Cut of electric pole re-routes circuit connections

[Beefstah]

Even when close enough to direct connect, I like to run my red/green wires along electricity poles for assorted reasons.

I have noticed that if I cut a pole with connections, those connections then reform directly where possible. However when I re-paste the pole, the new connections remain in addition to the connections to the pole, meaning I now have duplicate connections

Before:

01-06-2025, 12-02-55.png (515.38 KiB) Viewed 311 times

After cutting the pole - with clipboard ghost:

01-06-2025, 12-03-26.png (491.17 KiB) Viewed 311 times

After cutting the pole - without clipboard ghost:

01-06-2025, 12-04-01.png (396.17 KiB) Viewed 311 times

After pasting the ghost into a new position:

01-06-2025, 12-04-26.png (575.35 KiB) Viewed 311 times

This can make ongoing maintenance of things connected quite troublesome, especially in densely-packed spaces with lots of connections.

Ideally, the connections would only be reinstated after placing backdown the cut pole, and then only to the pole itself.

[boskid]

Thanks for the report. You described how a feature works, one that was already described in https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-379. Not a bug.

[Beefstah]

Thanks for the quick response. I had a re-read of the FFF to refresh my memory.

However I feel my my use-case is different to that covered in the FFF: my issue is about object-to-pole rewiring to object-to-object wiring when the pole was previously the only common object. This results in a lot of excess wiring with the object-to-object wiring in addition to the object-to-pole wiring once the pole is replaced, amplified by the object-to-object wiring making as many connections as possible.

For example this:

01-06-2025, 13-07-33.png (891.68 KiB) Viewed 268 times

All well and good. But if I cut the pole I get this:

01-06-2025, 13-07-46.png (340.22 KiB) Viewed 268 times

Which has every display connected to some - but not all - of the others. For example, 1 connects to 2, 4 and 5, or 2 connects to 1, 3 and 5. There's probably a pattern to it, but I don't know what.

If I then add the pole back in, I have connections all over the place:

01-06-2025, 13-09-32.png (722.16 KiB) Viewed 268 times

This can make redesigns very tedious, unless I want to leave a lot of excess wiring laying around...which then makes troubleshooting tedious as I have to check all of the wiring is how I originally laid it out and hasn't actually gained new connections when I moved a pole around.

Diving into this further, this object-to-object rewiring only happens when the last pole connecting the objects is removed. For example, if I have this:

01-06-2025, 13-18-26.png (951.87 KiB) Viewed 268 times

I can cut either pole without any object-to-object rewiring:

01-06-2025, 13-18-41.png (1.18 MiB) Viewed 268 times

When I put the pole back, all the red and green wire connections are back to how they were:

01-06-2025, 13-19-05.png (974.1 KiB) Viewed 268 times

I say red and green wires because in this scenario I now get a copper wire turn up between the two poles. I'm not thrilled about this either to be honest - the pole didn't have a copper wire beforehand, why should it have one now? It was able to remember that it had a green wire to the other pole, so there's some memory in effect here, but I don't want to have to go and remove copper wires I didn't have beforehand.

What's most irritating is this is only really a problem in pure vanilla - if I use the Even Pickier Dollies mod I can shuffle poles around without any of these problems. But then I don't get achivements.

[Beefstah]

Just to add, and this is what really grinds my gears...undo doesn't actually undo in this situation. If I cut/delete the pole and then hit ctrl-Z, I still have to go and unpick all the extra connections that turned up.

[Beefstah]

It also just occurred to me to test from the other direction, and see what happens if I cut/paste the objects, not the poles:

This works exactly as anticipated, with connections respected as-is.

01-06-2025, 13-30-43.png (632.97 KiB) Viewed 257 times

This remains true for partial cut only containing objects:

01-06-2025, 13-31-35.png (609.84 KiB) Viewed 257 times

But once a partial cut contains the pole, the objects not in the cut gain excess connections again - 3 to 4, 4 to 5. Not, curiously, 3 to 5:

01-06-2025, 13-32-50.png (824.88 KiB) Viewed 257 times

Multi-pole setups continue to work consistently with previous observations

01-06-2025, 13-35-04.png (908.69 KiB) Viewed 257 times

01-06-2025, 13-35-52.png (990.52 KiB) Viewed 257 times

[Muche]

Ref 121771 Cutting and pasting a power pole re-adds copper wires that were previously removed, 125413 Cutting power pole with logic wires attached randomly generates extra wires ruining the circuit.