Option to hide technology behind an unresearched essential technology

[Hexicube]

When looking at the tech tree at Production Science Pack I'm confronted with the following massive tree:

https://i.imgur.com/Vqkh8sU.png

Half of these are locked behind another pack's tech (primarily other planets - I've crossed them out) and merely serve to clog up what I'm trying to do: Work out which pack I want to go for first.

It would be helpful if there were a toggle to hide any research that depended on an unresearched essential technology (which right now is planets and packs) unless I'm specifically looking at that essential technology.

In my specific case it would have helped me quickly spot that, at my current tech level and with the restriction from the planet tech achievement, I would rather go for High Tech over Production to get infinite ammo damage so my Nauvis factory has something to do.

[IronCartographer]

Great idea. Maybe on the API side a tech could have a "keystone tech" flag, and if that flag is set then the checkbox would consider if that tech is researched.

Even more flexible than making it specifically for planets/packs, for any funky branching the modders might come up with.

If it were *really* fancy, the tech tree could have a dropdown to select *which* keystone techs to filter by...but that might be a bit much.

Better idea as per discussion elsewhere: Make the existing checkbox into a dropdown.

• Show all technologies
• Show essential and available non-essential technologies only
• Show essential technologies only

"Available" would mean that all "essential" prereqs were researched. I'm wishing they were called keystone (integral to a path) rather than essential (integral to the *only* path), now...but I digress.

As an aside, it's neat that the existing checkbox only affects the tree visualization so people can't get "stuck"! That makes these options a lot less risky.

Edit: 2024.11.5 - The above sentence proved incorrect. Someone today in Discord did very much get stuck wondering why they couldn't research the utility science pack despite having the prerequisite packs available.