Construction Planners

[dragon-architect]

It may be a little bit too late for me to post this because I sat on it for too long and Factorio 2.1 as the final update is right around the corner, but nothing ventured is nothing gained...

TL;DR:

Introduce a new Construction Planner that can manually (dis)approve ghosts for construction, and a complementary toggle to auto-approve ghosts for construction.

What?

As in the TL;DR, I would like to have the ability to manually approve ghosts for construction.

Functions that I think could be implemented for the feature:

• A new (perhaps yellow, to differentiate by color?) construction planner that players can use to manually (dis)approve ghosts for construction
• Construction planners could inherit the same filter capabilities of deconstruction and upgrade planners, so that a player can, for example, explicitly approve only belts for construction across an entire swath of ghosts
• A toolbar toggle to auto-approve ghosts for construction or disable auto-approval
• A per-player game setting where the player can choose the default approval mode when the player loads a game

Construction planner actions could mirror the actions performed by upgrade and deconstruction planners:

• Left-click + drag would approve ghosts for construction (per the filter configured in the planner, if one is configured)
• Right-click + drag would approve ghosts for construction using the inverse of the set filter if one is configured. As with the deconstruction planner, this action does nothing with no filter set.
• Shift + left-click + drag would cancel construction approval orders. This action should force all construction bots to immediately return to where they got their payload and to where they were staged before construction orders began.

Perhaps in synergy with this, the deconstruction planner could be given an additional mode: Deconstruct to Ghosts. (Ctrl + Shift + left-click + drag, perhaps? Similar to super-force-building with blueprints?) This isn't strictly necessary; just would be a nice to have alongside a Construction Planner.

The mode does what it says: Use a Deconstruction Planner to Deconstruct to Ghosts would order construction bots to remove the marked items and replace them with ghosts that are not marked for approved construction so that if the player has forgotten to turn off their auto-approve toggle, the player can manually set everything back to ghosts with minimal hassle by letting the bots do the work.

Why?

Now that I'm interacting a LOT more with construction bots, including using an early game construction bots mod, I am routinely running into issues where the bots overzealously try to construct things prematurely and end up using the semi-precious items in my inventory that I am trying to save for carefully planned and staged expansion of my factory in places where I do not want those items to be placed.

I vehemently dislike needing to manually pick those items back up replace the ghosts those items replaced. I would enjoy being able to dictate what my bots build when I want them to build it without needing to wait until I'm ready for them to build it before I place down blueprints and ghosts, and I think this feature would considerably improve bot construction QoL.

There are already several mods that attempt to implement this feature, with varying degrees of functionality and compatibility with vanilla-game functions such as upgrade planners, but I think this should be a feature built into the vanilla game itself as another QoL carrot to encourage the player to move to construction bots ASAP as intended/desired by the developers.