Factorio Forums

So when you're first developing your factory, you have a tenancy to use wooden electronic poles even after you've researched steel due to having the lack of recourses for a while after researching the technology. But a general question: Why can't you upgrade wooden electric poles to metal ones?

As someone who enjoys making sure I always have a certain number of items stored away to prevent wasting materials, I have a tendency to use tons of cables from one place to another, but I always forget to upgrade the poles to metal ones from wooden ones. After building a huge wire system, it just takes too long for you to take down the wire and the pole, place the pole and replace the missing cable. And for a game based around ease of use, why isn't this already a thing?

Another general question: Why do you want to replace the wooden poles? Makes no sense, if you do not also use the bigger area they cover.
You don't have any advantage in doing this, it just costs a lot of resources.

The coverage is not always as perfect as in the screenshot. Often, there are "holes" in the electric coverage, which means that one needs to build new poles or manually upgrade existing ones to fill these holes in order to build things that require electricity (e.g. inserters).

Allowing to upgrade poles the same way as belts can be upgraded would make this task less painful.

GAHJAHHHSHSHFSGD


While it might be space efficient to have those resource lines, looking at that was almost painful.


http://www.factoriomods.com/mods/replacable-poles

Mod instead of an ingame thinggy, but still.


Admittedly, when I get Medium poles, I now tear all my power out and use a perfect grid instead. Wooden poles can't be used the same way as Steel poles.

Well, it would be really, really simple to make a mod, that adds the fast replace group to these items, and it doesn't hurt.

ssilk wrote:Well, it would be really, really simple to make a mod, that adds the fast replace group to these items, and it doesn't hurt.

but something as simple like this shouldn't even be a mod though. As you said it's really easy to impliment and as the game is based around upgrading and ease of use, why can't we just replace them?

I see that as rhetorical question.
And the logical answer is: "And so I have made a mod that does this. I hope the devs may use it to implement my wish."


PS: Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=30575 Fast Upgrade (Belt->Splitters, Small Chests -> Bigger Chests... etc.)
cause it makes in my opinion really no sense to be able to downgrade from steel to wooden pole.