Some mods add surfaces that are not playable. It would be nice to be able to hide them, either manually or automatically.

Surfaces that I noticed from other mods:

"minime_*" Mod for changing the character skin adds multiple surfaces, all starting with minime_ https://mods.factorio.com/mod/minime
"Thruster control behaviour" https://mods.factorio.com/mod/thruster-control-behavior
"aai-signals" https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-signals

Oh this is very helpful, thank you! There is already a set of rules that hides unplayable surfaces (or irrelevant surfaces like platforms or spaceships in SE), but it's impossible to test out all mods. I'm glad to add these ones!

In the future I'd like to add manual hide/show toggles as well

I've added those surfaces and release it in 1.5.3

If anyone knows of some properties that are available during runtime that I could use to automate this check (apart from the surface name), please let me know!

I only know of another surface name that can be hidden/ignored:

vehicle-wagon-hidden from https://mods.factorio.com/mod/VehicleWagon2

As for properties to watch out for:

force.set_surface_hidden(surface, true)

https://github.com/robot256/Vehicle-Wagon-2/blob/master/script/hiddenSurface.lua#L12

Not sure whether you can watch for it though.

@bNarFProfCrazy this was very helpful, thank you (there is a force.get_surface_hidden function available)! From 1.5.4 onwards, most surfaces will be hidden automatically. That's great!