Flag to hide entities from upgrade planner

[Anachrony]

Modding Help thread: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=95514

I would like to request either that the hidden flag on an entity hides entities from the upgrade planner, or that a new entity flag be added which does that.
"hidden" on the entity does not hide it from the upgrade planner. "not-deconstructable" hides it from the deconstruction planner, which is good. "not-upgradable" is only partially effective. It hides it from the left hand column of things to upgrade, but not the right hand column of what to upgrade things into. "hidden" on the item rather than the entity does successfully keep it off the upgrade planner, but in some cases hiding the item is not desirable.

There is some discussion of why this is an issue in the modding help thread, but to summarize: I have some entities where a single item initially places one entity, but a script intercepts it and replaces it with a different entity. When it's deconstructed, it turns back into the original item. So there is one item shared by two entities. Additionally there are 3 tiers of this item that should be upgradeable with one another. The initial builder entity has to be the same fast_replaceable_group as the final built entity, because when you want to build a tier 2 over a tier 1, it's the initial builder entity in your hand that is hovering over the already built final entity that you want to upgrade. Because both versions of the entity are the same fast_replaceable_group, both of them appear in the upgrade planner, which is confusing for the user who doesn't understand why they are duplicated. Setting the initial builder version as not-upgradable does help the situation by removing it from the left column, but not the right. And hidden on the item isn't an option since both use the same item.

This may sound pretty niche, but I know of other modders using similar strategies for creating entities with novel behavior, and some of them have similar upgrade planner problems (which they may or may not have noticed yet). Functionally it's not a big deal since it works out the same regardless of which duplicate the user picks, but it does look buggy to a user who doesn't know the behind the scenes behavior.

[Stringweasel]

+1

The composite power poles in Fluidic Power also suffer from this issue, and I would love to clean it up.

[-DeadlyKitten]

+1