Factorio Forums

This only seems to affect power wires. I tested and I was able to have 6 red wires (in addition to the 5 power wires) connected to a single pole.

This has actually negatively affected my gameplay, which is how I noticed it.

This common solar panel setup (which is linked to in the wiki) is badly hit by this limitation. If you stamp two of them next to each other the two middle big power poles have 5 wires going out from them, so you cannot tie into the power grid from these two poles.

Pretty sure this is by-design.
Anyway - you can disconnect wires with Shift+Click, then connect the Copper Cable manually, to have the poles connected exactly where you want.

sillyfly wrote:Pretty sure this is by-design.
Anyway - you can disconnect wires with Shift+Click, then connect the Copper Cable manually, to have the poles connected exactly where you want.

Also you can toggle individual wires by building them between poles already connected.

I know about that workaround, but this shouldn't be the case.

I think this limit was implemented because it made sense for the small and medium electric pole where it's physically impossible to need to have more 4 wires per pole to connect all the poles together. (Keeping in mind that you can rewire adjacent poles to keep everything connected) This breaks down with big poles and substations where you require wires close by (for the smaller poles) and further away (for the adjacent big pole).

kovarex wrote:

sillyfly wrote:Pretty sure this is by-design.
Anyway - you can disconnect wires with Shift+Click, then connect the Copper Cable manually, to have the poles connected exactly where you want.

Also you can toggle individual wires by building them between poles already connected.

Ooh that is pretty nice!

That said, I don't think you should require people to play around with wires except for aesthetics or if they want to partition power grids.

kosievdmerwe wrote:

kovarex wrote:

sillyfly wrote:Pretty sure this is by-design.
Anyway - you can disconnect wires with Shift+Click, then connect the Copper Cable manually, to have the poles connected exactly where you want.

Also you can toggle individual wires by building them between poles already connected.

Ooh that is pretty nice!

That said, I don't think you should require people to play around with wires except for aesthetics or if they want to partition power grids.

With the power switch, it will be needed if you want to use it.

I see this needed:
- better visibility of wires in vertical direction (see pic above, that is also, what I often see)
- Highlighting wires, when hovering a pole and/or a connected device (to see, which is connected)
- Highlighing cables (same reason)
- beeing able to cut only one wire (you can place one connection, so you need also to cut one and not always all)

And as suggestion (long term plans):
- removing the needs to produces wires and/or cables. (they are all "magically" included into the poles),
- when placing poles or doing wiring we can to select what type of wires/cables - see also the autowire-mod

I wonder if the 5 wire restriction will be a problem with the electric switches in the future.

What's the rationale behind the restriction? As I said, it seems fine for small and medium poles, but it's very easy to run into with big poles (and likely substations) due to there being 2 types of poles you can connect to it: the short distance ones (small and medium) and the long distance ones (big and substations).

ssilk wrote:I see this needed:
...
- beeing able to cut only one wire (you can place one connection, so you need also to cut one and not always all)
...

kovarex wrote:

sillyfly wrote:Pretty sure this is by-design.
Anyway - you can disconnect wires with Shift+Click, then connect the Copper Cable manually, to have the poles connected exactly where you want.

Also you can toggle individual wires by building them between poles already connected.

I think the way Kovarex wrote it can be hard to understand, but if you try to build a copper connection that already exists, it will remove that one connection. So if you have a pole with 5 wires coming out and you want to remove just the one of the wires, just do the actions you would do to manualy connect the two poles (if they were not connected) and you will remove just that one connection, leaving your pole with just the other 4.

I've run into the same problem while trying to destroy some enemy bases with turret blueprints.
This is my blueprint:


If you put down a lot of them next to each other while destroying enemy bases you often run into a situation where they are reachable by other poles but won't connect because the available poles are already connected with five wires.

The solution is to either remove the 5 wire limit or disconnect another wire that is redundant and not needed to connect the new wire.

RoddyVR wrote:

kovarex wrote: Also you can toggle individual wires by building them between poles already connected.

I think the way Kovarex wrote it can be hard to understand, but if you try to build a copper connection that already exists, it will remove that one connection. So if you have a pole with 5 wires coming out and you want to remove just the one of the wires, just do the actions you would do to manualy connect the two poles (if they were not connected) and you will remove just that one connection, leaving your pole with just the other 4.

What I meant is, that this is (very) counterintuitive and must be learned by the player somehow from anywhere else, because it will not revealed with the game on it's own.