore to be included, but I learned that it is usually a mistake to underestimate the players, so I gave it a go, and decided to share it right away.
This naturally leads to the definition of what we want: We want to have a blueprint which doesn't have a specific item configuration, but rather is generic, and allows you to configure it differently each time you build it.
The first and most simple usage of this UI is to change all occurrences of some item or number in the blueprint to something else. If I want to change all the places where [X] signal is used in the blueprint to be [Y], I just change the value in the UI and confirm. The blueprint was just re-configured.
The same with changing all fives in a blueprint.
Practically every setting and number you can have in an entity can be reconfigured by this feature. Inserter filters, assembler recipes, circuit network settings, combinator configuration, logistic requests, inventory filters, even rich text icons.
The last one can be used to change the name of the train stop, as long as you make a rich text part of it.
These have no meaning outside of the parametrisation context, they are used just for the blueprint generic configuration. They are normally not selectable anywhere in the game outside the blueprint configuration menu, but for power users, there is an interface settings to make them actually available everywhere.
Here I specified all of the 3 IDs to be parameters, and the number 5 used in both of the items, to be parametrised as well. Filling up the name is not necessary, but it is useful for the user of the blueprint to know what is he asked for in the next step, when the blueprint is being built.
So this is already useful, but still not good enough. Why? Because sometimes parameters are expected to be related to each other, and forcing the user of the blueprint to always fill them up correctly is not good form.
What do I mean by the dependencies? Lets say, I have a blueprint to craft an item with 3 ingredients (parameters 1, 2, 3), and take the ingredients from the train network.
Naturally, I can make a big setup with 3 input stations each parametrised to be one of the inputs and row of assembling machines, parametrised to create the desired item (parameter 0).
But whenever I want to build this blueprint, I would have to remember and manually fill the 3 ingredients for the desired item, which would not only slow me down, but also open the possibility of a mistake.
Parameter 1,2,3 are set to be ingredients of the parameter 0, so when this blueprint is being built, only the value of parameter 0 is asked for, and the remaining values are automatically filled out.
We have a blueprint where 3 numbers are present, 100, 101 and 200. But for some reason, we only want the user to modify the value of 100, but the contraption just needs the second number to be 1 bigger, and the 3rd number to be double of the first.
This is why each parametrised number can be assigned a variable, and its value can be used in math formulas in all of the subsequent dependent numbers.
Factorio has been compared to programming many times, and this is just another part of the analogy. Almost everything you can do with parametrised blueprints can be done through circuit network logic, so it looks almost redundant.
In programming, the parallel is the compile time function execution versus runtime function execution. Basically, if you know the result of the computation already while compiling the program, it would be a waste to calculate it every time the program is ran, you can just put the number directly into the program. Which is very similar to knowing, that this setup will always be filtered to take iron gear-wheels, so it feels little bit wasteful to make a circuit network logic around it, just to simplify the building process.
Hello. With Christmas nearly upon us, life in the office has slowed down nearlyto the point of complete hibernation. But we still bring you your scheduledprogramme to give you something to look forward to in the next year.
For the past few weeks, I've been working on our shiny new blueprint library. Wealready introduced the library in FFF 161, but to briefly recapitulate: The blueprint library is a place for you to keep your blueprints, and it does twothings for you:
With a bit of work, we've managed to make it so that you can simply move a blueprint from the library window into your hotbar like you would any other item. Converting the blueprint record into a blueprint item is handled mostly transparently.
One of the changes is that it displays the blueprint name under its icon. Didyou know you could rename blueprints? You can, even in 0.14. Naming blueprintswill be very useful with the library, as you can stuff only so much informationinto the preview icon to help you remember which blueprint is which.
I'm still not completely convinced that this is the correct place for GameBlueprints to be. Game Blueprints are somewhat special in that they are tied toa specific save, and in this sense, they don't belong to the leftpanel. However, introducing a third panel would make the window too wide in myopinion. The interface is still very much work in progress, though, and perhapswe'll figure out an even better way to do it soon.
Seeing how much of a struggle a handful of GUI windows can mean for us, we'vebeen looking for a UI and UX designer. And as a bit of an early Christmas gift,we actually found one! Say hello to Norbert, our official GUI guy.
Another point Norbert made was that the old GUI didn't make it entirely clearthat you could select which icons would show up on the blueprint item in yourinventory. And while we're at it, why not make the preview icon larger so youcan see the icons better?
Blueprints are one of the most genius systems at work in Factorio, and it's a crime that many players don't know how to make proper use of Blueprints to save time and effort when building their factories.
Our Factorio Blueprints guide will not only walk you through how to get started using and creating blueprints, but also invite you to use RPS's very own Factorio Blueprint Book (along with a few other community-made blueprints) to help kickstart your factory!
For the purposes of this guide, I decided to go back and freshen up all the Blueprints I made years back and still regularly use to this day. And thus, I present the first (and probably only) RPS Factorio Blueprint Book. Woohoo!
This book contains 12 Blueprints, meant to take you comfortably from the very start of a Factorio game into the mid-game and beyond. Let's take a look at each of these Blueprints and how they are to be used.
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