Factorio Forums

Anyone know if it is even possible to mod the way the electrical network behaves in this game?

I would be interested in making the electrical network a more complex simulation, with effects like transmission loss. I think it would make for some nice looking structures and force the player to actually put thought into their electrical structures - need more than one transmission line to get very high power to a factory, or placing substations before/after long power runs to transform from high transmission voltages to usable low voltage. Does such a mod already exist?

AFAIK electricity in this game is an extremely simplistic sim, all power is added to one pool (per network of course) and transmitted instantaneously and losslessly to anywhere on the network. One small power pole could transmit the load from a 10GW power plant to the rest of the factory!

I imagine it would add computation time on par with using fluids, but is it even possible to change this part of the game in such a fundamental way?

there was this mod in 0.13
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/flownetwork

drachma wrote:I imagine it would add computation time on par with using fluids, but is it even possible to change this part of the game in such a fundamental way?

The built-in electricity simulation can not be altered by mods. It also has been optimized several times and lost some moddability in the progress. So that's definetly not going to change.

The mod above as far as i can tell from a quick look implements a completely new electricity mechanic in lua, by using accumulators as "power poles". The screenshots also show that it's not using copper cables. Meaning it's almost certainly doing lua-based power transfer. Which while allowing you to do custom stuff, will not have good performance, so it would only be usable in small to med sized factories.