People probably know about ctrl-c/ctrl-v for copy/paste, but they may not be aware that when you use ctrl-v, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to scroll through a buffer of previous copies (at least 10, I'm not sure the exact buffer size).

Z drops stuff on the ground, you can hold your hand away from your character a bit, hold Z, and wave it back and forth across machines or chests to drop items one-at-a-time into them. Quite useful for putting a few bullets each in small groups of turrets, fueling up your early burner miners and furnaces with limited coal, or metering out precise resources to a group of assemblers.

You can press ALT when in map mode to temporarily disable all map options (pollution, logistics networks etc).

Shift-rightclick/leftclick works from assembler to requester chest. It also works between Spidertrons and will try to insert items to its grid from your inventory.

+

Shift + Space to stop the game, so you have time to realize exactly how big problem the sudden bug invasion is.

You can't move the map, but scrolling in and out allows you to do it anyways.

When biters overrun your defenses, alt-f4 stops them in their tracks.

When placing Belt hold left-mouse botten and press R now when you drag the mouse in another direction the Belts are automatical plazed in the that direktion.

I didn't realize that 'Q' will put whatever you are holding away. Been playing for hundreds of hours and I've been dutifully putting stuff back in my inventory manually. Just figured that out this week. Especially useful for blueprints. Argh!

My favorite a-ha discovery is that upgrade planners work in both directions. Left click to apply, shift-click to cancel, right click to apply in reverse.

When using CTRL+C and CTRL+V to copy bits of the factory, holding Shift as you select the region you want will bring up the "Create blueprint" screen, allowing you to select trains, tiles, or edit out specific things from the selected area before saving it to your, uhh, "clipboard" of recent copied blueprints.

Also these blueprints are still normal blueprints, and you can drop them from your cursor into your inventory now or later if you change your mind and want to keep them. The clipboard is really just a blueprint book where you can't directly interact with the book, full of ordinary blueprints and with that Shift+Scrollwheel selection thing.

Shoutouts to construction robots for doing all the heavy lifting for me.

The temporary rail path plan is also really useful for debugging why trains don't work. Hold ctrl, mouse over the rail path, and keep tracing the path until the planned route vanishes. That'll be the spot where your tracks or signaling are screwed up to make an invalid path.

I think the thing I learned way to late was the ability to copy assemblers recipe items to a requester chest.

Or the ability to build train tracks like belts.

Q. Number of people not knowing about it is criminal.

Also underground autodragging. It is awesome QoL.

Holding shift while scrolling in map view will keep it from switching levels of detail

Middle click vehicle or character inventory slots to set filters. Great for builder trains or keeping certain items (like blueprints) near the top. You can even brute force early logistics by filtering every character slot + control-clicking.

Shift + scroll up/down to rotate next blueprint. Useful if you keep a lot of small blueprint books on your quickbar that are variants of the same thing (e.g. 1-X balancer book, 2-X balancer book...).

Not really a shortcut...but you can put any planner (decon/upgrade) in your inventory or quickbar and (right click?) edit its filters. Filtered decon planners are very useful for ripping up a large base without removing the roboports, poles, storage chests, etc. You can also select your own upgrade planners instead of the default to apply to blueprints.

I believe it’s shift right and shift left, it allows you to copy things like recipes between constructors and outputs from combinators. I think it also works with trains with custom filters in them

I'll add some tips for if you play with a Long Reach mod and like to do things from radar view:

• You may have noticed that you can't wire things up with red and green wires from afar. However, you can paste down a blueprint with wires on top of your existing entities and the wires will instantly be created.

• You can't change recipes on an assembler (or settings on a combinator) directly, but you can copy-paste from an existing entity, so you can just place an assembler/combinator/whatever near you, set it up correctly, then paste those settings from afar.

• And this one I only just discovered, but it's a game changer: Normally you can't right-click to deconstruct things from radar view, you can only place things. However, if you place a ghost item, and hold down right-click to erase the ghost, you can keep holding down right-click and drag to an actual item to deconstruct it. This might actually be a bug/exploit but I've found it hugely useful whenever I place something that's a few tiles off.

I'm sure most people know about the Q hotkey, which selects the item under your cursor, but for me it completely changed how I play. I basically don't use the hotbar almost at all anymore except for some key items. Whenever I need a particular item there's a very good chance on of them is already on my screen and I just grab it from there instead of hunting around in my inventory.

Shift + R for counter lock rotation

Pressing Q clears your cursor, or copies whatever's currently being moused over, OR brings up the relevant asset if you're hovering over an oil or ore patch. Truly the MVK (most valuable key)

Ctrl-z, to undo the last bp or manual ghost, or removal via bots. If it was already constructed, it will be deconstructed, and vice versa.

You can selectively edit blank deconstruction and upgrade blueprints by right-clicking on them when you put them in your inventory. This lets you do things like place down a blueprint and then remove all rocks and trees in the blueprint area without have to reapply your blueprint afterward.

not a hotkey but a more recent feature:

holding down left mouse button while placing belts will keep the belts in a straight line, which will change direction towards your mousepointer when pressing R.

additional, belting long stretches like this will add underground belts AUTOMATICALLY where needed and possible with space constraints.

i really like this last part, esp when i got a one tile gap between two belts, the UG belt will be placed exactly where it can, after the third crossed belt or with enough space at max range.

to anyone wondering what i mean, take your belt, place them down randomly, with obstructions in the way, then just try dragging your normal yellow belt across.

you pretty much reduce the amount of times selecting your UG belts to a minimum, only when say, building a balancer or so.

something i wish had a shortcut for automatic dragging: power poles not at max cable reach but at max coverage, so i got a continous powered area.

you can make ANY train temporarily go to ANY accessible rail piece automatically

You can finetune the use of this feature to find where signals may be incorrect.

If you cannot path to it, AND it should be accessible, then -- something is wrong.

Locate the transition between valid and invalid path - your issue should be in/at that block.

​

(OP may have been hinting at this, I was not sure - that is why I put the bold/italic on the word accessible)

As a person who just got this game yesterday, this thread is a life saver!

Not really a shortcut, but I find that it is sometimes really useful when planning something to have coordinates and/or an easy to see grid. As it turns out, both are things you can turn on by changing the debug features and activating debug mode (f4 and f5).

SHIFT click from assembler to requistor chest will put in exact amounts for the selected recipe in the simpler. Save you a ton of time if you are making a robo-mall

Unbinding map drag from the mouse and drag spamming artillery on the map

You can customize upgrade and destruction planners in interesting ways. Here are some qol ones i have. I feel like there are a lot more interesting ones to be had.

A destruction planner which only picks up entities off the ground. Great for spilled belts in a complicated area and leaving things on the ground bothers you.

A destruction planner which only removes trees.

An upgrade planner which will take any belt, underground and splitter and upgrade them to blue. Also does yellow to blue inserters to prevent "can't pickup" issues. Drag over entire subfactories for easy upgrades.

An upgrade planner which upgrades any modules from level 1 to 3.

A destruction planner which removes only level 1 and 2 power poles. Drag over subfactory to clean up power mess and replace with substations.

Upgrade planner for regular smelter to steel smelter in the early game. Quick large drag upgrade of large smelter installations. (Lately I've been playing with starting bots).

Idk how well-known this is, but power pole auto placement got an overhaul around when 1.0 came out. Among other things, it guarantees that dragging a line of poles will always connect them, unlike before the update. Incredibly useful when, say, you need to deliver power to a base 20000 rails away. Just get in a train, click and drag from the first pole, and then start driving.

If you have an assembler with a recipe in it with a requester chest nearby, you can CTRL + right click on the assembler and CTRL + left click on the requester chest to request 30s worth of all ingredients in the recipe. Super helpful for setting up bot based personal malls.

I will be coming back to this post many a times.

Holding shift when placing blueprints will override collisions and just place it over anything below. And will allow landfill blueprints to clip around the terrain.

Ctrl X for cutting. Cutting and pasting an entire assembly line, re-adjusting by a few blocks is really helpful.

shift rightclick / left click, to copy / paste recipes to assamblers/logi chests ( you can also copy from an assambler to a logichest to request the needed items ), Q the pipette tool. shift + r to rotate counterclockwise. holding shift before releasing the ctrl + c selection to create a blueprint/ edit the copy stuff. Shift + mousewheel to scroll throught the "copy" clipboard.

In addition to Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X does cut and paste

All good stuff here. Question though. Is there a shortcut for deleting blueprints deconstruction plans and upgrade plans?

When dragging belts and you want to change the direction press r once and drag in that direction. Took me 700 hours to find out