Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Non-electrical network poles for running signal wires to save UPS

What ?

Sometimes signal wires need to get across to entities in a short distance that don't need to be strung across on electrical wires. It would be nice to have a non-electrical entity to carry these signals around.

Why ?

Independent electric grids cause UPS issues and a player may not know the impact of just running signal wires on electric poles without electrical lines connected to the main grid, that this behavior will contribute to poor UPS on the electrical network.

This is actually quite an easy thing to mod. I've thought about doing it myself but haven't got around to it.

All you need is to create new poles, that's actually chests internally with a capacity of zero. They allow circuit wire connections, and won't spam anything on the circuit wires themselves. And then you simply make it look like a tiny pole or something.

Would be a tinnny but useful mod. Maybe it even exists already.

This looks like the closest thing to my suggestion

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/shortwave_fix

lol, somebody reads the forums

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/circuit-poles

Done, you can find it here. It would have been a lot faster if I took stringweasel at his word and didn't try the wall prototype first.

1WheelDude wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:55 pm

lol, somebody reads the forums

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/circuit-poles

Hah, you're faster than me, even.

lyvgbfh wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:56 pm

Done, you can find it here. It would have been a lot faster if I took stringweasel at his word and didn't try the wall prototype first.

nice! I've downloaded it and looking at it now. Gonna provide feedback on the mod page

lyvgbfh wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:56 pm

Done, you can find it here. It would have been a lot faster if I took stringweasel at his word and didn't try the wall prototype first.

Nice! Another option would have been Constant Combinators, but if you click on them the GUI isn't as nice. Not sure what the UPS difference is between them.

Stringweasel wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 08, 2023 7:15 am

Nice! Another option would have been Constant Combinators, but if you click on them the GUI isn't as nice. Not sure what the UPS difference is between them.

I considered that but opted to skip it since they take an energy source of some kind, even void, and I didn't want to spend time testing if that did any checks. If anyone knows what kind of effect void sources have for electric logic (i.e if they end up in their own sub network or something) I would be interested to hear.