Agreed, this would be great.

As an added bonus, maybe there could even be an option to name blocks based on their position. "Front/Left Thruster", for example.

Agree on the need for something like this. Despite the comparative ease of use of this mod, I still fall back to Whip's renaming script half the time simply for the auto-numbering.

However, I'd just have a secondary checkbox, "zero-pad numbers", rather than a selector for number of digits. If someone had, say, 200 thrusters, I don't really see why *anyone* would want to number those 01-99, then 100-200, rather than just 001-200. So if the numbers are zero-padded at all, they should be padded based on the count of modules selected (this is also how Whip's renaming script works). Frankly, it's also easier from a user perspective, since you don't have to go check how many you have and think about how many digits that needs to be (though, to be fair, the answer is very rarely more than 3 digits).

Isn't this somehow maybe doable over the prefixes/suffixes? Still yes this suggestion needs implementation!

No, prefixes are fixed strings. There's no way to auto-number with it. You *could* rely on vanilla numbering, but it gets REALLY confused when you start merging and separating grids. And it doesn't zero-pad, so they don't sort properly. Whip's is still the most reliable way of handling the zero-padding and auto-numbering, despite this mod being wildly easier to use.

Originally posted by Kaedys:

... Whip's is still the most reliable way of handling the zero-padding and auto-numbering, despite this mod being wildly easier to use.

would it make sense to use both?

Afaik, they are sorta mutually exclusive. Not in that they'll conflict, but in that they'll overwrite each others changes to the names. Whips does everything this mod will do, except that this mod is quite a bit easier to use. So I tend to have both, and use this mod for quick renames of things I don't care about numbering for (ex. thrusters, gyros, anything that doesn't have an inventory really), and use Whips for things I care about the numbering and ordering of (turrets, assemblers, refineries, etc).

got it and thx for the info. When you say complicated, does it support a regular expression search and replace?

AFAIK, Whips does not support regex search and replace. It's just more complex in that it's round-about, you need to grab all of the blocks you want to rename, assign them into a group with a specific naming pattern (detailed in Whip's script, there's a lot of options, but the syntax can be a bit arcane for the advanced ones), and then run the script to execute the renaming (and then probably go delete the group, both for cleanup and to avoid it being executed again next time you run the script).

On the plus side, you can do batch jobs, make a bunch of different rename groups and then execute the script to handle all of them. But it's not quite as simple as selecting the blocks, typing in the new name, and hitting "rename".

I tried out Isy's renaming script which does the job okish. The vid tutorial seems not on par with the version so there was some confusion. Other than that after playing around with it, it got me where i wanted to be. rename,replace,sort, autosort for everything and leading zeros so the iterations look nice. No regex, but enough for what needed to be done.

Adding my vote that I wish this was a thing, when playing around with workshop blueprints in creative that were made in a different language it's great to use this mod to reset all of the blocks names so they become English but then they all lose their numbering and for larger blueprints going through and individually numbering them all is a pain

this is the only things this mod lacks, still the best and simpler modscript for renaming blocks imho.

Strange... why not... Anyway, possibly it could be implemented by comparing block position with the grid center point... If i had more health! I would do even that then, no. now i need to finish my other mods for M&B, Gothic 3, Civ 5 and few other things i need to do