Factorio Forums

I ran into this issue today. I upgraded a bunch of small electric poles to medium electric poles that were in close enough proximity for the medium's to make new wire connections to each other so they did. I would have expected them to just retain all their existing connections and not make any new ones when upgrading.

1) Build some small electric poles with a bit of overlap (e.g. around the corners of a line of assembly machines)
2) Upgrade them with an upgrade planner

Before:


After:


Video:

Considering upgrading via bots is just an automated form of fast replacing manually, and fast replacing is actually a shortcut for remove & place new operations, that's exactly the behavior I would expect.

Hmm, when you put it like that it makes sense.

I was thinking of it in terms of using an upgrade planner in a blueprint.

Regardless of whether upgrading is considered a shortcut for remove and build new internally - I would expect electric poles to not make new connections on upgrade, if the amount of connections before is not 0 (both manually or automatic).


Factorio also saves electric connections in blueprints to avoid such a connection mess, so it'd be great to fix this as well.

Yeah and there's no example previously stated here from what I've seen: where you are connecting Big electric poles and are sometimes failing to make the intended long connections because there are too many other connections available nearby.

Auto-connecting power wires has been a necessary evil that I've just had to deal with by more thoughtful placement of electric poles. Add to the fact that my eyes aren't that good to see all wire connections sometimes and it can get annoying at times.

All that said but I still have to comment that upgrading in place doesn't have much value. Upgrading usually is better when poles are being relocated in addition to upgrading.

The power pole connections change depends on when they are placed.
If you want to cleanup the connections, you can use the Power Grid Comb to fix the connections and they will align correctly again.

Thanks for the report. I am not considering this to be a bug. There are not many reasons why you would want to upgrade existing electric poles other than using newer items that are easier to produce. Having more connections may actually be desired since it creates extra rendundant connections that when some poles are destroyed the network stays in one piece.