Hello,

Firstly, awesome mod! I’ve given it a few shout-outs on Reddit recently, and I will share my PO factory when it’s complete. I might share a screenshot in the short term to show the mod in use as well.

I’ve just had a thought - IRL, pylons usually carry multiple wires. Is this something that could be included within the mod? You can already connect wires to specific parts of buildings (such as the vanilla power switch, combinators, your transformers or these: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Electric_Transformators) - this would be similar with each pylon having multiple connection points. I’m not sure if there’s a limit to how many connection points an object can have, but two would be a start. The connected wires would not interact with each other - each would carry a separate network.

This technique would enable higher capacities in the high power parts of the network. I know you can increase the capacity in the mod settings or use parallel lines - this is a similar way of achieving the second method but within a single structure. The ability to have multiple circuit network connections per pylon would also be useful.

Thanks again.

That would be very cool, but unfortunately is definitely impossible because of the limitations of the game engine. That's not the kind of thing that can be worked around with the modding API.

Ok actually having read your suggestion more thoroughly, it would actually not be impossible. As you say, I already have transformers that have 2 connections. Internally, these are represented a power switch that doesn't allow any connections (but provides the GUI) and 2 invisible power poles that you can connect to other poles.

Pylons with multiple lines is doable using similar techniques, but I don't know when I'll have time to work more on this mod to add it.

No worries if you don’t get time. It’s a nice-to-have and would look awesome with say six wires coming off a pylon going to different locations, but it’s not urgent/necessary. I’m using Bob’s Power so I already have plenty of high-tier pylons to keep me powered.

Definitly doable by adding additional invisible power pole entities to each peaceable entity, though it would be hell stopping them from connecting to each other, may need some serious nested if statements ;)

I don't think that it would be too hard stopping them from connecting? I disconnect the hidden transformer poles after they are created with no problems. For theoretical double poles I'd disconnect any hidden-pole-right from any hidden-pole-left that it automatically connects to upon creation. That should solve the problem (and make the lines continue in parallel between poles - good!), though this wouldn't work so well for changes in direction.

The main problem I can see is that pole graphics rotate based on their connections. I don't think there is any detectable event for this occurring and I'm not even sure if this rotation can be changed or read by the mod ?API... the placeable entity could just be a basic entity that could be manually rotated, but then you'd lose the pole dragging mechanics. Maybe there's a better solution - I've not looked into this in detail yet.

Out of interest, do you have a save using PO that you'd be happy to share? It would be useful for testing/improving performance.