In-ground electric

[flash1833]

I searched but haven't seen this suggestion.

As a late-game technology, I'd like to see a type of ground cover (like concrete) which has embedded electric so that electric poles aren't needed in those areas. This is something we have in real life - in cities electricity is no longer on poles in many urban areas, it's buried under ground. It would make the screen and factory area cleaner and would be a nice late game improvement. When used, you could place factories, inserters, and anything that uses electricity anywhere that the ground cover is applied without the need for electric poles.

[Zappes]

Uh, I like that. A side effect would be that you'd use poles only for the circuit network, thus making it much easier to see where your signals are going.

[Tekky]

I like your idea, especially since it is limited to the late stage of the game.

However, I'm afraid that your suggestion would significantly increase the number of entities in the power network. This would significantly increase the CPU time required to recalculate the power network, whenever you change something in the power network or a power switch is flipped.

I am confident that there are ways to optimize the game so that it would be possible to implement your suggestion without causing too much of a slowdown. But I'm afraid that implementing this would be a lot of work.

[bobucles]

What entity problem? Just have the tiles create a 1:1 blob of blue.

[torne]

The "blob of blue" is just a thing that's rendered for display purposes; that's not how the game actually determines what has power and what doesn't. It just stores the individual connections between entities. So, to have "powered ground" there would have to be actual entities spread across the area that function as power poles, and have wire connections going to them.

[SyncViews]

If a mod wanted to try and fake it perhaps by having invisible entities automatically spawned, doesn't mean the devs would do it that way.

[ssilk]

There was the idea of a new ground-plate-type that connects everything.

[darkfrei]

It can be optimized.

On building of electrical floor, you place invisible poles on map every 6x6 tiles. And activate it when it was connected to the next one. On deconstruction script disabled poles when it have no connection. Then you are need calculation speed not less than normal poles.

And it must be expensive, at least the one red electronic circuit, one concrete, 8 copper wires, and some amount of plastic in recipe.

[aka13]

That sounds interesting, but maybe somewhat imbalanced. Sounds like this type of floor will become a must-have for any lategame stuff, completely removing any poles whatsoever. Also it would have an interesting impact on mining, since it would allow higher density of miners.

[Tekky]

What entity problem? Just have the tiles create a 1:1 blob of blue.

In Factorio Friday Facts #115, it is explained how power networks work internally and that all entities must be iterated whenever a change is made to a power network. I imagine it could be a problem if every single tile were such an entity, since this would increase the number of entities significantly.

On building of electrical floor, you place invisible poles on map every 6x6 tiles.

I doubt that this solution would work properly, because placing invisible power poles every 6x6 tiles could cause the power network to invisibly connect to another power network.

[HL65536]

Maybe merge them all to one entity or optimize n*n squares to one entity.
Or just create a sub-subnetworks.

[Engimage]

I like the idea about electrical floor tiles as it would enable precision in powering/unpowering entities via power switches which can't be done currently.
As for consuming CPU power - it would not require any CPU for running your factory (per-tick) but will consume it only if the change is made. However power switches might be a problem especially if they are not configured with S-R latches and will "blink" often hitting your CPU with a sledgehammer.
But I am sure these devs can pull out some miracle optimization allowing this to work w/o major CPU hit.