When I first conceptualized Engineer Alpha one of the things that I really wanted to include was tiers for virtually everything. Tiers are essentially the quality of the object in question with objects at higher tiers doing the same job as those at lower tiers, just better. The gameplay goal being that it feels good to replace an item/building/whatever of a lower tier with one from a higher when you got there.
For the vast majority of items in the game there are 6 options for tier:
0 Wood/Stone
1 Copper
2 Iron
3 Steel
4 Titanium
5 Tungsten
This leads to a very large number of items and buildings that the player has access to and is why some time ago I added the tier drop-down the the workbench / assembler as the number of recipes was getting far to long and unwieldy for a single list.
But today I don't want to talk about Items, I want to talk about buildings. Buildings can be a pain to replace with one of the same type from a higher tier. And to make the transition from a low tier to a higher tier feel as good as possible it should be as easy as possible. With 0.4 I am adding the ability to fast replace buildings with one of a higher tier instantly. All you have to do is be aiming where you want the building to be placed and if you aim at a building of similar type that is a lower tier your aim will "snap" to the location of the old building. If you create the building while snapped to an existing one it will remove the old one, add it back to your inventory, and copy any relevant variables (settings, inventories, etc.). I have decided to restrict it to going up in tiers only (for now) as going down can be messy, e.g. going from a big inventory to a small one (things could end up lost/on the ground). This will definitely be coming to many buildings like chests, shaft splitters, mergers, gearboxes, and others likely as well. Connectors like shafts are a bit trickier and hopefully will be implemented but I can't promise that for this version.