Factorio Forums

I just picked up the alpha and am really impressed with how good the game is looking.

One issue i'm having, it's minor, but it's quite annoying to me, is power lines.
I don't know if i'm just bad at placing them, or it becomes less of an issue later in the game (i've only put in a few hours so far) but i find that i end up with power poles dotted around my map with wires criss crossing my equipment willy-nilly.

It's frustrating to have to arrange poles to get to the one unpowered inserter in a group of buildings and i end up with wires crossing over all over the place. It's frustrating and distracts me from concentrating on making my automation stuff work (which is a struggle for me atm while i'm learning ).

Is there any plans to change this?
The ideal situation (i think) would be to have buildings and equipment 'transfer' power to adjacent blocks. So if you have a clump of equipment sitting next to each other, you only need to run a power line to the first item and the whole group will then be powered.

It could be worse. They could put power lines between the poles and each item needing power

mrwiggles wrote:The ideal situation (i think) would be to have buildings and equipment 'transfer' power to adjacent blocks. So if you have a clump of equipment sitting next to each other, you only need to run a power line to the first item and the whole group will then be powered.

I think I just had this exact same thought earlier today.

I don't know. I agree that they can be unsightly - they look like cobwebs, actually - but they're part of the design process and not really something that should be "fixed".
Instead, I'd suggest slightly buffing the wire range and supply area of the low and mid-tier poles.

In the meantime, the Substation will get rid of a lot of clutter if used properly.

@mrwiggles: Funny. I made some similar suggestions last year.

First some kind of tip: I try meanwhile to place first the poles, so that they cover the whole area. I build three to four long lines of small poles. Sound like waste, but spares me the mentioned distraction. And then I build the buildings in between. If I see then, that something doesn't fit, I move the pole. To cover a whole area has the advantage, that if you cut one wire, it doesn't cut the power behind, cause the power can also run around that cut. So I have generally ordered lines of poles, with some exceptions.

But back to the posts I mentioned:

This is interesting: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=961

In the first post in I suggest to build poles randomly, until an area is covered by poles. Not so well useable. But with the construction bots it would be cool to be able to generate a pseudo-blueprint, that covers any areas with poles. Side note: it is interesting for me, that some ideas in that article have been introduced since that time. But I was surely not the only.
I think also some ideas from the second are not bad!

The other thread hits exactly what you mean:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 5961#p5961 :

Problems with the wires are only in dense areas. Sim city 2000 (and other sim cities) goes around this problem so, that you only need to connect a block with a house to electricity and the hole block has electricity. I mean: how cabled would sim city look, if you need to connect every house?

And then read the answer: this would disable separating networks. Maybe you don't understand yet, why that is important, but just wait for v0.10 or v0.11, then you will see, what can be done with that!

I have only one problem with poles because now placing single pole without connections is not possible.

This has changed with v0.9: you now need to place it first. Then click shift on a pole to remove all wires. See keyboard-settings! Now you can drag wires to that pole yourself.

I usually get a pretty clean energy setup. I use big poles to distribute energy to the different parts of my factory. Then I use substations to get them to areas with a lot of stuff, and, if that doesn't work too good or i don't have enough space, i use medium poles. I use no small poles at all after i research electricity distribution.

What ssilk said is also important: if there are too much wires for your taste, shift+leftclick a pole, then take some copper wire on the cursor and wire them yourself however you like it. It took me some learning, but nowadays I get a clean energy setup every time.