Pipes unplaceable with Space Exploration (no tomwub): placeholder collides with its own variant → refund + find_entities_filtered error

[MaksArh]

What kind of issue is this?

• Compatibility
• Locale (names, descriptions, unknown keys)
• Graphical
• Crash
• Other

What is the problem?

Environment

• Factorio 2.0.77 (Space Age)
• parallel-piping 1.0.20, perel 1.1.9
• space-exploration 0.7.57 (+ postprocess/scripts)
• the-one-mod-with-underground-bits NOT installed

Symptom
Placing any pipe just plays the build smoke: no entity is placed, the item is not
consumed, and a red script error is thrown from surface.find_entities_filtered.
With tomwub installed the same pack works fine.

Root cause
SE re-applies collision masks to every pipe in its data-final-fixes pass
(prototypes/phase-3/space-collision.lua, required from SE data-final-fixes.lua).
Because parallel-piping sorts before space-exploration, SE runs after PP and
re-adds the space_tile and vehicle collision layers to BOTH the placeholder base
pipe AND the generated *-pp-NN variants.

PP relies on the placeholder having only { out_of_map } so the variant can be built
on the same tile. After SE's pass they share layers, so in on_built:

can_place = surface.can_place_entity{ name = variations[base][0], position = entity.position, ... }

returns false (the still-present placeholder collides with the variant). Verified in-game:

• pipe: {layers = {out_of_map, space_tile, vehicle}}
• pipe-pp-00: {layers = {is_lower_object, item, meltable, object, space_tile, vehicle, water_tile}}
• can_place(pipe-pp-00) on empty ground = true, but false on the tile where the placeholder sits.

PP then takes the "cannot place → refund item" branch, which additionally crashes because it
passes a collision-mask layer table where find_entities_filtered expects layer name(s):

-- control.lua (refund branch)
local params = { position = ..., force = ...,
  collision_mask = prototypes.entity[variations[base][variation]].collision_mask.layers } -- table, not layer id(s)
... surface.find_entities_filtered(params) -- throws

Workaround (confirmed)
A tiny mod loading after SE that resets each PP placeholder pipe's collision back to
{ layers = { out_of_map = true } } fixes it completely; variants are left untouched.

Steps to reproduce

No response

Additional context

No response

Log file