Sharing Blueprints is Hard
Has this ever happened to you? You've just come up with some incredible new invention and want to share it with the world:
You craft your perfect blueprint, paste it into Pastebin, and summon the blueprint bot to share your creation:
What's going on here? You click on your link to make sure you didn't paste it wrong, and you discover that Pastebin's anti-spam measures have flagged your post and made it unavailable to the world.
Even worse, Pastebin has retroactively flagged many anonymously shared blueprints from the past as spam, leaving them lost to the sands of time.
Introducing: FactorioBin
The Factorio community deserves a way to post blueprints that is as quick and easy as Pastebin, but which understands what they are and won't delete them.
Today, I'm proud to introduce to you my answer to this problem: FactorioBin. You can just paste in your blueprint string and get a URL to share. But wait! There's more! FactorioBin will automatically render more information about your blueprint, because it understands how to decode them.
Let's walk through a few examples to show you just how much FactorioBin can detect and display about your blueprint string:
Blueprints
Let's take that balancer I created earlier and submit it to FactorioBin. You can see a screenshot below. Click on the screenshot to open a live page in a new tab (this should look better if you're on a small screen). I'd like to draw your attention to the things that FactorioBin can automatically display about my blueprint:
- The name, description, and icons match the ones I chose in the in-game blueprint editor.
- It shows the length (765 bytes) and the version of Factorio used to make the blueprint (1.1.32)
- It shows a list of blueprint contents and quantity
- It shows the approximate in-game size of the blueprint
- It uses the same code as BlueprintBot to render a nice preview automatically
Blueprint Books
Because FactorioBin deeply understands all aspects of Factorio blueprints, it can also render a nice depiction of the contents of blueprint books:
If you click into a blueprint that's part of a blueprint book, you can see where it is in the hierarchy and even click to go back up to a parent blueprint book. This example also shows you a blueprint that has been configured to snap to a global grid.
If you view or copy the blueprint string, you will get just the blueprint string for what you're looking at. No need to import the entire blueprint book into the game and figure out where to find that one blueprint you wanted.
Deconstruction & Upgrade Planners
But that's not all. Do you have a deconstruction planner in your blueprint book? Let's render some nice information about it!
If you have some of the trickier combinations, like tile whitelist or trees/rocks only, it will correctly tell you information about which entities/tiles will be deconstructed by the deconstruction planner.
We can also render something nice for upgrade planners:
Limited Mod Support
Factorio has so many mods, it'd be impossible to support mods in FactorioBin, especially once you consider the ways that different combinations of mods could interact.
Instead, FactorioBin is smart enough to recognize when something isn't part of the vanilla game, and it will still do a decent job. Image previews will show question marks and the entity name, and the modded entities in the component list and blueprint icons will have a special icon you can hover over to see the internal entity name (which is all that is stored in blueprints).
Here's an example of how FactorioBin handles blueprints which contains modded entities. You can hover over the ?MOD hexagon icons to see the game-internal name for modded items.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank Wube for making such a great game, and for being cool with FactorioBin existing. Thanks also to the Factorio-FBSR project, for making your excellent blueprint renderer open-source. Finally, thank you to my beta testers. Your feedback and testing was invaluable.
Final Remarks
I hope this site will be useful to you! To learn more about privacy or the features I have planned for the future, check out the About page. To let me know about a problem or just to get in contact in general, see the Contact page.
Now go share your wonderful creations, and let me know how it works for you!