mass edit power pole connections with click and drag

[brucemalt]

TL;DR

Give box draw tool to edit many power connections at once.

What?

We all know and love the copy paste feature, and we do that by clicking and dragging a box, then everything inside the box is selected and pasted to the blueprint. Nice and easy.

I would suggest for that feature to be re-used slightly different, for power pole connections, to be able to isolate networks nicely:

07-06-2025, 15-53-40.png (1.41 MiB) Viewed 165 times

"Simply" find all power poles in the selection, find all connections that go to power poles that are not in the selection (outside) and delete them.

I would suggest to put this feature behind activating the "copper wire" mode and then holding ctrl or a different modifier key while the box is being drawn, or some other hotkey combination.

Why?

As I am delving deeper into the game mechanics and try to leverage power switches and beacons with efficiency modules, the most efficient solution would be to just switch off entire blocks.

This is already relatively easy if manufacturing blocks are sufficiently isolated and the connection that is switched on or off is explicitly built with that purpose in mind.

However they sort of have to be built that way. And they have to be planned that way. Just placing things closeby will auto connect the power poles. It is possible to edit connections manually, but that's not really an option for big blocks. Having to do it manually means single connections can be missed and overlooked. Yes the electrical overlay in the map can help find those.

E.g. in this case (on the left), when adding switches a good while after building the assemblers, all connections have to be manually destroyed and recreated.

The "solution" would be to copy paste the assemblers outside of the autoconnect distance, but doing that removes the synergy of using just one belt and the setup needs more space.

07-06-2025, 16-01-13.png (1.66 MiB) Viewed 165 times

WHY do you think it increases the value of Factorio as a game?

It makes the depth of doing anything with the electrical grid more accessible.

I hope this is not a duplicate.

Cheers!

[Rseding91]

A small thing, performance wise the best for the game is “one huge electric network where everything always has power”. Not having power or going from having to not and back end up making the overall game performance worse.

With that in mind, designing game mechanics to actively encourage and make that easier isn’t a priority.

[TurtleZ]

Whilst this is not appropriate as a base game feature, I can see this being entirely doable by a mod.

[brucemalt]

performance wise the best for the game...

Ah. I did not know that. Obviously that's a much harder sell as a feature then.

I think adding a "switching cost" to discourage switching back and forth rapidly would be a way to design around that, (and I would love to play around that limitation) but that would be a way bigger change than a simple UI / convenience tool.

Thanks for the replies!