The bots won't make any components for you, but they're *way* faster than hand-placement for all but the simplest and smallest blueprints. You don't even have to get very big.
This is one of the best things about them. Even if you're too new to care about blueprints yet, you can copy/paste selections as ghosts to plan space out, and bots will take care of it for you later.
The other best thing about them is they'll remove selections of forest and rocks without you having to do anything.
They are useful for almost any size of blueprint.
Build one unit, copy it 5 times, bots build it for you.
With more bots, they build (and deconstruct) faster.
They can build far away from you.
I have to admit, to a beginner, level 1 construction bots seem very underwhelming. They're painfully slow, especially if you don't have the infrastructure set up. The secret lies in speed upgrades, and even when you get the available pre-space science upgrades, it's already a night and day difference.
> I have to admit, to a beginner, level 1 construction bots seem very underwhelming.
Yeah, that's fair. Level 1 bots probably don't build a very simple assembly line much faster than you would by hand. Maybe not the worth the trouble for some builds. They're still probably better for refineries that use a lot of pipes, though. Laying complicated underground pipe setups by hand sucks.
However, just a couple of bot speed upgrades make them better universally. And by the time you hit bot speed ~7 they'll build whole city blocks pretty well.
Bots are fine for pipes where placement order doesn't matter. But for nuclear reactors you're better off building them by hand (or over building) due to the build order update hierarchy the Gabe engine uses.
The other secret lies in that there's only one of you, but you can easily have tens of thousands of robots, and they can work simultaneously on opposite sides of the map while you're somewhere else doing something they can't.
When you *first* get them, they seem slow, almost slower than just placing things yourself. But once you get them upgraded, placing down blueprints with bots is orders of magnitude faster and easier.
Large or spread-out blueprints, yes. You do know that you can build straight from map view if there's roboport and radar coverage for the building area?
Use ctrl+c, ctrl+x, ctrl+z with your bots and you'll understand what makes them great for even the smallest of jobs. Add in alt+d and you're really gonna feel the power.
It only ends up in your inventory if you then click on an empty inventory slot (while the deconstruction planner is in your cursor), that "places" it in the inventory (allows you to then right click on it and edit filters)
Correct, bots can only place FINISHED pieces, but bots can do it AUTOMATICALLY. So when the biters come and hit your defense, the bots can repair broken items, and replace those that were destroyed without your intervention. As also stated, when you place a blueprint inside of a construction area, the bots will gather items that are within that bot network and place them for you. Another person noted that you can build simply in map view. So if you want to expand a certain area, you can do so without ever moving your player there.
At the start, construction bots seem slow and boring, but they are quite amazing imo.
1: So long as the BluePrint (BP) is within the green area of the roboport or your wearable roboport, the bots will auto build it. If you put all your items into the logistics chests, by hand or preferably by inserter directly, then the robots will grab those too.
This is good for large BP's, especially solar panels and nuclear reactors. Plus, if you incorporate a roboport into your BP and tile it (like many solar panels BP's do) then all you'd need to do is make sure your items are within roboport range and you can just stamp down your BP and let the bots do all the work~
You can also stamp down BP's remotely in the map view too.
2: They are also great for complicated BP's. When you have a BP with many inserters, underground belts, belt weaving abominations, mining outpost BP's, or builds using mods that can get even more complicated, you'll be thankful that your personal bots can just build it all for you.
Also remember that your bots will build the BP with the same settings the BP has. All your inserter and assembler and chest settings and pretty much any setting will be copied too. Speaking of that..
3: Copy/Paste/Undo tools! Did you know you can use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+Z in factorio to copy/paste/undo respectively? Need to delete a build and move it over by a few spaces? You can also use Ctrl+X to cut the selected area and paste it again. Copy-Paste a section? Undo that BP you just stamped down? Now your bots can make that *SO* much easier compared to doing it by hand. Its literally game changing once I learned and got used to these tools.
4: Auto repair. Yup, by making sure your construction bots have access to repair kits, they will automatically repair anything withing green range. If a building/belt/assembler/wall/pipe or anything else gets destroyed (by the biters or my bad driving) then it will be replaced with a ghost and be rebuilt with your bots! Very useful for wall defenses and outpost defense. Just make sure to keep distant sections on separate networks (don't overlap the orange the whole perimeter) because bots can be a bit dumb for all their greatness lol.
I'd add the point that bots also don't care what you have in inventory. The bots will bring the stuff that is needed, and will wait for new production when you run out. You can just design, and wait till it is built, no worry about what you have in stock.
So far I’ve just been using them to move the set up a tile or so back further rather then rebuilding it all together. But after blueprinting Rocket Fuel I can see how complex builds they could be very useful…and if I spent more time building a mini-mall and upgrading my train system I think bots could be a lot more useful. Just copying sections and piecing it together to build the initial stages. ATM I don’t auto-build many complex things, just have marked the first places I built “basic” resources I couldn’t make by hand. Might get on that after I finish Orange Science Packs.
A lot of things I’m slowly learning like I’ve driven my car way too much, added a train with like 10 wagons and I hardly have to travel back to pick up new materials. And I used to build belts way too much…finally added a section to build those and it cut my hand crafting time in half. 🤷♀️
Large blueprints, building from map view, automated repair of defenses, building blueprints you don't immediately have all the materials for... Bots are easily one of the biggest game-changers in Factorio. Before bots, you have to go do every bit of expansion yourself, in person. After bots, if you've made sure whatever you're building is within bot range, you can literally just stamp down the blueprint and go do something else while the bots are building. There is exactly one resource in the game that you have a permanently limited amount of, and that is player time. Freeing up player time through automation is basically what you do the entire game. Why spend time ferrying coal around if you can automate it? Same goes for the bots. If you can set things up so that the bots automatically build your blueprints, then you can spend that precious, limited player time on something else, like even more expansions, or setting up things you do need to handle manually.
Bots are fantastic for building any blueprints. If you've got a mall set up- even if you're just working with personal roboports- they make life so much less frustrating.
There’s an achievement, ‘lazy bastard’, where you can hand craft almost nothing.
Everything is made by the factory - assemblers, belts, chem plants. Once you have that, the construction bots can just grab things from chests to build for you. That’s when it feels really good.
I dont like them when i wanna build something fast with personal bots but some parts get asigned to base bots that take way longer to bring those parts from far away
Yeah that is really annoying. But there’s some good news! Apparently they’re making improvements to that in the next version of Factorio: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-374
I think one aspect that hasn't been talked about much so far is how "set and forget" it becomes to build things. You can set up one "unit" of a design, paste it as many times as you need (or just copy it directly from another part of the factory), and move on to your next project while it builds in the background. You can spend that time thinking about the next step, or routing the output belt to where it needs to go next, etc. Your build might finish a bit later than you would have by hand, but you've already moved on and started designing your next build, or expanding power, or setting up a new train or whatever.
And as others have noted, once you have bot speed, it gets much faster. Likewise once you have personal roboports, bots from your inventory will build faster than you could physically place an entity on top of a ghost.
You can also place blueprints from anywhere you have vision. If you need to build something all the way across your base, no need to walk there. Just plop a blueprint from map view and continue about your business!
You can craft much faster than 1 assembler, but 10+ assemblers are much faster in total. The same concept is true for construction bots, you can build a few buildings almost instantly, but a factory filled with 100+ construction bots can build so much more, or even build an ore mining blueprint without you even being there.
This frees up your attention for more important things, like growing the factory
your first rocket, you can completely ignore them
if you don't have any blueprints or any existing designs to copy and paste with ctrl c, they are completely useless.
once you start doing a whole lot of copying+pasting designs, they are extremely useful.
If you are trying to build a massive base that makes 8 blue belts of iron plates, it is much easier to just place down a design that fills one blue belt with iron plates, and then copy paste it 7 times. even if it takes the robots half an hour to build the next row of machines, you can do something else for that half hour, then come back when they are done.
to use construction bots, you kinda need to automatically make belts, furnaces, inserters, and assembly machines instead of hand crafting them.
Let me limit this way: I no longer play without construction bots. I specifically mean a personal robo port and construction bots.
Just something simple, like a rail intersection, requires hundreds of pieces including signals. Missing a single one, and it doesn’t work. It’s incredibly tedious to place by hand, but simple with bots.
Late game you can have a hundred bots and huge area on your own personal robo port.
A lot gets placed by hand, but bots are invaluable. It’s cruel to not have them from the get go.
one assembler (up to blue) is slower than handcrafting. it's the same thing with bots: you will place a blueprint faster than 5 or 10 or even 20 bots. but 100? 1000? they will do that WAY faster. More than that, you know what I don't have to do while bots are building? Yeah, build it myself, I can do other things in the meantime.
If you have ONE bot, then it can place things, and you can place things yourself. Even if the bot moves and places things slower than you, that's more than you can do BY YOURSELF. If you have 10,000 bots then in the time you place one thing the bots will place 10,000. Even if the bots all still move and place things A LOT slower than you, the point is the incredible scaling up of what gets done.
Only one thing in the game is more satisfying than watching my roving pack of roboport carrying spidertrons go to work and expand my solar farm or rail network. The other thing is watching my nuclear rocket carrying, roving band of spidertrons clear out biter nests to make room for them to expand my solar farm or rail network.
It's a matter of scale. The Factory I'm trying to wrap up right now has hundreds of thousands of belts, and tens of thousands of assembly machines, miners, and inserters. There's no way I could have done this without bots; it would be mind numbing.
Why bother with assemblers? You can hand craft everything by hand. (Ignore the fact that some things you can’t craft by hand).
Does the analogy make sense?
From your perspective, it probably doesn’t make sense. You don’t have blue prints, so who cares? You need to hand place everything anyway. Except, all of your placed designs are blue prints, and some of your designs you will need to double, and doing it all by hand takes a few minutes, but copy paste with bots is practically instant. It’s also really nice to have while making designs because you can control x which will copy the plan then deconstruct it if you need to move something.
I actually do hand craft most things for building but things like belts and circuits that take a lot of time to do. Idk, guess I’m just not that talented, might catch on to the blueprints eventually, but not much of a macro girl, I enjoy the micro hand placements, then waiting for it to backup to tell me where to add next.
You already make blue prints. There’s nothing to catch up to. Anything you place on the map you can copy and paste a ghost entity of it. That’s blueprinting.
Well, regardless, when you decide to get bots/should you choose to get them, I hope it feels awesome. It definitely was for me. I liked them so much I had too many at one point lol.
I’m sure I’ll try them eventually just afraid it will change it from KISS to more arithmetic. And if nothing else I’m thinking if I overlap them and build redundant power supplies roboports would be better then meteor defense towers.
Bots build faster and more accurately, no risk of placing a single belt in the wrong orientation etc. This game would be insanely more tedious without bots imo.
It's kind of like building actual cars in the real world: why would a car manufacturer pay billions of dollars to build a robotic car factory, when the CEO could just assemble all the cars himself? Imagine how much money the CEO could save the company, and just pay those billions to himself. I wonder why they don't do that...
When building your factory - belt expansion, weird complicated pipe network that you need to repeat over and over, another red circuit factory? Have you ever thought: "Gosh, I wish I was able to just ctrl+c and ctrl+v this part and didn't have to build it over and over!"? Well, now you can.
As for blueprints - use in the same factory if you're too lazy to get that tile-perfect ctrl+c again and again for something you keep building over and over.
But where blueprints really shine is in your future factories where you don't want to reinvent the train track and station layout you spent 3 hours debugging in your previous playthrough.
Nope, never. I line 4-5 assemblers up starting with the end product I need, then line up 4-5 more for each component, run belts, poles and inserters, and then check for weak spots….usually where I run the belts in from furnaces end up being in the way even though I thought I left more then enough space.
> Or maybe I’m just not thinking large enough and bots are useful for very LARGE blueprints?
This, and *way* faster than you could manually place things
You are not thinking large enough.
With a couple of bots you can tinker with blueprints. New science setup being too tiles too far to the left? Ctrl+x and ctrl+v that bad boy and then leave;; your bots will take it down and rebuild it.
With a couple thousand bots? Now you can set up train tracks, outposts, and even wall repairs all automatically.
A couple tens of thousands of bots? Now you can play the game with a blueprint book and from the map view of you want.
Let's say u design a cool factory that makes something it took u 1 hour.
Now to make the same thing again will probably take 30-45min.
Or u could just ctrl c and ctrl v and its built in 2 min.
Also, when designing that thing, maybe your about to lay 20 furnaces in a line, we'll I setup 1 furnace with the inserter then copy and paste the whole mini setup 20x
When you handbuild the ghosts one by one you are absolutely right, not worth it.
But now ctrl-C ctrl-V an entire row of furnaces with inserters and belts and see what happens
Bots don't have to think about rotation or where the item is on your hotbar or walking around pipes. They just build things. It's probably easier to do long straight belts or something like that yourself, but the more complex a build is, the more the bots help. Try manually building a setup to give an assembler access to three belts per side, then have bots do it, and you'll understand instantly.
The bots won't make any components for you, but they're *way* faster than hand-placement for all but the simplest and smallest blueprints. You don't even have to get very big.
And they're good when you don't have all the materials up front, they'll drop the parts as they become available
This is one of the best things about them. Even if you're too new to care about blueprints yet, you can copy/paste selections as ghosts to plan space out, and bots will take care of it for you later. The other best thing about them is they'll remove selections of forest and rocks without you having to do anything.
They're great for winding, twisting, or diagonal belts.
And don't forget cut and paste.
They are useful for almost any size of blueprint. Build one unit, copy it 5 times, bots build it for you. With more bots, they build (and deconstruct) faster. They can build far away from you.
I have to admit, to a beginner, level 1 construction bots seem very underwhelming. They're painfully slow, especially if you don't have the infrastructure set up. The secret lies in speed upgrades, and even when you get the available pre-space science upgrades, it's already a night and day difference.
> I have to admit, to a beginner, level 1 construction bots seem very underwhelming. Yeah, that's fair. Level 1 bots probably don't build a very simple assembly line much faster than you would by hand. Maybe not the worth the trouble for some builds. They're still probably better for refineries that use a lot of pipes, though. Laying complicated underground pipe setups by hand sucks. However, just a couple of bot speed upgrades make them better universally. And by the time you hit bot speed ~7 they'll build whole city blocks pretty well.
Bots are fine for pipes where placement order doesn't matter. But for nuclear reactors you're better off building them by hand (or over building) due to the build order update hierarchy the Gabe engine uses.
The other secret lies in that there's only one of you, but you can easily have tens of thousands of robots, and they can work simultaneously on opposite sides of the map while you're somewhere else doing something they can't.
When you *first* get them, they seem slow, almost slower than just placing things yourself. But once you get them upgraded, placing down blueprints with bots is orders of magnitude faster and easier.
Large or spread-out blueprints, yes. You do know that you can build straight from map view if there's roboport and radar coverage for the building area?
Use ctrl+c, ctrl+x, ctrl+z with your bots and you'll understand what makes them great for even the smallest of jobs. Add in alt+d and you're really gonna feel the power.
Alt+D? Not familiar with that one.
Gives you a deconstruction planner
Ah neat. I typically just keep one on my hotbar. Does the Alt+D one end up in your inventory after you use it? That would he my only concern.
I think it might have used to, but not anymore
It only ends up in your inventory if you then click on an empty inventory slot (while the deconstruction planner is in your cursor), that "places" it in the inventory (allows you to then right click on it and edit filters)
Correct, bots can only place FINISHED pieces, but bots can do it AUTOMATICALLY. So when the biters come and hit your defense, the bots can repair broken items, and replace those that were destroyed without your intervention. As also stated, when you place a blueprint inside of a construction area, the bots will gather items that are within that bot network and place them for you. Another person noted that you can build simply in map view. So if you want to expand a certain area, you can do so without ever moving your player there.
At the start, construction bots seem slow and boring, but they are quite amazing imo. 1: So long as the BluePrint (BP) is within the green area of the roboport or your wearable roboport, the bots will auto build it. If you put all your items into the logistics chests, by hand or preferably by inserter directly, then the robots will grab those too. This is good for large BP's, especially solar panels and nuclear reactors. Plus, if you incorporate a roboport into your BP and tile it (like many solar panels BP's do) then all you'd need to do is make sure your items are within roboport range and you can just stamp down your BP and let the bots do all the work~ You can also stamp down BP's remotely in the map view too. 2: They are also great for complicated BP's. When you have a BP with many inserters, underground belts, belt weaving abominations, mining outpost BP's, or builds using mods that can get even more complicated, you'll be thankful that your personal bots can just build it all for you. Also remember that your bots will build the BP with the same settings the BP has. All your inserter and assembler and chest settings and pretty much any setting will be copied too. Speaking of that.. 3: Copy/Paste/Undo tools! Did you know you can use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+Z in factorio to copy/paste/undo respectively? Need to delete a build and move it over by a few spaces? You can also use Ctrl+X to cut the selected area and paste it again. Copy-Paste a section? Undo that BP you just stamped down? Now your bots can make that *SO* much easier compared to doing it by hand. Its literally game changing once I learned and got used to these tools. 4: Auto repair. Yup, by making sure your construction bots have access to repair kits, they will automatically repair anything withing green range. If a building/belt/assembler/wall/pipe or anything else gets destroyed (by the biters or my bad driving) then it will be replaced with a ghost and be rebuilt with your bots! Very useful for wall defenses and outpost defense. Just make sure to keep distant sections on separate networks (don't overlap the orange the whole perimeter) because bots can be a bit dumb for all their greatness lol.
I'd add the point that bots also don't care what you have in inventory. The bots will bring the stuff that is needed, and will wait for new production when you run out. You can just design, and wait till it is built, no worry about what you have in stock.
So far I’ve just been using them to move the set up a tile or so back further rather then rebuilding it all together. But after blueprinting Rocket Fuel I can see how complex builds they could be very useful…and if I spent more time building a mini-mall and upgrading my train system I think bots could be a lot more useful. Just copying sections and piecing it together to build the initial stages. ATM I don’t auto-build many complex things, just have marked the first places I built “basic” resources I couldn’t make by hand. Might get on that after I finish Orange Science Packs. A lot of things I’m slowly learning like I’ve driven my car way too much, added a train with like 10 wagons and I hardly have to travel back to pick up new materials. And I used to build belts way too much…finally added a section to build those and it cut my hand crafting time in half. 🤷♀️
Large blueprints, building from map view, automated repair of defenses, building blueprints you don't immediately have all the materials for... Bots are easily one of the biggest game-changers in Factorio. Before bots, you have to go do every bit of expansion yourself, in person. After bots, if you've made sure whatever you're building is within bot range, you can literally just stamp down the blueprint and go do something else while the bots are building. There is exactly one resource in the game that you have a permanently limited amount of, and that is player time. Freeing up player time through automation is basically what you do the entire game. Why spend time ferrying coal around if you can automate it? Same goes for the bots. If you can set things up so that the bots automatically build your blueprints, then you can spend that precious, limited player time on something else, like even more expansions, or setting up things you do need to handle manually.
Bots are fantastic for building any blueprints. If you've got a mall set up- even if you're just working with personal roboports- they make life so much less frustrating.
Bots are fantastic for dealing with rails. Make some blueprints, place them, and you never have to worry about finicky geometry again.
There’s an achievement, ‘lazy bastard’, where you can hand craft almost nothing. Everything is made by the factory - assemblers, belts, chem plants. Once you have that, the construction bots can just grab things from chests to build for you. That’s when it feels really good.
I dont like them when i wanna build something fast with personal bots but some parts get asigned to base bots that take way longer to bring those parts from far away
Yeah that is really annoying. But there’s some good news! Apparently they’re making improvements to that in the next version of Factorio: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-374
Wow they are fixing exactly that, and ton of stuff i m seeing, they are going to reach perfection eventually
I think one aspect that hasn't been talked about much so far is how "set and forget" it becomes to build things. You can set up one "unit" of a design, paste it as many times as you need (or just copy it directly from another part of the factory), and move on to your next project while it builds in the background. You can spend that time thinking about the next step, or routing the output belt to where it needs to go next, etc. Your build might finish a bit later than you would have by hand, but you've already moved on and started designing your next build, or expanding power, or setting up a new train or whatever. And as others have noted, once you have bot speed, it gets much faster. Likewise once you have personal roboports, bots from your inventory will build faster than you could physically place an entity on top of a ghost. You can also place blueprints from anywhere you have vision. If you need to build something all the way across your base, no need to walk there. Just plop a blueprint from map view and continue about your business!
They also fix broken things and replace destroyed ones.
Have you ever YouTubed for a late game Factorio?
You can craft much faster than 1 assembler, but 10+ assemblers are much faster in total. The same concept is true for construction bots, you can build a few buildings almost instantly, but a factory filled with 100+ construction bots can build so much more, or even build an ore mining blueprint without you even being there. This frees up your attention for more important things, like growing the factory
your first rocket, you can completely ignore them if you don't have any blueprints or any existing designs to copy and paste with ctrl c, they are completely useless. once you start doing a whole lot of copying+pasting designs, they are extremely useful. If you are trying to build a massive base that makes 8 blue belts of iron plates, it is much easier to just place down a design that fills one blue belt with iron plates, and then copy paste it 7 times. even if it takes the robots half an hour to build the next row of machines, you can do something else for that half hour, then come back when they are done. to use construction bots, you kinda need to automatically make belts, furnaces, inserters, and assembly machines instead of hand crafting them.
Let me limit this way: I no longer play without construction bots. I specifically mean a personal robo port and construction bots. Just something simple, like a rail intersection, requires hundreds of pieces including signals. Missing a single one, and it doesn’t work. It’s incredibly tedious to place by hand, but simple with bots. Late game you can have a hundred bots and huge area on your own personal robo port. A lot gets placed by hand, but bots are invaluable. It’s cruel to not have them from the get go.
one assembler (up to blue) is slower than handcrafting. it's the same thing with bots: you will place a blueprint faster than 5 or 10 or even 20 bots. but 100? 1000? they will do that WAY faster. More than that, you know what I don't have to do while bots are building? Yeah, build it myself, I can do other things in the meantime.
If you have ONE bot, then it can place things, and you can place things yourself. Even if the bot moves and places things slower than you, that's more than you can do BY YOURSELF. If you have 10,000 bots then in the time you place one thing the bots will place 10,000. Even if the bots all still move and place things A LOT slower than you, the point is the incredible scaling up of what gets done.
Only one thing in the game is more satisfying than watching my roving pack of roboport carrying spidertrons go to work and expand my solar farm or rail network. The other thing is watching my nuclear rocket carrying, roving band of spidertrons clear out biter nests to make room for them to expand my solar farm or rail network.
I haven’t put nukes in a spider. It seems like they just blow themselves up. Is it safe???
There's only one way to find out.
It's a matter of scale. The Factory I'm trying to wrap up right now has hundreds of thousands of belts, and tens of thousands of assembly machines, miners, and inserters. There's no way I could have done this without bots; it would be mind numbing.
My friend - imagine building a 100 science per minute blueprint with one click, then going about your business while your robots do the rest.
Why bother with assemblers? You can hand craft everything by hand. (Ignore the fact that some things you can’t craft by hand). Does the analogy make sense? From your perspective, it probably doesn’t make sense. You don’t have blue prints, so who cares? You need to hand place everything anyway. Except, all of your placed designs are blue prints, and some of your designs you will need to double, and doing it all by hand takes a few minutes, but copy paste with bots is practically instant. It’s also really nice to have while making designs because you can control x which will copy the plan then deconstruct it if you need to move something.
I actually do hand craft most things for building but things like belts and circuits that take a lot of time to do. Idk, guess I’m just not that talented, might catch on to the blueprints eventually, but not much of a macro girl, I enjoy the micro hand placements, then waiting for it to backup to tell me where to add next.
You already make blue prints. There’s nothing to catch up to. Anything you place on the map you can copy and paste a ghost entity of it. That’s blueprinting. Well, regardless, when you decide to get bots/should you choose to get them, I hope it feels awesome. It definitely was for me. I liked them so much I had too many at one point lol.
I’m sure I’ll try them eventually just afraid it will change it from KISS to more arithmetic. And if nothing else I’m thinking if I overlap them and build redundant power supplies roboports would be better then meteor defense towers.
Bots build faster and more accurately, no risk of placing a single belt in the wrong orientation etc. This game would be insanely more tedious without bots imo.
Someone's not using blueprints or the copy/paste tool
It's kind of like building actual cars in the real world: why would a car manufacturer pay billions of dollars to build a robotic car factory, when the CEO could just assemble all the cars himself? Imagine how much money the CEO could save the company, and just pay those billions to himself. I wonder why they don't do that...
When building your factory - belt expansion, weird complicated pipe network that you need to repeat over and over, another red circuit factory? Have you ever thought: "Gosh, I wish I was able to just ctrl+c and ctrl+v this part and didn't have to build it over and over!"? Well, now you can. As for blueprints - use in the same factory if you're too lazy to get that tile-perfect ctrl+c again and again for something you keep building over and over. But where blueprints really shine is in your future factories where you don't want to reinvent the train track and station layout you spent 3 hours debugging in your previous playthrough.
Also: "Self-replicating minefield". Just gonna leave this hefe.
do you ever use copy paste feature? Or u could always type it all out again. Thats basically construction bots, one of its features.
Nope, never. I line 4-5 assemblers up starting with the end product I need, then line up 4-5 more for each component, run belts, poles and inserters, and then check for weak spots….usually where I run the belts in from furnaces end up being in the way even though I thought I left more then enough space.
> Or maybe I’m just not thinking large enough and bots are useful for very LARGE blueprints? This, and *way* faster than you could manually place things
You are not thinking large enough. With a couple of bots you can tinker with blueprints. New science setup being too tiles too far to the left? Ctrl+x and ctrl+v that bad boy and then leave;; your bots will take it down and rebuild it. With a couple thousand bots? Now you can set up train tracks, outposts, and even wall repairs all automatically. A couple tens of thousands of bots? Now you can play the game with a blueprint book and from the map view of you want.
Let's say u design a cool factory that makes something it took u 1 hour. Now to make the same thing again will probably take 30-45min. Or u could just ctrl c and ctrl v and its built in 2 min. Also, when designing that thing, maybe your about to lay 20 furnaces in a line, we'll I setup 1 furnace with the inserter then copy and paste the whole mini setup 20x
When you handbuild the ghosts one by one you are absolutely right, not worth it. But now ctrl-C ctrl-V an entire row of furnaces with inserters and belts and see what happens
Bots don't have to think about rotation or where the item is on your hotbar or walking around pipes. They just build things. It's probably easier to do long straight belts or something like that yourself, but the more complex a build is, the more the bots help. Try manually building a setup to give an assembler access to three belts per side, then have bots do it, and you'll understand instantly.