Blueprints and Planners

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Planning tools

Planning tools operate on rectangular areas of the map, applying an operation to all selected buildings at once. They include the blueprint, deconstruction, upgrade, copy-paste, and cut-paste tools. All planning tools are available from the start of the game, but they become most useful once construction robots are unlocked.

To use a planning tool, take it in hand using its shortcut. ALT + B gives the blueprint planner, ALT + D the deconstruction planner, ALT + U the upgrade planner. Press LEFT BRACKET on an empty tile to mark the first corner of a selection, move the cursor to update the rectangle, then press LEFT BRACKET again to confirm and apply. Press RIGHT BRACKET instead to cancel a deconstruction or upgrade order on already-marked buildings. Press Q or change the item in hand to cancel an ongoing selection. CTRL + Z undoes the last completed selection.

Deconstruction planner

Buildings selected by the deconstruction planner are marked for deconstruction. Construction robots then pick them up and store them in the logistic network, along with any items inside. Marked machines stop working immediately. Natural entities such as trees, rocks, and cliffs can also be selected — robots need cliff explosives to remove cliffs.

Undoing a deconstruction order with CTRL + Z removes the marks from standing buildings and restores already-deconstructed ones as ghosts so robots can rebuild them.

Upgrade planner

Buildings selected by the upgrade planner are marked for upgrading. Construction robots find the next tier of each building and swap them out, putting the originals into storage. This works for inserters, transport belts, splitters, assembling machines, and stone furnaces, among others. Upgraded buildings must have the same footprint and an unambiguous higher tier version.

Blueprints

Blueprints save and reproduce factory layouts. Take an empty blueprint in hand and use area selection to fill it with a factory area. The blueprint stores the positions, rotations, and settings of all buildings inside.

When a filled blueprint is in hand, the cursor previews its placement. Placing it down creates ghosts — outlines of the buildings with their original settings. Construction robots fill ghosts using items from logistic storage, or personal construction robots use items from your inventory. You can also use ghosts as manual building guidance, especially combined with the smart pipette tool (Q), which automatically puts the right building item in hand when the cursor is on a ghost.

Blueprints can be exported as text strings and imported back, making it possible to share layouts or transfer them between saves.

Manually building with blueprints

Blueprints speed up repetitive building. For a row of furnaces, create a blueprint of one repeating section and paste it along the row as ghosts. Then use the scanner (HOME key to jump between matching ghosts) to move through them quickly, pressing Q at each ghost to get the right item in hand and place it down.

Copy-paste and cut-paste tools

The copy-paste tool (CTRL + C) creates a temporary blueprint in hand without saving it as an item. The last copied blueprint can be recalled with CTRL + V. The cut-paste tool works similarly but also marks the original buildings for deconstruction. Both are vanilla tools.

Blueprint books

Blueprint books store multiple blueprints in a single portable item. Factorio Access supports importing blueprint books and copying blueprints out of them into hand. Creating or editing blueprint books is not yet supported.

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See also:

• Kruise Kontrol
• Worker Robots Basics
• Logistic Network Systems

External links:

• Official Factorio Wiki: Blueprint
• FA Docs: blueprints-and-planners