[shadowgovt]

Now that I've hit that part: yes yes yes they cracked the nut. :)

The addition of that game mechanic creates for the player a new type of puzzle in addition to the raw crafting puzzles: pattern recognition. Coming up on a jumble of nonsense, mentally parsing it out, and recognizing you have a template that can be applied to it is actually really fun (and even more exciting when you're doing it in realtime because some monster is bearing down on you).

[philistine]

I'm happy you like it. I felt the same when I started using blueprints in Factorio as I did when I unlocked blueprints in Zelda: profound elation.