How do you create large blueprints?

[Zak]

So I just started looking at blueprints and I was hoping to create large, long prefabs to lay down neat train tracks, roads, bridges, etc, but the designer only allows 4x4 structures (32m x 32m). I see though that there are blueprints available for download that are much larger and can't even be loaded into the designer. How do they do that? How can I make larger blueprints? Mods? Thanks.

[Doc✪Hollywood]

I think the devs made blueprints like a big puzzle which you have to stick together.
A bit tedious.

But maybe they are afraid, not without reason, that too much building blows up savegames and slow down game performance. Many say after tier 6 it begins ...

[Cheeze Wizard]

Originally posted by Gordon✪Gekko:

Nothing's more refreshing than a contribution beginning with a good smack of insult :heart_laugh:

But then it gets informative & useful and I can feel passion in his arguing :cchappy:

Lets be honest, the people who the insults are directed at weren't gonna actually try to properly digest the post in its entirety anyways, so it saves time overall to just alienate them right away. Just like the blueprint system saves time overall when planning larger builds that benefit from standardized systems.

[Cheeze Wizard]

Originally posted by Gordon✪Gekko:

I think the devs made blueprints like a big puzzle which you have to stick together.
A bit tedious.

But maybe they are afraid, not without reason, that too much building blows up savegames and slow down game performance. Many say after tier 6 it begins ...

That is actually exactly how they want it, they have said as much online when talking about the size comments. I think Factorio actually suffers from base-in-a-book style blueprints simply being too easy for a complete beginner to find and use and never actually learn how to play the game. But at least in Factorio you need to setup logistics before automating blueprint building and have stuff like limited resources and an arms race to worry about independent of blueprints. In Satisfactory however you can instabuild blueprints the second you unlock them, and don't have to worry running out of resources, or monsters attacking your base, and the worldmap is the exact same each time, so your game is essentially solved and you could prolly beat the game in less then ten hours with no actual thought required

A compromise I think would work is in tier 8 or 9 when the game comes out to version 1.0 being able to unlock a 6x6 or 8x8 blueprint builder. It would be much larger, but it would be balanced by the scale of factories you are creating at that point.

Although no matter what, I think the ability to "zoop" blueprints should be added, the blueprint system is clearly meant to create tillable designs and being able to zoop them would further encourage that.

[Zak]

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Originally posted by Zak:

You didn't read my original post, I guess: I wanted LONG prefabs for road and bridge construction. I never wanted anything COMPACT. It's not suitable for my intended use.

Bridges are easier than ever to create with blueprints. You can create a modular single piece for the roadway portion and then for a worst case scenario (archway bridges), you can still flip the blueprints to build half the bridge for free. You obviously didn't read the rest of my post which goes more into detail about how the blueprints are extremely useful in creating modular pieces.

I tried, I can build roads, railways and bridges quicker in normal mode using zoop than using short, 4-panels long fragments as they're slow and tricky to snap, so there is little time savings for me in using such short prefabs. There are some nice looking long prefabs available for download but they're way too complex for my needs, too many parts. I don't need anything fancy looking with arches and architectural supports, I just was hoping for simple, but fairly long spans that can be snapped together quicker than building in normal mode.

[Zak]

Originally posted by Gordon✪Gekko:

Nothing's more refreshing than a contribution beginning with a good smack of insult :heart_laugh:

But then it gets informative & useful and I can feel passion in his arguing :cchappy:

:)

[Zak]

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Lets be honest, the people who the insults are directed at weren't gonna actually try to properly digest the post in its entirety anyways, so it saves time overall to just alienate them right away. Just like the blueprint system saves time overall when planning larger builds that benefit from standardized systems.

So what's the point of writing such detailed posts if you already know that I'm not gonna read the whole thing? I mean, I appreciate the efforts but your post was not entirely relevant to my question as you elaborated on boostrap factories, etc., while my interest was strictly in long road, rail and bridge pieces. Sometimes being concise, short, down to the point is better than such long elaborate writeup that mostly misses the question.

[Cheeze Wizard]

Originally posted by Zak:

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Lets be honest, the people who the insults are directed at weren't gonna actually try to properly digest the post in its entirety anyways, so it saves time overall to just alienate them right away. Just like the blueprint system saves time overall when planning larger builds that benefit from standardized systems.

So what's the point of writing such detailed posts if you already know that I'm not gonna read the whole thing? I mean, I appreciate the efforts but your post was not entirely relevant to my question as you elaborated on boostrap factories, etc., while my interest was strictly in long road, rail and bridge pieces.

Modular design can still be applied to roads and such. One click bridges sound great until to realize you will need to create separate blueprints for different gap lengths. And gap lengths aren't exactly uniform around the map, and at that point you might as well build on site. Longer blueprints would most likely just lead to you zooping anyways for simpler designs like the ones you want to build. For more complex bridge designs, snapping woes are a solvable problem, and I think being able to zoop blueprints is something they should add to the game regardless.

That being said the discussion quickly turns into a general blueprint complaining post rather than your specific post inquiring about bridges. I was replying to the current state of the discussion rather than the one it started out as. And those were the people the insults were aimed at anyways, not you just to be clear.

[Zak]

Yes, if those "blueprinted" bridge or road segments could be zooped, like you said, then yeah, it might have worked for me. But it takes a bit of effort right now to align them which kind of defies the purpose of using them in the first place - unless they were much, much longer.

Also, any rail tracks laid on top of blueprints don't connect so this requires fair amount of tinkering to build railroads this way which also nullifies any time savings from making blueprints.

I was hoping the blueprints would speed up the process of building roads and bridges, not make them look better.

So I believe you that blueprints might be useful, but I'm pretty convinced that they're not useful for my use case.

[The Ohio Question]

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

If you think the blueprint designer is too small for useful stuff than you either haven't actually tried to design useful things for more than thirty seconds within the allocated space or you are completely hopeless in designing anything remotely compact. Even youtube personalities like Nilaus who heavily criticized the space constraints changed their tune after actually giving it a chance and seeing how actually useful it is when used for its intended purpose. If people like Kibitz with computer melting factories say that the blueprints are a massive time saver for the game and are extremely useful in their current state then maybe you are using them wrong if you think they are bad and useless.

You can easily fit bootstrap factories in a single blueprint, which is very useful for outposts or starter setups. But the even better use case is for modules, for example my first update 8 steel foundry I made which I made almost entirely out of blueprint modules which greatly sped up the construction process. It cut the build time by half compared to just placing by hand without sacrificing neatness and aesthetics. (I designed a base empty room module which included overhead girder and light aesthetics, a logistics floor space, and the hookups for anything I would need, then I could make copies of that blueprint for each step of the process, and could copy those blueprints for similar steps that only needed minor tweaks in machine setups, then use a main bus style routing system to connect it all together.)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2995239499

And that is what it is designed for. When you are creating a factory floor or asthetic features, each item is like a puzzle piece. Larger projects ask for an extreme amount of pieces, part of it is due to the space elevator being over calibrated since the final tier isn't added so you have a long term goal to go for but not everyone has 100 hours to build a single factory, even longer if you want it to look nice. What the blueprints allow you to do is spend a couple hours creating some tillable factory and decorative modules and then only spend like 10 hours total creating that big project instead of 100.

Believe it or not Satisfactory has a lot of key differences from a game like Factorio beyond being 3d. Just because large scale blueprints work in other games doesn't mean they automatically will work from a game design standpoint in this one. If you spent less time complaining about blueprint sizes and more time actually trying to use them the way they are intended then maybe you wouldn't have a massive hate boner about them.

if your entire defense of current blueprints is "oh its ok if you hyper cram and clip parts into each other te he" you dont really have a counter argument on why the current system is woefully to small.

[Cheeze Wizard]

Originally posted by Unyielding Sarcasm:

if your entire defense of current blueprints is "oh its ok if you hyper cram and clip parts into each other te he" you dont really have a counter argument on why the current system is woefully to small.

Hypercram? Clipping Parts?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601367
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601252
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601188
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601137
This is how the factory looks from the inside. Each one of those "alcoves" is a single blueprint. No belt clipping needed, even inside the logistics walls and floors. And I made sure there was plenty of room to walk around. I simply used the blueprint system how the devs described it was intended to be used, and saved several hours doing so.

[The Ohio Question]

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Originally posted by Unyielding Sarcasm:

if your entire defense of current blueprints is "oh its ok if you hyper cram and clip parts into each other te he" you dont really have a counter argument on why the current system is woefully to small.

Hypercram? Clipping Parts?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601367
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601252
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601188
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601137
This is how the factory looks from the inside. Each one of those "alcoves" is a single blueprint. No belt clipping needed, even inside the logistics walls and floors. And I made sure there was plenty of room to walk around. I simply used the blueprint system how the devs described it was intended to be used, and saved several hours doing so.

a bunch of links that wont load, convincing.

Regardless of how nice it looks, its still hyper small. Up it. No getting around that, and saying "well thats how the devs intended hur dur" is pointless for a function they had to be bullied into adding in the first place. Their "intention" was for it never to be a thing in the first place till the entire playerbase smacked them upside the head for YEARS.

their intention is hogwash.

[info]

I did tons of stuff with the 4x4 CSS limit on BPs then took things to a new level using +

I dont mess with trains but have you seen the sorts of interchanges done in a large designer? Try some of that in the vanilla, lol.

If someone wants to limit themselves in a game that is there choice and I would not hold that against them.

[Cheeze Wizard]

Originally posted by Unyielding Sarcasm:

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Hypercram? Clipping Parts?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601367
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601252
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601188
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3084601137
This is how the factory looks from the inside. Each one of those "alcoves" is a single blueprint. No belt clipping needed, even inside the logistics walls and floors. And I made sure there was plenty of room to walk around. I simply used the blueprint system how the devs described it was intended to be used, and saved several hours doing so.

a bunch of links that wont load, convincing.

Regardless of how nice it looks, its still hyper small. Up it. No getting around that, and saying "well thats how the devs intended hur dur" is pointless for a function they had to be bullied into adding in the first place. Their "intention" was for it never to be a thing in the first place till the entire playerbase smacked them upside the head for YEARS.

their intention is hogwash.

Links should be fixed now.
Hyper small is subjective.
And I don't get how it's pointless. Game design is an iterative process. They refused for years because having one click endgame factories like you can in factorio simply wouldn't work well in this game. Honestly I don't think it works well in Factorio either but the nature of the overall design in Satisfactory would make it 10 times worse. But never the less the players wanted it, so they worked on an implementation that works well for this specific games design. Their intention of the feature is to bring the parts of blueprints that would positively effect the game (saving time and lowering boredom on repeated designs and structures in larger projects.) without breaking the game wide open considering it's progression, balance, and pacing was never designed with blueprints in mind in the first place.

[The Ohio Question]

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Originally posted by Unyielding Sarcasm:

a bunch of links that wont load, convincing.

Regardless of how nice it looks, its still hyper small. Up it. No getting around that, and saying "well thats how the devs intended hur dur" is pointless for a function they had to be bullied into adding in the first place. Their "intention" was for it never to be a thing in the first place till the entire playerbase smacked them upside the head for YEARS.

their intention is hogwash.

Links should be fixed now.
Hyper small is subjective.
And I don't get how it's pointless. Game design is an iterative process. They refused for years because having one click endgame factories like you can in factorio simply wouldn't work well in this game. Honestly I don't think it works well in Factorio either but the nature of the overall design in Satisfactory would make it 10 times worse. But never the less the players wanted it, so they worked on an implementation that works well for this specific games design. Their intention of the feature is to bring the parts of blueprints that would positively effect the game (saving time and lowering boredom on repeated designs and structures in larger projects.) without breaking the game wide open considering it's progression, balance, and pacing was never designed with blueprints in mind in the first place.

i dont think anyone is asking for "end game factory" instant blueprints in satisfactory. Loooooota difference than more than the almost not there current joke size, and megabase.

[Cheeze Wizard]

Originally posted by Unyielding Sarcasm:

Originally posted by Cheeze Wizard:

Links should be fixed now.
Hyper small is subjective.
And I don't get how it's pointless. Game design is an iterative process. They refused for years because having one click endgame factories like you can in factorio simply wouldn't work well in this game. Honestly I don't think it works well in Factorio either but the nature of the overall design in Satisfactory would make it 10 times worse. But never the less the players wanted it, so they worked on an implementation that works well for this specific games design. Their intention of the feature is to bring the parts of blueprints that would positively effect the game (saving time and lowering boredom on repeated designs and structures in larger projects.) without breaking the game wide open considering it's progression, balance, and pacing was never designed with blueprints in mind in the first place.

i dont think anyone is asking for "end game factory" instant blueprints in satisfactory. Loooooota difference than more than the almost not there current joke size, and megabase.

It's a joke size, thats why people like ImKibitz and Nilaus with thousand hour worlds regularly use it and sing it's praises nowadays after the initial kneejerk reaction to the size limits wore off. Let's be honest here, the only reason why people say its small is because other factory games exist that basically allow for unlimited blueprint sizes, to their favor or (more often) detriment. Just because something works in a different game in the same genre doesn't mean it would work in this game.