Factorio Forums

Normal deconstruction behaviour: ghosts of whitelisted entitites remain untouched (ghost entity remains after deconstruction).
Bug: all ghosts of tiles are removed in all configurations of the deconstruction planner, including "tile: never".
Note that the behaviour is correct for placed entitites. I specifically selected an area that is not completely built yet for the screenshot.

Tile ghosts are not tiles but are entity ghosts and fall under the entity filters.

Not exactly intuitive GUI wise, but thanks to your pointer I've found the question mark icon in the entities tab that lets me filter ghosts. Thanks.
That explains why the "filter rocks and trees only" left the ghost tiles alone (something I discovered later yesterday)

EDIT: I'm still confused though. I included the "ghost tile" entity to the filter. Both on blacklist and whitelist it still marks them for deconstruction. Is that also correct behaviour?

What if I want to only remove ghosts of some type but not all ghosts?

As far as I can tell there is no possible filter to separate out a single type of ghost tile for that as there is only the one entity filter for all tile ghosts. I see two strategies:
- build it, then deconstruct using a filter on the type you want removed (actual tile filter). Heavy on robot use I'd imagine.
- blueprint it, then right click on the type you don't want (up top, it will remove everything of that type) and stamp that down. This cannot distinguish between ghost and actual tile though.

It would be nice if a blueprint could also be used a deconstruction plan. Remove the items (and only the items) in the blueprint leaving everything else alone.

Having the ghosts not obey deconstruction filters makes it more difficult to lay out plans before actually building. I noticed this issue when trying to remove all signals from some rails I had laid out.