just been altering a component and its alterations were made at the outer most blue breakpoint and has 19 instances throughout the page but when i go to another break point all the formatting of that element are lost - BTW i was using the Tips tutorial page as the example and altered the Back Button and gave it some styling.

so as a working method do i need to set that at the very beginning of the build and then add breakpoints later for it to keep its instancing attributes

Yes. Foundation Framer uses a mobile first workflow (as mentioned here). In general, changes made at a breakpoint affect all breakpoints to the right of it, but changes made at a breakpoint do not affect breakpoints to the left of it.

I say 'in general', because a breakpoint to the right will not be affected by this rule if the style change made at the smaller breakpoint happens to be of an item (e.g. colour, font size) already set at the larger breakpoint.

Frank

Thanks for clarifying that Frank and makes sense too