TL;DR
Being able to set a filter for [Agricultural Tower](https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/pro ... otype.html) input items would allow for better distinct agricultural towers in mods.What?
Currently there is no way to limit what plants different agricultural towers can plant. This can somewhat be circumvented by limiting towers to different planets via surface conditions, but breaks down if surface condition barriers are crossed, or if mods want to implement multiple categories of plants to be used on the same surface.Why?
Being able to filter would already be beneficial for the Algacultural bay from my mod Seabloom Algaculture, which has radius=1 and thus is imbalanced when allowed to plant trees and other plants intended for the 3-radius Agricultural tower:- picture of agricultural tower with radius=1 placing trees closer than normally allowed with radius=3
- 02-23-2025, 23-08-31.png (889.96 KiB) Viewed 254 times
An analogous "crafting category" for plants would solve all of my use cases, as well as work for another modder's plans afaik. As the agricultural tower automatically updates the tooltip for "accepted items" based on the surface conditions for a planet, I hope this is a reasonable ask. To match the paradigm of crafting_category being specified on the recipe, it'd likely make sense to specify the "plant_category" on the PlantPrototype, which works for me. Let me know if you have any further questions!
