"connected" electrical poles & powering machines

[Turtle Duck]

With the introduction of power switches in 0.13 i've been playing around with the idea of only powering machines whenever they're required to be used so whenever i'm producing green circuits my furnace array will kick into high gear and start producing the goods the assembly machines require.


Having this i thought a good idea would be to introduce "connected" electrical poles and straight to machine power supplying much like the circuit network only with power switches and objects like assembly machines, beacons etc. The idea would work like this:

"connected" electrical poles: Are to be used for guiding electrical wiring to its destination and shouldn't have the area of effect power delivery like the regular small, medium and big electrical power poles.

Copper cable: Copper cable should be capable to be connected straight to certain machines such as the assembly machines and beacons noted before, much like the way green and red wire is able to be connected to many different objects. However instead of adding a little status box it should add a little electrical pole that is connected to the machine implying it's connected to the power network.

Power network: Machines that are connected straight to the power network with electrical wiring should ignore the area of effect power delivery of other electrical poles. This should make it possible to switch on and off certain machines with the power switch without having to micro manage the area of effect radius of the power poles.


To give you an examples as to what this would allow players to do let me give you the following:

Say you have a green circuit build that features a small buffer but you want to shut down your assembly machines and beacons when the build isn't working to stop static power drain, however you would like to keep your inserters and lights on so the belt won't empty out while you're gone and keep the lights on for when it's dark outside. With the addition of connected power you would be capable of shutting down the assembly machines by connecting them to your connected power poles and then in turn to a power switch and keep the inserters and lights powered with the regular power poles.

[depeter]

I haven't tried it out myself, and I don't see anything in the description suggesting that it'll do everything you want, but you might want to check out https://mods.factorio.com/mods/DedlySpy ... d_Entities

[Neotix]

I'm using this mod and it'a quite useful but that power entities can't be connected manually and they have quite large connection distance (like medium pole). So when I place assemblers or beacons too close, they are all connected and I can't make separate networks.