COPY/PASTE
Tools that let players duplicate a selection of their own construction — a room, a factory block, a circuit — and stamp it down elsewhere, often with a ghost preview and material cost.
- SOLO-DEV COST HIGH
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN AUTOMATION · SANDBOX · BASE-BUILDING · CITY-BUILDER
Factorio's blueprint system is the canonical implementation, turning late-game expansion from manual tile-laying into deploying saved designs; Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program adopted equivalents, and Minecraft's creative community relies on structure-copying mods. Designers add copy/paste when the game's scale outgrows its placement tools: once a player has proven they can build a smelting column, making them hand-build the fortieth copy is friction without decision. Blueprints also become shareable artifacts that fuel community knowledge exchange. Key decisions: whether pasting is instant or spawns construction work for logistics to fulfill (Factorio's bots), whether blueprints are free knowledge or cost resources, and how rotation, mirroring, and terrain conflicts resolve. Pitfall: introducing copy/paste too early can skip the mastery phase — players paste downloaded megabase designs before understanding the systems, optimizing away their own learning.
SEEN IN
- FACTORIO
- SATISFACTORY
- DYSON SPHERE PROGRAM