TL;DR
Be nice if we could set the upgrade planner to only affect objects that have actually been placed and ignore ghosts, or the opposite; this would be especially handy when working with quality modules.What?
Give the upgrade planner config page a little dropdown (like the one the deconstruction planner has for whether it affects tiles) with these options:- Ignore ghosts
- If selected, the upgrade planner will only be applied to objects that actually exist; ghosts will be ignored
- Already planned upgrades are also ignored in this mode, so if the object that currently exists is a valid target for this upgrade, but the object that it is planned to be upgraded to is not, then the object will be affected, with the new upgrade replacing the old.
- Objects which are scheduled for deconstruction are not affected
- Everything
- Same as current behaviour
- Is the default
- Ghosts only
- If selected, the upgrade planner will only be applied to ghosts; existing objects that would otherwise be valid targets are ignored
- 'Ghosts' include the results of other planned upgrades, so if the object is planned to be upgraded into something that is a valid target for this upgrade, then then the object will be affected, with the new upgrade replacing the old.
Why?
The primary utility of this option is for upgrading objects, particularly modules, through various quality levels. Consider this scenario:- I decide I need more science-processing capacity, so I copy-and-paste my existing lab setup.
- Whoops! My existing labs are all equipped with legendary Productivity 3 modules, but I don't have nearly enough in stock to fill all the new labs.
- The first thing I want to do is downgrade all those legendary Productivity 3 modules to normal Prod3s, since some productivity bonus is better than nothing. I can use an upgrade planner to replace those planned legendary Prod3s with normal Prod3s.
- Problem 1: While I didn't have enough legendary Prod3s for all the labs, I did have some of them, which my bots have dutifully placed. If I apply that upgrade planner to all the labs, the bots will replace those legendary Prod3s with normal ones, which is not desirable. In order to avoid this, I have to look closely at each lab and downgrade those with ghost legendary Prod3s while not touching those with real legendary Prod3s. Worse, each lab has two module slots, so there might be one real and one ghost module in the same lab, in which case I can't use the upgrade planner at all; I have to open the lab and manually replace the ghost legendary Prod3.
- Solution 1: With the above suggestion, I can use 'ghost only' to downgrade only the legendary Prod3s that have not been placed, while ignoring those that have.
- Now that, all my labs have at least a normal Prod3 in every slot, I want to start upgrading those modules to progressively higher qualities as they become available. I start by creating a upgrade planner to replace normal Prod3s with uncommon ones and apply it to all the labs. My bots immediately place as many uncommon Prod3s as they can, but I don't have enough in stock to do all of them immediately.
- Due to the nature of quality upcycling, I also have some rare Prod3s, though not as many as I do uncommons, and there's no reason to wait until all the normal Prod3s have been replaced before I start using them. I create another upgrade planner, this one replacing uncommon Prod3s with rare.
- Problem 2: The ghost uncommon Prod3s in the slots that haven't been upgraded yet are considered valid targets for this new upgrade planner, so If I apply this it to all the labs, then all the remaining planned normal-Prod3-to-uncommon-Prod3 upgrades will be become planned normal-Prod3-to-rare-Prod3 upgrades. If I didn't have enough uncommon Prod3s to upgrade everything at once, I certainly won't have enough rare ones, and now the remaining normal Prod3s will no longer be upgraded to uncommon as new uncommons become available. So, once again, I have to carefully check that I only target those labs that have already received their uncommon Prod3s, and again I have to beware cases where one slot is upgraded while the other is not, and upgrade them manually. And then I have to do it all again for the rare-to-epic and epic-to-legendary upgrades!
- Solution 2: With the above suggestion, I can set 'Ignore ghosts' mode on all the one-quality-step upgrade planners, then just select all the labs. All the placed modules will be scheduled for the next upgrade step, but those that are still waiting for their previous upgrade will be unaffected. Thus I can perform all the upgrade steps in parallel without any micromanagement.
- Prod1 -> Prod2 -> Prod3
- Quality beacons & machines
- Assembler 1 -> Assembler 2 -> Assembler 3
- In theory; generally by the time Assembler 3s are available, all my Assembler 1s are long gone. But mods might add other, similar chains where incremental upgrades make more sense.