Hi,

while working on preparing the save file for
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pump/discussion/5fefda60e794fa476bdf1972
I realized the shortcut for PUMP can only be activated after having construction robots.
While it is true that you need construction bots for placing buildings on ghosts, the ghosts alone can be helpful before having construction robots already, because you'd get a good layout to build manually.
It might make sense to remove the restriction, if there are no technical reasons speaking against it.

Cheers
Merikolus

I think P.U.M.P. will never be able to do as-good-as a job as the player can when doing it manually. P.U.M.P. is limited by a routine I pre-programmed and the routine has some concessions in order to make the code workable and to try to work in as many situations as possible. So when you're in the manual stage, take the opportunity to make a better one by yourself! :-D

I also think there's a charm in having to first experience some manual layouting to build extra appreciation when P.U.M.P. unlocks. Similar to how you get to appreciate bots when they're finally unlocked. Then again, copy pasting and blueprints all already work before bots are unlocked, so maybe P.U.M.P. should, too? Tough call ..

I don't recall putting anything explicitly in place to unlock at this stage. So I guess it's just a default. But I assume there's ways to pick another research requirement. So I don't expect a technical reason to not do it.

Bottomline, .. I'll think about it. No promises.

You have a point about appreciation and the manual phase. There are so many cheaty bot mods though, and after playing a few times, I dislike not having bots and doing everything manually. After testing some, I ended up with using "Early Construction", the construction robots there can fly, so they do not have the same issues as the ground based ones, and they are one time use, once they finished their task, they vanish, so it's still kinda balanced and you try to not use them for everything as they are still very valuable.
Maybe you should leave the requirement as it is, because if someone is bothered by the first manual steps, they would most likely have other mods that speed up things, just like the EC drones for example.

That said, personally, any routine will do a way better job in creating a layout than I would. :-)

Hi,

I've uploaded version 1.1.0 which addresses this issue.

I've removed the tech requirement for the P.U.M.P. shortcut, so it should now always be available. Instead, before showing the selection menu, I do a quick scan if the pump/pipe is actually unlocked by research and it won't show the not-yet-researched item.

Assuming you don't use PUMP before you're actually ready to process oil, this seems like the most player friendly route to take. But just in case you still want to produce layouts without having the appropriate research done, you can also disable to the research-check in the settings.

Let me know if this works for you! :-)