Would it be possible to make so that the player can configure how many planets they want? I loved the mod changes to each section but there's too many of them and i don't think i would ever use them. I would love to be able to choose to have, for example, 1 of each type or just 1 north east and 1 south pole.

Great question!

I haven't come up with a good idea for in-game configurable planets yet. I thought about showing all of the planets in a list and then you could chose whatever "preset" you wanted for that planet, or maybe making each individual zone researchable so there's less visual clutter.

There's no way to choose how many planets are visible, sorry, so currently the way to change what zones are what, is manually editing the planets.lua file. If you look inside, I have:

local presets = {
Nauvis_Default_Settings= {
    ["iron-ore"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1,richness = 1},
    ["copper-ore"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1,richness = 1},
    ["stone"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1,richness = 1},
    ["coal"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1,richness = 1},
    ["crude-oil"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1,richness = 1},
    ["uranium-ore"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1,richness = 1},
    ["water"] = {frequency = 1,size = 1},},
...

There are a few different presets that I've created for each planet, and then within:

        if planets[i] == "nauvis" then
            if loc.zone == "east" or loc.zone == "west" then
                apply_preset(new_planet, presets.Nauvis_Railworld)
                apply_preset(new_planet, presets.Triple_Biters)

I have it so that it's clear what preset is applied to what planet, based on the presets list.

It's not that user friendly in terms of just choosing from a drop down, but I've made it as easy as I could.

But to answer your main question, it's not possible to control how many planets users see. But if you're concerned with FPS/UPS, unless you've visited a planet, there are no extra surfaces created, so there's no extra overhead in terms of UPS/FPS.

I hope this answered your question!