Factorio Forums

Hi,

when creating larger and more complex circuitry, I often find it very hard to visually keep track of the wire connections. As far as I can tell this is mostly due to how the wires are displayed in "3D". For example if a power pole is build just the right amount of tiles below a combinator, the points where a wire connects to either are very close together, making it difficult to distinguish at a glance.

Is there a mod that can help with that? For example I imagine it would be very helpful if the wires would (visually) connect at the same position for each entity (lets say at the bottom right tile's center) and to remove the visual sag the wires have.

But really I'm open for all kinds of ways to make it easier.

For example, I found PickerDollies very useful to create larger setups since I can move combinators around - which means I can place everything such that wires don't form tangled knots (at least for most setups).

What I'm *not* looking for are mods that remove the need for complex circuitry - I enjoy the logical puzzle itself.

I do actually use PickerDollies to get help with creating combinator setups. It's invaluable. I start by placing combinators distributed over some area with much space to see every connection. I move them around and rotate them so functionality is visible and the wires are as short as possible and don't cover the whole area like a web.

After I finished the design, I try to compress the setup by moving the combinators to a compact blob while still maintaining some readability of the wire connections. I try to make wires go straight horizontal or vertical, not diagonal. Horizontal should be as short as possible to not have that much sag. And arrange everything in a way wires don't appear to be connected to a combinator if they aren't actually connected to it.

If you hover over a combinator input or output, all wires connected to that connection are highlighted.

I debug circuits in single step (single ticks) in map editor mode.

That's enough for me.

As far as I understand fff-379, the visual sag is improved in the upcoming Factorio 2.0.

Well, the upcoming changes described in FFF #384 will probably fix my issue. So I guess my ambitions for complicated wiring will simply have to wait for the big update.