Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Currently, if the player shift-clicks to place a blueprint while their mouse happens to be over an existing power pole, all the pole's connections are removed, which is almost never the desired behaviour.

What ?

The 'shift-click a power pole to remove all connections' functionality should be disabled if the player is holding a blueprint.

Why ?

I have a standard blueprint I use for my main rail lines - two lines of track 4 spaces apart, with rail signals at regular intervals and big electric poles between them. This blueprint is 62 spaces long, with power poles at each end and in the center, since that makes it easy to tile. However, this means that the center pole is at the exact center of the blueprint, which means if I'm trying to align a new copy of it with an existing line, my mouse will be centered on the last existing power pole of the already built section. If I'm placing the blueprint with shift-click so that rocks and trees are automatically cleared away (which I almost always am) then I end up removing the existing wire connection on the pole I'm aligning with.

This can also happen when placing other blueprints that overlap with existing construction. Re-placing a mall to set new assembler recipes as you researched them? Copying a section of an array to extend it? Better hope your blueprint doesn't happen to have a power pole at the center.

See also:

Pasting while dragging shouldn't disconnect electric poles

Yes, I've noticed this too, with a blueprint that chains turrets and inserters. There's a power pole squarely in the middle, and if I shift-click when I start to place them, the power pole loses all its connections.

Of course, I can avoid that by clicking, dragging, and then holding shift, but it'd be great if I didn't have to.

I think this is addressed in 1.1 according to FFF#362?
Unless I’m misunderstanding things.

MassiveDynamic wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 04, 2020 6:26 pm

I think this is addressed in 1.1 according to FFF#362?
Unless I’m misunderstanding things.

No, that's talking about saving the cable connections within a blueprint. The issue here is that the shift-left-click input is used for two different things:

• When holding a blueprint: Place blueprint and mark trees or rocks for deconstruction if they are in the way
• When hovering the cursor over a power pole: Remove all existing wire connections to other poles

The problem is that if you are holding a blueprint and hovering over a power pole, shift-left-click does both of these at once.

Now, there are some cases where the changes to blueprints might make this not a problem. If the existing connections on the pole you are clicking are also part of the blueprint, I think they will be recreated by the blueprint after they are removed by the shift-click. However, this is not a general solution; if the pole you click on has connections outside of the blueprint they will be lost.

I noticed this behavior, too. It would be grat when the suggestion could be fulfilled.

See 87695 / 88377

87695 was mine!! Finally found a bug that actually was a bug and not me being stupid.

Removing of connections should be behind more complex key combination. There is no need to make it many times in building but it make annoying unintentional problems when for example I adjust inserters in stations and mouse hits to poles.