Shoter Ghost Trees

One button. The forest gets out of your way.

A per-player toolbar button (or Ctrl+Shift+T) cycles the trees in your view
through three states:

• Normal — exactly as before.
• Translucent — trunks and leaves fade to a configurable opacity (35% by
  default), so you can finally see the ore patch, the biter nest, or that one
  power pole behind the forest.
• Hidden — trees vanish entirely. Shadows, reflections and all.

The effect follows your camera — walk, drive, or pan around in map view — and
covers what is on your screen (up to a configurable range). Other players keep
their own setting.

Why this one

• Every tree, from every mod. No hand-drawn replacement art, no per-mod
  compatibility lists — the translucent and hidden looks are generated from each
  tree's own sprites at load time. Alien Biomes, planet mods, Space Age plants:
  covered automatically.
• Nothing is lost. Trees keep their exact appearance variation, colour,
  health, pollution-death stage, growth progress and deconstruction orders —
  verified by an automated test suite against the real engine.
• Per player. Your toggle is yours; each player cycles their own view.
  One honest caveat: tree looks are shared game state, so a player standing
  inside your active view sees that area faded too, and where views overlap the
  strongest effect wins. A truly per-client look is not possible in Factorio.
• Works from scripts: /ghosttrees normal|ghost|hidden and
  remote.call("ghosttrees", "set_mode", player_index, mode).

Settings

Opacity, shadows on/off, dead-tree handling, per-player range cap and cycle
order. Note trees stay selectable and collidable when hidden — this mod changes
what is drawn, not what is there.

Before uninstalling

Everyone switches back to Normal (or run /ghosttrees resweep from the
server console) first. Faded trees are technically stand-in prototypes; removing
the mod while they are active deletes those trees from the save.

Known limits

• Translucency comes from the tree overlay layer, so per-tree leaf colour
  variation is averaged per tree type by default (a "per tree" experimental
  setting exists for Factorio 2.1+).
• Shadows cannot be faded, only kept or removed (startup setting).
• Mining/dying visuals: leaf and branch particles keep their normal colours.

Made with AI

Most of this mod's code was written by Claude, Anthropic's AI, working under my
direction - the design calls and the in-game testing are mine. It is not
vibe-shipped, though: the mechanics are held to account by an automated test
suite that drives the real game headlessly (clone prototypes, swap state
carry-over, view-bubble behaviour, and a load of the full mod set), and every
release has to pass it.