The KI core says I have 198 linked beacons. I decided I didn't like the factorissmo mod, so instead of tearing everything down, I just left the game, and turned the mod off. Nice and simple, no more factorissmos. Unfortunately, all the factorissmos had my 248k beacons inside them, and my KI core still says I have 198 linked beacons. Is there no way to recalculate the linked beacons? Do I need to reinstall factorissmo and manually pick up all the inner beacons to get the slots back?

The KI core says I have 198 linked beacons. I decided I didn't like the factorissmo mod, so instead of tearing everything down, I just left the game, and turned the mod off. Nice and simple, no more factorissmos. Unfortunately, all the factorissmos had my 248k beacons inside them, and my KI core still says I have 198 linked beacons. Is there no way to recalculate the linked beacons? Do I need to reinstall factorissmo and manually pick up all the inner beacons to get the slots back?

Ohh that's tricky - this depends on how factorissimo handles this case. I assume all the surface created by factorissimo alongside the beacons are still in your game. They do recalulate automatically if you playce/remove beacons.

Seems like you need to collect them back somehow.

As an update, I've tried deleting the factorissimo's surfaces using:
/c game.surfaces["Factory floor 1"].clear()

and

/c game.delete_surface("Factory floor 2")

and the surfaces appear deleted, but the beacon count remains unchanged.

As an update, I've tried deleting the factorissimo's surfaces using:
/c game.surfaces["Factory floor 1"].clear()

and

/c game.delete_surface("Factory floor 2")

and the surfaces appear deleted, but the beacon count remains unchanged.

can u place another KI beacon manually to try trigger an update?

Quick answer, I did, and it didn't work. Then I went down a rabbit hole with my brother and we figured it out. tl dr: get the gvv mod and remove the beacons using a special command.

Longer answer: Clear surface and delete surface does actually remove the surfaces. but it doesn't destroy any of the entities on those surfaces. It just removes them from the game and makes the entities unreachable. Since the entities are unreachable in memory, you can't even recover those beacon slots if you wanted to, so we had to load a save we had from before deleting the surfaces. There's a gvv mod that allows you to directly interact with the entities: "https://mods.factorio.com/mod/gvv" using that we were able to run another console command:

/c
for _1,beacon in pairs(remote.call('__248k__gvv','global').ki.beacon) do
if beacon["entity"] then
beacon.entity.destroy{raise_destroy=true}
end
end

and that allowed us to destroy all the beacons as if we were picking them up (the raise_destroy=true part). Since the save was before we removed all the surfaces the beacons still existed in the world somewhere, and we were able to delete them correctly.

If anyone else experiences this, now we know.

Different topic, probably should start a new thread, but while I'm here. I'm hosting the game on my computer and my brother joins my game so he has to have the same mod list. He has a 248k button in the top left corner of his screen next to the informatron button, and I don't have that button. Neither of us can figure out why he has the button and I don't, and we have no idea where the setting for that button exists (doesn't seem to be in start-up, map, or per player). Any ideas?

Quick answer, I did, and it didn't work. Then I went down a rabbit hole with my brother and we figured it out. tl dr: get the gvv mod and remove the beacons using a special command.

Longer answer: Clear surface and delete surface does actually remove the surfaces. but it doesn't destroy any of the entities on those surfaces. It just removes them from the game and makes the entities unreachable. Since the entities are unreachable in memory, you can't even recover those beacon slots if you wanted to, so we had to load a save we had from before deleting the surfaces. There's a gvv mod that allows you to directly interact with the entities: "https://mods.factorio.com/mod/gvv" using that we were able to run another console command:

/c
for _1,beacon in pairs(remote.call('__248k__gvv','global').ki.beacon) do
if beacon["entity"] then
beacon.entity.destroy{raise_destroy=true}
end
end

and that allowed us to destroy all the beacons as if we were picking them up (the raise_destroy=true part). Since the save was before we removed all the surfaces the beacons still existed in the world somewhere, and we were able to delete them correctly.

If anyone else experiences this, now we know.

Different topic, probably should start a new thread, but while I'm here. I'm hosting the game on my computer and my brother joins my game so he has to have the same mod list. He has a 248k button in the top left corner of his screen next to the informatron button, and I don't have that button. Neither of us can figure out why he has the button and I don't, and we have no idea where the setting for that button exists (doesn't seem to be in start-up, map, or per player). Any ideas?

The disapearing button is a bit suspicous, maybe due to something like GU unifier? Other then that my whole GUI logic is not that good written so it could also be a problem of 248k .