Hello, I'm back again! This time for a small suggestion, if you're open to it... if not, just disregard this post, and sorry for the noise!
Not sure yet how's the best way to design Staged BPs or what is the best or intended use, as I've just recently started using the mod... so the way I describe might not be the best/optimal way of doing things, but nevertheless, what I've personally been doing is to design my BPs in a Lab environment that has cheat mode enabled so it's easier to just paste stuff and change etc. and then, after I'm done with that and my design is functional, I import it into a new Staged Build and paste the produced design and start separating it into stages.
So, keeping that in mind, what I've found I was wishing that the mod provided is some kind of reverse 'upgrade' tool that deals with belts/machines/etc (anything that can be touched by a normal game upgrade tool) but that basically worked retroactively instead of from now on. What I mean by that is that normally, when you finish a design and test it, you use all the latest possible tier of things that you can use according to the purpose of the build, i.e. say red belts and blue assemblers. But when you are staging that design you need to downgrade those for the initial stages, and then in a later stage upgrade them again, which leads to having to do two separated operations in two different stages in order to leave stuff the same as before for later stages.
It occurred to me that if you had a sort of downgrade tool integrated into the mod, that acted as if it was a reverse upgrade tool (i.e. the same as using the upgrade tool with right click) and if you were to use such tool say in the current stage, what it would do is to mark the belt as upgraded in this stage, and move backward through stages and apply the reverse upgrade in the stage where those entities were introduced... if you had such tool, it would be much easier to do the downgrade/upgrade in a single operation, which would lead to making less mistakes while editing big BPs.
Maybe hijacking the upgrade tool for doing this could also work out, if it's easier. The mod already recognizes the 'upgrade' operation of using the reverse tool, but it treats it like a normal upgrade and tracks it forward when what it should be doing is tracking it backwards (IMO.) But perhaps that would lead to confusion and a new tool would be better for this operation.
EDIT: Just to clarify, when I say 'making less mistakes' etc, what I mean is that when you're in the stage where you supposed to upgrade some belts to red belts, for example... in the existing BP you already see the red belts there, so it's easy to know that you need to downgrade them... but when downgrade them, you lose the information on where there are supposed to be red belts, and then in the later stage when you need to upgrade them, you need to go by memory and use the upgrade tool in reverse to what you already did before. That's my justification to think that there should be an unified operation that does this atomically (in my mind makes sense, but maybe it's just nonsense lol)
Ofc. I'm open to suggestions/learning if there are better ways of doing what I'm doing that maybe dont require doing this!
Best wishes, and thanks again for making/sharing this mod!
