Factorio Forums

Green and Red circuit network wires are available immediately upon starting a new game, despite being explicitly unlocked by the Circuit Network technology.

Thanks for the report however this is not a bug. Circuit wires were always placable without research to avoid cases where you place a blueprint with circuit wires and it would be pasted incorrectly due to lack of research. Since there were bypasses to have circuit wires early, it could happen that some entities were connected with circuit wires early and to avoid having them non configurable in this case, circuit control gui will show even without technology researched.

Lets say that this is more of a gate for new players and if you are experienced then it does not matter much anymore and this technology just gives you some new entities.

In that case, I think "Unlocks Circuit Network" should be removed from the tech card. As from what your saying, it doesn't actually unlock anything (other than the new entities and iron sticks of course)?

It is still related to a modifier on a force data, the "unlock-circuit-network" modifier. It is used in an extremally subtle way: if its set, then "Circuit network" button in entity gui will be enabled for entities that support circuit network even if an entity has no circuit wires attached to it. If there are circuit wires attached to the entity then this button is enabled regardless of this modifier. Still not a bug.

Aahh, that explains it then. I'd at least disable the shortcut bar buttons for wires until you have the technology researched.

Locking shortcut bar is just a way to reduce visual noise for new players, shortcut bar unlocks are persisted across games and you can unlock them with a console command `/unlock-shortcut-bar`. Again, if you already researched this technology in one game there is no good reason to make those buttons disabled.

Research done in one game really shouldn't affect other games... especially as the main goal of the game seems to do research!

If you have suggestions please create a topic in Ideas and suggestions and not derail a bug report that is already effectively closed. Just in case i am closing this one to discourage future unrelated discussion under this topic.