Wire Shortcuts

by daydev

Removes red and green wires as craftable items and makes them available as shortcuts, similar to blueprints and planners. Let them clutter your inventory no more! Additionally, adds a shortcut to pick up a copper wire for the rare instances when it's necessary. Also includes a wire cutter selection tool to quickly remove all wires in an area.

Utilities
11 months ago
0.17 - 1.1
34.5K

g [Implemented] Interaction with other mods

5 years ago

How does this affect mods that add recipes requiring coloured wire, for example Expanded Rocket Payloads?

5 years ago

For now it just removes red and green wire from recipes that have them.

4 years ago

Can you not make it so that it is both a craftable item and available as a shortcut? I don't think it's a good idea to remove entities that are present in the vanilla game as this is bound to mess up the behaviour/balancing of other mods.

4 years ago

I certainly could, but this mod is made from the viewpoint that physical colored wires are needless clutter and should not exist. So far I was made aware of two other mods that use the colored wire in one recipe each, this mod should remove the colored wire from those recipes (if it doesn't, let me know, I'll investigate) and in my opinion the impact on balance is negligible. I'm not removing copper wire which is actually important. If you're aware of any actual, not hypothetical issues caused by the removal of colored wires as craftable items, let me know, I'll look into it.

4 years ago

You are not wrong :)

4 years ago

Can you make the removal proccess toggleable? Should be the best of both worlds.

4 years ago

I thought about it, but instead of the best of both worlds it seems questionable and highly problematic, actually. See, if the wires were preserved in the recipes, I probably shouldn't delete them from the player inventory, right? But even if I kept that there are a whole bunch of ways you can circumvent that: put it in a chest, put it on the ground and tell the robots to take it, etc. Currently all that stuff is not tracked because if you really want to keep a stack of useless wire, be my guest, it'll despawn the moment it touches your inventory. The shortcuts give you a stack of colored wire with the understanding that it's useless for anything other than connecting things. If the wire is actually used in recipes it becomes cheaty as all hell, so I'd have to get on top of keeping track of which wire came from where, which seems like it would complicate the mod about tenfold. So the bottom line is, it's a lot of trouble for something I don't really want to do anyway. Like, if you want to play with colored wires as items, do it, what do you need this mod for? This is specifically for people who agree that the wires belong in the shortcuts with the blueprints that spawn them for free anyway.

4 years ago

There's a new mod that changes blue science (in a different way than the proposed FFF changes), and if used red wire as a replacement for red circuits in the recipe. I would like to test it, but I very much like what your mod does as well.

How about adding a 'fake' wire pair, that can't be used as wires, and replaces the ingredients instead of them being removed entirely?

4 years ago

Hmm, maybe. Still seems like it could cause trouble because I now need to catch the changes other mods make to the recipes of the wires themselves, but I think I have an idea, and I can include it as an "potentially unstable" optional feature. I'll get back to you.

4 years ago

Okay, I've released an update (0.3.170) where you can optionally, very much not recommended, enable colored wire surrogates for crafting. It seems to work, but I probably broke something, especially when all the overhaul mods come into play, so let me know how it goes.

4 years ago

Actually, make that version 0.3.171, the first release turned out to not actually work with that oil mod, the new version should work.

4 years ago

Do you mind if I take a look at your code? I'm planning 2 mods that need to do something similar, but I don't have a clue how to go around with string recognition. It would help me to see how others do it (of course, I have no intention of control C/V'ing your stuff.)

4 years ago
(updated 4 years ago)

Oh, yeah, I forgot to push the changes to GitHub, didn't I? I did that now, but you know, all the mod's source is included with the download anyway, so even if I were against you taking a look, how would I stop you? But, yeah, of course, go for it, I myself get by with my humble modding in large part by looking at how something is done elsewhere.

4 years ago

It's common courtesy to ask.

3 years ago
(updated 3 years ago)

Hello, this does not seem to remove the Green/Red wire from "Ick's Seablock Pack": https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlockCustomPack

Any ideas on why this may be or how I can adjust settings to fix it?

EDIT: have fixed the issue through a fork, though still wonder why it's an issue to begin with. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlockCustomPack-Variant

3 years ago
(updated 3 years ago)

Hello. I think the issue is because Ick's mod, being a patch on top of everything, does its changes in data-final-fixes which is the same place Wire Shortcuts does its changes to the recipes, so whose changes stick depends on what's loaded last. I think adding an optional dependency on ick's mod to Wire Shortcuts to force the load order would solve it. I tried to reproduce it and actually check that's the case, but Ick's mod seems to have broken dependencies. "A Seablock Config" is not a thing anymore and "KS Power quickfix" conflicts with "KS Power" required in turn by Seablock itself? Seems like there's some sorcery I'm unaware of involved in making this patch mod work at all.

2 years ago

This conflicts with Modmash Electronics, where green wires and red wires are used as crafting ingredients for circuits, are unlocked from the start, and have their recipe changed :/ . I hate to make this request, but could you switch your use of the wires to custom items? I'm in the group that thinks disabling vanilla items/recipes/etc is a not a good idea for this reason. I enabled the setting, and added "modmashsplinterelectronics" as a dependency to Wire Shortcuts but it's just a huge mess.

2 years ago
(updated 2 years ago)

Hello. The core premise of this mod is that color wires should not exist as items. They are almost pure logical entities in the vanilla game, just not quite, this mod's purpose is to take them there. The motto is "Let the wires (as items) go!".

It sounds from your descriptions like that other mod is made with the opposite premise: integrate the circuit wires into crafting more deeply.

I'm not sure, it may even be the case that the wires are hardcoded in the game such that it's impossible to make custom wires for connecting things. Maybe not, but in any case I'm not going to try. Surrogate recipes are provided for those who think they still need to have the wires as ingredients for one reason or another. If that is not good enough, then I'm sorry, but sometimes there's just going to be a fundamental conflict of premises and purposes.

2 years ago

k, figured, ty

2 years ago

What if you replace colored wires with copper wires in recipes?

2 years ago

I don't see the purpose. The surrogate wire is provided for those who don't want to just let the wires as items go. The whole thing is to preserve the recipes for those who want it, not change them in some different way.

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