Factorio Forums

Even when close enough to direct connect, I like to run my red/green wires along electricity poles for assorted reasons.

I have noticed that if I cut a pole with connections, those connections then reform directly where possible. However when I re-paste the pole, the new connections remain in addition to the connections to the pole, meaning I now have duplicate connections

Before:
After cutting the pole - with clipboard ghost:
After cutting the pole - without clipboard ghost:
After pasting the ghost into a new position:
This can make ongoing maintenance of things connected quite troublesome, especially in densely-packed spaces with lots of connections.

Ideally, the connections would only be reinstated after placing backdown the cut pole, and then only to the pole itself.

Thanks for the report. You described how a feature works, one that was already described in https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-379. Not a bug.

Thanks for the quick response. I had a re-read of the FFF to refresh my memory.

However I feel my my use-case is different to that covered in the FFF: my issue is about object-to-pole rewiring to object-to-object wiring when the pole was previously the only common object. This results in a lot of excess wiring with the object-to-object wiring in addition to the object-to-pole wiring once the pole is replaced, amplified by the object-to-object wiring making as many connections as possible.

For example this:
All well and good. But if I cut the pole I get this:
Which has every display connected to some - but not all - of the others. For example, 1 connects to 2, 4 and 5, or 2 connects to 1, 3 and 5. There's probably a pattern to it, but I don't know what.

If I then add the pole back in, I have connections all over the place:
This can make redesigns very tedious, unless I want to leave a lot of excess wiring laying around...which then makes troubleshooting tedious as I have to check all of the wiring is how I originally laid it out and hasn't actually gained new connections when I moved a pole around.

Diving into this further, this object-to-object rewiring only happens when the last pole connecting the objects is removed. For example, if I have this:
I can cut either pole without any object-to-object rewiring:
When I put the pole back, all the red and green wire connections are back to how they were:
I say red and green wires because in this scenario I now get a copper wire turn up between the two poles. I'm not thrilled about this either to be honest - the pole didn't have a copper wire beforehand, why should it have one now? It was able to remember that it had a green wire to the other pole, so there's some memory in effect here, but I don't want to have to go and remove copper wires I didn't have beforehand.

What's most irritating is this is only really a problem in pure vanilla - if I use the Even Pickier Dollies mod I can shuffle poles around without any of these problems. But then I don't get achivements.

Just to add, and this is what really grinds my gears...undo doesn't actually undo in this situation. If I cut/delete the pole and then hit ctrl-Z, I still have to go and unpick all the extra connections that turned up.

It also just occurred to me to test from the other direction, and see what happens if I cut/paste the objects, not the poles:

This works exactly as anticipated, with connections respected as-is.
This remains true for partial cut only containing objects:
But once a partial cut contains the pole, the objects not in the cut gain excess connections again - 3 to 4, 4 to 5. Not, curiously, 3 to 5:
Multi-pole setups continue to work consistently with previous observations

Ref 121771 Cutting and pasting a power pole re-adds copper wires that were previously removed, 125413 Cutting power pole with logic wires attached randomly generates extra wires ruining the circuit.