Hi!
I'm trying to place lightning rods but even though I have tried to set the surface options to Fulgora, it keeps telling me that I can't place it on a surface that doesn't have lightning.
Thanks!

Yes, this is likely and unfortunately to be how it works, with no way around it, indefinitely. I will continue thinking on it, but I am limited by the way that Factorio's engine was designed to handle this.

Couldn't you set the lightning properties to use some custom lightning prototypes that deal no damage and basically never strike (or is invisible and doesn't make a sound)? Sure, it won't simulate needing to use it for power (assuming it never strikes), but it would allow for placing lightning attractor entities in blueprints.

How about an alternate workaround: a lightning rod facsimile that 1) shows the range of a normal lightning rod, and 2) can upgrade to an actual lightning rod. So if you save it into a blueprint, you can use an upgrade planner to automatically upgrade it to a lightning rod.

I need a few use-cases explained here, instead of pitching solutions or stating the facts. Right now, I don't fully understand the needs. At first, it seems to be that lightning does not occur, or that lightning collectors cannot be placed.

The use case I'm interested in is being able to place collectors throughout a factory design to verify complete coverage of the design. As it is, I can make a layout in the sandbox, but since collectors can't be placed in the sandbox I have no way to verify complete coverage in the sandbox (let alone even make a blueprint containing any number of collectors regardless of coverage areas). The only way to verify coverage is by taking the design as a blueprint back to Fulgora, finding a place to be able to put it down (as ghosts is fine) and add collectors to it. If there is an area that is too tight to be able to fit a collector, that would mean the design has to get reworked.

Granted, this specific use case is probably not super necessary because collectors are a single tile and have a large coverage area that can stretch a nearby collectors coverage area as well, so the likelihood of being unable to add full coverage without reworking sections entirely is fairly low. Though, the secondary use case of just being able to put down collectors at all to be able to creat blueprints with them regardless of coverage still stands.

I did some digging, and apparently surfaces don't have any lightning properties, only planets have them, and I'm not seeing any way to create new planets at runtime (the planets table appears to be read only), so that limits the functionality (you'd have to decide on a limit to the number of lightning enabled sandboxes, though this could possibly be configured with a mod startup setting)

Exactly right. I doubt the engine will be modified or reworked too much, and all of my Planet-related feedback during the beta was essentially ignored. Music, heating, lightning, remote viewing - to name a few - are quite specific to Planets (not just locations/surfaces, the idea of a Planet that you can travel to). And Planets must be known statically ahead of time via prototypes - not dynamically at runtime.

Supporting those features requires a significant redesign of how this mod implements sandboxes. Naturally, since it's a very different approach, this also means sandboxes will behave differently, having different features and problems. It's not something to take on lightly, and no one small feature is probably enough to warrant it. That said, since the beta, I have been researching, prototyping, and generally working towards a possible future where sandboxes may also be planets.