Build commands picker / selection like in Factorio

[foggy charm]

In Factorio, an industrial factory builder / survival game, there is a key bind that allows you to select the building blueprint of an already built construction to immediately get the blueprint of the same building on your cursor.

So lets say our key bind is "ctrl+c" while having any construction unit selected.
If you select your construction unit and hover over a Wind turbine (or any other building the selected unit can build), and press our ctrl-c keybind, you get the wind turbine build mode selected and you can place more of that building without having to use the "XX" key bind to reach the same result. Because for this you need to remember the key-combinations.
A video example for the construction picker in factorio: https://youtu.be/RuZIqub2Yoo?t=102

Another feature for building in factorio is the ability to select a formation of buildings with a rectangle selection tool, in which case a hotkey gives you the exact same formation / blueprint of the selected buildings and you can place it so the constructor will start building a copy at the location you place it.

Example for the selection copy paste tool in Factorio.
https://youtu.be/Fs-WmS9AxSQ?t=347

Maybe something that could work in this game aswel, since you guys already have such insane versatile possibilities!
Factorio has more interesting tools you might get some inspiration from, but these 2 are the most powerful in my opinion.

[wanton robin]

Blueprints may be a bit too nontrivial - if you just copy paste an area, what guarantee is there that your currently selected constructor can build all the buildings in the area? What order would it give to the selected buildings? It's not immediately obvious.

What could, instead, be a great fit is the pipette tool. In Factorio, if you press Q and click on a building, it selects that building from your inventory (assuming you have one in your vast backpack) and with just that, you're ready to place more of it. That could work. In fact I think it'd work even as a user-side widget (#widgets-download), no?

[mighty dune]

Thanks for reminding me i should play Factorio again

[foggy charm]

I agree with your blueprint statement being a bit non-trivial. However, I do see this work for lets say build openings during the preparation mode. instead of having to place the whole layout, you can place your mex and place your 2 energy types and chosen factory preset from a blueprint library to get people to ready up faster. (but seems like a lot of work for what it could be worth)

The pipette functionality you mention is the one i mean and show in the Xterminator youtube link above. This could definitely work and could be usefull in many scenarios.

[wanton robin]

Ooooh sorry, I missed your second paragraph ^^'

yeah

That'd work

[foggy charm]

Now that I think of it. Hovering over a building and pressing ctrl-c actually puts all the configurations of that building on your clipboard, allowing you to fast copy configurations of a building to another of its kind.

This could work for instance for build queues in factories, but just like the blueprints I think it might not have enough use-cases for it to be worth the manhours in development 😛

[wanton robin]

Yeah... but I still like the pipette idea a lot!