Factorio Forums

TLDR: Add more wires (blue and yellow?) for signals.

Why? Complex wiring is complex and can get very messy, and it can be an ache to put lots of lines of pylons down to keep circuits separate. Different colours would help to pick out where circuit paths are going.

If we could also do something like this suggestion -- viewtopic.php?f=6&t=56890 -- and pick up signals from each wire separately, this would enable us to make signal busses which would look a lot neater with complex circuits and mean if we needed to send signals up and down a bus they could be on different colours.

I agree with the problem. I do not have enough information to judge the solution.

You can Pick up seperate signals with an arithmetic combinator Set signal + 0 output signal amount

Absolutely (I use each * 1 output each as a buffer but it's the same thing). Most stuff is *doable* if you add enough combinators and poles. The issue is that you can't necessarily see what's going on. Cables can be pretty hard to read, especially when they overlap, and the problem solving bit can get a bit hairy.

To solve some of the graphical issues with 4 colours, such as having to redo graphics, I would also suggest a "purple" wire which is a multicore cable containing a red, green, blue and yellow channel that you can only connect between power poles. Use the purple wire to carry the signals between poles on one of the terminals, then break out the colour channels from the other terminal. That way you can keep the same model for the power poles but get the new functionality.

You'd need new graphics for chest/inserter/tank connections etc but iirc the connection panel is just a separate graphic overlaid on the models?