Factorio Forums

Hello
I know I'm not the first to ask this, but I couldn't find the exact thread about this issue : my blueprints won't replicate any hand-made power line connections between the poles. I already know this is intentional, but I'd also like to know: why?

Because the majority use-case is you don't want wires preserved. If they where literally every blueprint you make would never connect to any other pole.

Then it would be best to have a selectable "replicate wire connections" field in blueprint creation settings.

My exact problem is:
I'm building a massive refinery complex and I need 252 chemical plants to be able to convert all the light oil I produce into solid fuel. It's a "smart" refinery, which, based on the amounts of resources in "product control containers" switches production accordingly and is (in theory at least) 100% stall free. Through the use of circuit network and combinator "brain", the refinery changes it's mode of operation between one of several scenarios: normal (proportional production of petro, lubricant and solid fuel), petro boost (convert all resources to petro), low lubricant (convert all heavy to lubricant, less solid fuel + petro) and low fuel (convert heavy to light rest to fuel with some 1/3 petro production). Additionally it has an anti stall system that monitors 3 "fraction control tanks": heavy oil, light oil, petro gas, and adds corrections to reduce the near-stall states (over 80-90% control tank capacity) by limiting overall output and modifying production/cracking rates. This all is archieved mainly through extensive use of what I call IPC - Independent Production Cell. An IPC for the refinery production consists of: 3 chemical plants, a circuit-controlled switch and few manually connected poles to ensure I have full power control of each IPC separately. The "brain" turns IPCs on and off depending on the current "alarm & stall state" so the entire complex produces most of what what is actually needed most and can also turn itself off in exstreme situation to prevent stall. For example: If there is simultaneous petro stall and lubricant shortage, the refinery turns on it's basic processing facilities to boost heavy oil production and and drains the petro lines by converting it to huge amounts of solid fuel.

Anyway, I blueprint such IPC and to archeive a solid fuel factory of 252 chem. plants I need to replicate this IPC blueprint 84 TIMES. This also means a have to arrange copper wires manually for every one of those 84 replicated IPCs... And to think I still have to use 33 IPC to build a petro->fuel conversion factory and do this 33 more times, and then 28 more IPCs to build light oil -> petro conversion plant nad 28 times more cable connection madness,,, And this is only the refinery part... I love this game because it's so mindboggling

Nevertheless - a "replicate wires" checkbox would be very welcome and would not break current state of things. Also, I think it would be best to blueprint always remeber the wires, but only replicate them (or go in auto mode when switched of) during the actual usage of the blueprint. This would give the user full flexibility of whether he wants to replicate a blueprint with or without hand-made connections.

Currently copper wires are not even included into blueprint. While it *might* make sense in rare use cases I would personally avoid dedicating dev time to it as this is beneficial in a really few use cases and there a LOADS of requests that would be beneficial to majority of players.

For the OP I would suggest designing stuff so you do not really need manual wire control. It ends up badly most of times anyways as every time you add/replace a pole wires do reconnect to adjacent poles anyways.

While the copper wire issue is a bit annoying you can get the same behaviour, except the power saving part, by using circuit controlled pumps on the output and/or input pipes to each IPC (depending on what kind of lag is acceptable). You should even be able to copy the circuit conditions from the power switch directly to the pumps.

aaargha wrote:While the copper wire issue is a bit annoying you can get the same behaviour, except the power saving part, by using circuit controlled pumps on the output and/or input pipes to each IPC (depending on what kind of lag is acceptable). You should even be able to copy the circuit conditions from the power switch directly to the pumps.

This is exactly what I am doing right now. I used to utilize power switch to enable/disable oil cracking etc but the whole arrays blinking no power made me nervous and I found controlling pumps being much more elegant solution overall especially if you want to build compact solutions which definitely don't allow power pole play.

Yes, the fluid distribution control is a good solution.
I have pumps alwys working and forcing LO, HO and PG up to the each IPC-dedicated pump, so the pipes before the IPC pumps are always filled and "ready to drain" . The pipe between the IPC pump and assemblers is 7 segments long. The delay should not be a problem.
After all I think I over-complicated the IPC-based design a little. My goal is not the power saving - nuclear power is available and very effective, so the power-cutting might not be the best solution. I'll fiddle with the fluid distribution control a little more now.

My biggest use for hand-made wire connections is for wall defense. Walls of laser turrets have a considerable idle power drain, but it's reasonably easy to setup a system by which only a few lasers are powered 24/7, and their activation (because an enemy is within range) triggers power to the rest of the lasers. But every version I've managed required manual wire setting, which kept me from blueprinting it.

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