[0.15] Deconstruct all except trees/rocks

[Aeternus]

The Deconstruction Planner filter "Trees only" is very handy if you want to clear some terrain objects to make room for construction or just want a road to drive through. However, "Stone Rocks" have been omitted from this filter.
Change the filter to "Clear Natural Objects" and include the Stone Rocks, so that it becomes a basic terrain bulldozer filter?

[threephi]

It would be great if there were a fast way to set the deconstruction planner to ignore trees, as there is when selecting "trees only" when you want to deforest an area.

It seems asymmetric and inconsistent that the deconstruction planner can whitelist all trees with a single click, but blacklisting them requires over 40 clicks to tediously select 21 different entities from the environment tab.

I can think of a few ways this could be implemented:

1) Most useful: break out the "environment" sub-category from the entities tab into a top-level tab of its own, with a drop down list as exists for tiles: normal, never, always, and only. This is the most efficient and intuitive from a gameplay perspective as it would allow the same deconstruction planner to also filter for other entities, just as it already does when whitelisting/blacklisting tiles. Also, I'm not sure why the player-character might want to individually select from each and every variety of tree and rock, but perhaps I am missing something. To that end, perhaps all the trees and all the rocks could be collected into single icons for this purpose.

2) Less useful: Rename the checkbox from "trees only" to "trees", and allow the selection for whitelist/blacklist to apply. Maybe this is a little easier to implement?

I hope the devs will consider this as I believe it will make the deconstruction planner more intuitive and useful.

Thanks, and congrats on making such a fantastic game.

[ssilk]

Merged posts.

[Therax]

Request:

Allow the Deconstruction planner to be set to Blacklist mode while the Trees/rocks only checkbox is active.

Rationale:

Frequently I will want to remove structures over a large area without removing trees or rocks in the selection box. This happens especially often when revising a rail layout. I can currently do with with the 0.15 deconstruction planner by opening it, setting a filter for every tree & rock type, and setting the toggle to Blacklist. This is necessary because when the existing "Trees/rocks only" checkbox is active, the deconstruction planner locks to Whitelist mode.

It would be nice to be able to use Blacklist together with Trees/rocks only (possibly changing the label to "Trees/rocks excluded" for clarity), rather than managing multiple deconstruction planners.

[_alphaBeta_]

I was also looking for this. Only workaround I see is to blacklist every individual tree type to the planner. Seems a waste of time with the checkbox and white/blacklist slider right there.

[BlackKnight]

I don't understand why every tree and rock type is available. Just make 1 rock and 1 tree refer to all within the deconstruction planner. Then situations like this would be solved very simply.

TLDR; Simplify deconstruction planner's filters for rocks and trees

[JohnyDL]

I don't see why you'd necessarily want to keep trees but okay, if you're trying to remove rail rather than blacklisting trees why not whitelist your rails, signals, etc, it'd be super awesome though if you could drop a blueprint on the whitelist/blacklist grid and then the items (or at least the biggest 30) would get added to the deconstruct planner, 1 click multiple uses.

Also the granularity is awesome in some ways it allows you to get rid of trees that displease you or keep ones you like.

[Koub]

I don't see why you'd necessarily want to keep trees

Trees are amongst the best pollution absorbers (apart from the biter/spitter spawners, but the spawners spawn biters/spitters in compensation of the pollution absorbed)

[JohnyDL]

and there I was clearing swathes of forest oops XD 1300 hours into the game I still just see them as an obstacle for a good factory XD

[mrvn]

Maybe you don't have the inventory space for 1000000 trees. Sadly you can not put them back somewhere else after harvesting trees and rocks. I want to plant my own forest.

[BenSeidel]

Instead of the current toggle, it should be a selectable type, like the "ghost entity" or "item on ground".

special icon.jpg (316.34 KiB) Viewed 7813 times

[mophydeen]

I have 2 deconstruction planners in my inventory:
- normal deconstruction planner
- deconstruction planner which sets all trees except the dead ones. (I like to remove dead trees and rocks)

I'd like a way to just add this deconstruction planner to my blueprintbook.

[_alphaBeta_]

I'd like a way to just add this deconstruction planner to my blueprintbook.

Yes! I was also going to suggest this as well. Deconstruction planners can now become very customized and it seems silly to have to recreate them for every game. This is especially considering the blueprint library we have now.

[deer_buster]

I'd like a way to just add this deconstruction planner to my blueprintbook.

Yes! I was also going to suggest this as well. Deconstruction planners can now become very customized and it seems silly to have to recreate them for every game. This is especially considering the blueprint library we have now.

Quoted for truth


+1

[steinio]

I'd like a way to just add this deconstruction planner to my blueprintbook.

Yes! I was also going to suggest this as well. Deconstruction planners can now become very customized and it seems silly to have to recreate them for every game. This is especially considering the blueprint library we have now.

Quoted for truth


+1

We also need renaming and customizing icons...

[BlackKnight]

Better still, allow a drop down of saved filter presets for a single deconstruction planner. This would save hunting for a specific filter. If deconstruction planners were made to be exported the string would have to include the saved preset list within them.

[mrvn]

I would like for the list of trees / rocks to have an "Any" icon. That way a single click would add all of them to a filter while preserving the ability to be more selective.

[Rseding91]

I don't understand why every tree and rock type is available. Just make 1 rock and 1 tree refer to all within the deconstruction planner. Then situations like this would be solved very simply.

TLDR; Simplify deconstruction planner's filters for rocks and trees

Because it's presenting a list of all deconstructable entities and uses the entity ID to do the filtering. Every rock and tree is unique and so it shows up as its own option in the list of "all entities". Even more that's important when you add mods in that use the different types for different things.

[BlackKnight]

I don't understand why every tree and rock type is available. Just make 1 rock and 1 tree refer to all within the deconstruction planner. Then situations like this would be solved very simply.

TLDR; Simplify deconstruction planner's filters for rocks and trees

Because it's presenting a list of all deconstructable entities and uses the entity ID to do the filtering. Every rock and tree is unique and so it shows up as its own option in the list of "all entities". Even more that's important when you add mods in that use the different types for different things.

Fair enough, somehow I expected that. Yet, it should still be possible to group all IDs into a single entity referenceable entity as Trees or Rocks and display that for selection instead - just like the All Rocks and Trees toggle - and still allow listings of new individual entity IDs associated with mods. Of course they (all tree and rock) could just be replaced by the All Rock and Tree toggle, or merged into a single icon for trees and another for rocks.

Though if you decide to keep the icons, something that bothers me even more than the above is the messy look of the tree and rock list as some of the icons for for both types look identical to eachother -- which make them look like needless duplicates. So at least merging these together or differentiating would be better than what is currently available IMO... Thanks

[BenSeidel]

How about the deconstruction planners have access to the "fast replace" categories.
For the icons they could use 4 random icons of the entities in the group. Then we could deconstruct all chest or all inserters etc.