Very easy to optimise the fun out of Factorio. I have a hard rule: no blueprints carried forward between saves. It's more fun for me to figure out what I can design quickly that kinda works and kinda supports scaling. A lot of the time I'll just build something as a repeatable unit cell and then use copy/paste, skipping the blueprints. I think it's worth trying this out.
Agreed, and aside from balancers and some train grid blueprints I don't use external blueprints. There are just some things I don't like re-inventing. Sometimes if I do a back-to-back factorio game I'll bring over some blueprints but I learned early that external blueprints are the quickest way to ruin the game for me.
I think that's a good rule. If there's something particularly tricky I will make a blueprint and carry it between games, but it's rare. And I only use my blueprints, with the exception of belt balancers (which I'm not smart enough to figure out). Using other people's blueprints is the fastest way to kill the fun in Factorio.
Same. I do use blueprints (I usually make copypasteable smelters, circuit factories and whatnot) but only in the same save, all of them get chucked when I start a new save.
And of course no copying blueprints from the internet at all.
So the first iteration of the design is always slightly wonky, so it remains fun :)
