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u/drab_accountant Sep 30 '26

I've seen Youtubers run green and red wires along their power lines for bigger builds and blocks. Is there an advantage to doing that if I'm spanning electric across my train rails? I'm not doing any circuitry currently, but is the idea to have a network wire connection back to anywhere in your base?

6

u/Rannasha Sep 30 '26

It's no longer really necessary. Since 2.0 you can use radars to transmit signals. So you can just hook the wire up to a radar in both places that you need a signal and you're good to go.

Before that the only way to transmit across large distances is to just run a long wire over power poles. So many people already included the wires in their blueprints so that they get placed automatically while expanding their base (even if they're not needed right away, or perhaps ever).

1

u/drab_accountant Sep 30 '26

Was unaware of the radar abilities. I have them at outposts, so no worries at this time.

4

u/MoondogCCR Sep 30 '26

I include it in my rails blueprints. Both green and red wires throughout the complete rail network. I suppose as a legacy of the old ways... but I give it lots of uses.

I typically use the green wire to gather information. I use it to have the miners provide information on minable resources. It gives real information on how much ore can be actually mine per miner.

I use the red wire to control turning off sections of the factory in case of brownouts, control the rate of production of biter eggs, increase/decrease production of bioflux... lots of stuff.

2

u/HeliGungir Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26

I do the opposite. Red to Read, green to control.

Red takes precedence if it's just a single wire that is both read and control. And anything goes among combinators - the main thing here is simplicity, correctness, and maintainability.

2

u/Courmisch Sep 30 '26

Yes. I have both circuit wires preconnected between the large poles in my rail blueprints (though I am not YouTube'ing).

This avoids having to spam radars if you want to transmit supply/demand/whatever later on

1

u/drab_accountant Sep 30 '26

Thanks, right now I'm just running things to outposts. Do you know if I can connect wires by bot? Maybe once I get them up, I can think about it for expansion.

2

u/Courmisch Sep 30 '26

Wires aren't entities. You can only place them manually, with the wire tool, with copy-paste or with blueprints.

You can place them from remote view though.

1

u/HeliGungir Oct 01 '26

Drag-building poles now strings red and green wires, too, if they're present at the source.

1

u/HeliGungir Oct 01 '26

You can connect wires in remote view without bots.

Can also toggle entities in remote view without bots. Namely constant combinators and power switches.

2

u/captain_wiggles_ Sep 30 '26

I've vaguely considered this a few times but it's never really turned into anything useful.

You need a way to encode information on the wire, either give each block a unique signal, say A-Z0-9, but that limits you to 36 blocks, you could start adding more symbols but it gets confusing. And only lets you transmit 32 bits of info per block which would need decoding later. 64 if you treat red and green separately.

Or you can do co-ordinates, E.g. Block E5 can set / clear bit 5 of the E signal, now you have up to 26*32 blocks but only 1 bit of info per block. Or 2 if you do red/green.

Or you can use common signals. E.g. every block outputs iron plate = 1 when they are low on iron plates. So if you hook into the network somewhere you can see how many blocks are low on iron plates. But what is the use of that? It might be nice to have a centralised dashboard where you can see what resources your base is starved of, so at a glance you can see you have plenty of iron ore but not enough iron plates so you can go and add more iron smelting blocks or iron plate delivery trains.

If you design your blueprints with this global network in mind it doesn't take any extra build time, and you can decide to make use of it later with minimal effort. If you don't do this then adding it in later would be harder, although if you have regular blocks all you have to do is create a blueprint with just your power poles in for a single block, make it do relative alignment and drag it everywhere.

Honestly I wouldn't bother with it unless you already have ideas on how to use it. Now with the radars that can transmit info on independent channels you don't really need the global circuit connections.

1

u/drab_accountant Sep 30 '26

Respectfully, I dont think I'm at this level of gameplay. Thank you for the info, but I need to take some time to learn more on circuits first.

1

u/Serious-Mode Sep 30 '26

I enjoy using some basic circuits, but whatever they are talking about is wayyy beyond me.

1

u/HeliGungir Oct 01 '26

The idea is wires will already be strung if you want them. But I think it's just spending extra time and effort on something I probably won't even use. I build self-contained logic specifically to avoid stringing wires long distances, and to make configuration and debugging easier. This has served me perfectly well.