Automatically landfill when placing blueprints/ghosts

[mrvn]

TL;DR

When placing a blueprint with shift or a ghost over water the game should add ghosts for landfill automatically.

What ?

The subject really says it all: When placing a blueprint with shift, a ghost or even a real entity over water the game should add landfill automatically. With the new way land/water is handled in 0.16 the old landfill bugs have been solved so there is no reason not to place landfill or have construction bots place landfill.

Why ?

Making blueprints as building blocks for a modular factory is fun. But often when later placing the blueprint there are trees, rocks and water in the way. Pressing shift will mark trees and rocks for deconstruction so that is fine. But water means only parts of the blueprint will be placed. One has to run around and landfill the area before placing the blueprint.

And how much landfill do you need to do? Where does the blueprint end? Where will the blueprint have entities and where can you leave water? Even more importantly where will the offshore pump end up that requires water? God forbid you landfill that tile and the whole factory module won't work anymore.

Running around to place landfill where needed and not where water is required is tiresome. Building a land bridge for train tracks with properly properly spaced islands for signals, power poles and radars or landfilling for curves becomes torment.

Note: With waterfill mod the blueprint should also place waterfill under offshore pumps as needed.

[impetus maximus]

i forget what versions, but blueprint landfil was an unintended thing at one time.
it being unintended, it was removed. i don't see it coming back.

[mrvn]

It was broken because water always had to be 2x2 tiles large. Placing a single tile of landfill then had to fix up the map that would either add additional landfills (for free) or sometimes waterfill a tile to get back 2x2 tile large water holes. With blueprinted landfill the random order in which bots place landfill would trigger this bug all the time making it more trouble than it is worth.

But the new beaches in 0.16 avoid this problems so there is no technical reason landfill can't be blueprinted again.

Note: Works fine with mods that enable landfill blueprinting again.

[eradicator]

+1
Placing landfill is one of the few things that can't be automated.

Note: Works fine with mods that enable landfill blueprinting again.

Examples?

[Engimage]

Automated landfill was removed as it was considered a cheat allowing player to create fully isolated islands. I suppose this is not coming back as well as "waterfill" for the same reason.

Water was never 2x2 but to simplify water edges draw it had a smoothing algorithm which was exploited by players allowing super savings on landfill items. Now this is effectively gone as devs implemented other algorithm of water edges drawing which allows drawing of any water configuration.

Problem with landfill is it is not a paving (unlike stone/concrete) and it replaces the core tile itself. It can not be effectively blueprinted as you can't select core tiles as it makes no sense. I am sure devs have just removed this functionality for good. And I am strongly against of automatic landfill placement under blueprints as it poses quite a few issues such as what tiles exactly should be landfilled? Ones occupied by entities or the whole rectangle?

[mrvn]

+1
Placing landfill is one of the few things that can't be automated.

Note: Works fine with mods that enable landfill blueprinting again.

Examples?

I have Landfill Painting, BlueBuild2 and Bot Landfill installed. Not sure if the last is even needed or if Landfill Painting already enables landfill ghosts.

[<NO_NAME>]

Automated landfill was removed as it was considered a cheat allowing player to create fully isolated islands. I suppose this is not coming back as well as "waterfill" for the same reason.

You can make an isolated island manually without any problems. I doubt that automated landfill wouldn't help with that significantly enough to change player behavior.

Problem with landfill is it is not a paving (unlike stone/concrete) and it replaces the core tile itself. It can not be effectively blueprinted as you can't select core tiles as it makes no sense. I am sure devs have just removed this functionality for good. And I am strongly against of automatic landfill placement under blueprints as it poses quite a few issues such as what tiles exactly should be landfilled? Ones occupied by entities or the whole rectangle?

Easy. It should replace only the tiles that are occupied by entities, just like it works with trees and stones. It would also solved the first problem, because it would be inconvenient to use to create islands. It would be helpful rather in situation when you have a small water path on the area where you're placing blueprint.

[mrvn]

Automated landfill was removed as it was considered a cheat allowing player to create fully isolated islands. I suppose this is not coming back as well as "waterfill" for the same reason.

You can make an isolated island manually without any problems. I doubt that automated landfill wouldn't help with that significantly enough to change player behavior.

Problem with landfill is it is not a paving (unlike stone/concrete) and it replaces the core tile itself. It can not be effectively blueprinted as you can't select core tiles as it makes no sense. I am sure devs have just removed this functionality for good. And I am strongly against of automatic landfill placement under blueprints as it poses quite a few issues such as what tiles exactly should be landfilled? Ones occupied by entities or the whole rectangle?

Easy. It should replace only the tiles that are occupied by entities, just like it works with trees and stones. It would also solved the first problem, because it would be inconvenient to use to create islands. It would be helpful rather in situation when you have a small water path on the area where you're placing blueprint.

I'm playing the SeaBlock mod pack in 0.16 and I can just make a blueprint of an area with nothing in it and I get a blueprint with landfill. That blueprint I can place anywhere I like and get ghosted landfill. I don't have construction bots yet but bluebuild happily builds the ghosted landfill as I move around. So you can select core tiles, can blueprint them and it makes total sense and works just fine. Just not in vanilla.

But anyhow that is a bit besides the point as creating blueprints specifically for landfill is another issue. This suggestion is about adding landfill that isn't in the blueprint but where water prevents a blueprint from being placed.

[Aeternus]

I'd advise to not do this, for a simple reason: It cannot be undone. If you misalign a blueprint you can accidentally fill in areas you need to stay water.

[<NO_NAME>]

I'd advise to not do this, for a simple reason: It cannot be undone. If you misalign a blueprint you can accidentally fill in areas you need to stay water.

That's why you would have to press shift to confirm that.

[mrvn]

I'd advise to not do this, for a simple reason: It cannot be undone. If you misalign a blueprint you can accidentally fill in areas you need to stay water.

That's why you would have to press shift to confirm that.

And it only places ghosts so you can easily undo it by deconstructing it again.

And last it's far harder to misalign the blueprint than manually placing the landfill where you think the blueprint will be. Manually placing gives you two chances to misalign, first when looking where the blueprint should be and then again when you place the landfill.

[adam_bise]

This is one of the roadblocks still preventing automated land expansion in vanilla.

[Zavian]

My solar farms would appreciate me being able to automatically place landfill. (Ideally I would like to also add a couple of tiles of landfill around the blueprint, so I can walk around the edge. Ideally that margin would also be cleared of trees, if the blueprint was placed on land).

One alternative is something like https://mods.factorio.com/mod/platforms.

That neatly solves

I'd advise to not do this, for a simple reason: It cannot be undone. If you misalign a blueprint you can accidentally fill in areas you need to stay water.

[Jap2.0]

Ah, I see this has has had its annual suggestion post come around again. +1 as always.

[BlueTemplar]

Platforms sounds great if you're unwilling/unable to use waterfill - thanks !

[mrvn]

Maybe one could write a mod that would add landfill ghosts to an existing blueprint as interim solution?

[Chrisi]

+1
I like to have huge builds with steam engines or nuclear reactors inside lakes or oceans. Lots of saving and reloading is required during landfilling the correct spots because if you landfill a wrong tile, it cannot be undone.
Automating construction of huge reactor builds and rails through oceans with blueprints with landfill would be a great QOL feature and be hugely appreciated by a lot of people playing this game.
Hopefully the devs will consider adding this feature.

[Optera]

This mod somewhat does what the OP suggested.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Blueprint_Footprint

Sadly it doesn't place landfill under tiled floor.

[TheBloke]

Idea: The ability for entity ghosts to exist on top of landfill ghosts when on water, such that Construction Bots can first place landfill and then the entities on top of them.

Supplementary idea: Some way to have it such that the game automatically adds landfill when a BP is placed on water, allowing any BP to be placed on water and have the necessary landfill be ghosted and built. This could be default behaviour (like the removal of cliffs), or it could be a tickbox or other UI element in a BP, allowing this to be specified per-BP.

I was really excited when I saw that bots could now place landfill. And it is a helpful feature that I'm glad we have, but unfortunately not quite as useful as I hoped it might be. However I believe it could become incredibly helpful, and a big time-saver, with one or two additions.

What I hoped I could do:
Plop down a blueprint over water and have any and all water be filled with landfill, in the same way bots will automatically remove trees, rocks and now cliffs. Meaning I could now place a blueprint just once and it have it built regardless of the terrain obstruction. The only thing I'd need to take care of manually would be biters.

What happens in practice:
I first need to re-blueprint my structure to include landfill over the entire surface. This may well involve having to landfill over a large lake, so I can ensure I can get an area where 100% of the blueprint will be on top of landfill.

Then I can place this new blueprint on water. However any water tiles will only get landfill ghosts placed on them. The ghosts for structures on top don't get placed and so won't be built. I guess this is because the game doesn't allow ghosts on water, and so because the landfill hasn't yet been placed it's not possible for the ghost to placed. This is the key thing that I hope can be changed.

So instead only the landfill gets constructed, and I have to wait for it to be entirely finished - which could take a long time - before I can go back and place the blueprint again over the top to get the other entities in place.

This loses the big benefit of automation. I hoped that with bots able to both place landfill and remove cliffs, I'd be able to just place a blueprint and leave to let them get on with it. But as I have to go back and manually intervene anyway it makes me think I may as well just place the landfill myself as I was doing before, which means it goes down a lot quicker.

My hopes for improvement:
This whole process would be enormously improved if the game were able to place entity ghosts on top of landfill ghosts such that once the landfill is built so too will be the entities on top. Just like with concrete. The difference here being that this means the game needs to allow entity ghosts on water, so long as there's also a landfill ghost there.

On top of that, the whole process of building on water could be made much quicker and more pleasant for the user if the game could automate the addition of landfill when over water. This could simply be default behaviour - once the user has landfill available, it is automatically added under water in the same way that cliffs, trees and rocks are automatically moved. Or it could be configurable, such as having a tickbox in a BP that would cause landfill to be automatically added on a per-BP basis.

That would cut out the whole business of having to re-blueprint everything on top of 100% landfill. This additional request is a less important concern as at least this process only has to be done once for each BP and then it'll work forever. And probably we can use external tools to automate this for us. But it would certainly be a much appreciated time saver if it could be implemented in vanilla, particularly as it means the same BP can be used on both land and water (without needing to shift-click force it) just by toggling the box on and off.

The per-BP configuration idea could be extended to something more generic and even cooler: A 'tile box' on every BP, into which the user can place any tile entity. If this tile box is filled then when the BP is placed it automatically has that tile as its 'floor'. Thus allowing the user to make any blueprint go down on landfill, concrete, stone, etc, without having to first create it like that and blueprint it.

[mrvn]

Note that when you create blueprints there is a little check box to include tiles. No need to create landfill ghosts, including tiles will place landfill ghosts when you put down the blueprint.

Doesn't work with walkways, like stone, wood, asphalt though as they can't be placed on water and the landfill underneath the walkways isn't included in the blueprint.

Note: It would be nice to have an option to include tiles only where needed. I.e. only below entities.