Medium Electric Pole

Lore & Background

In the sprawling industrial wastelands where the player's factory slowly devours the green, electricity is the invisible bloodstream that keeps every assembler, furnace, and lab humming. The Medium Electric Pole is the quiet workhorse of that bloodstream—a slender lattice of metal and insulators that stands a little taller than its small-pole cousin, its cross-arms reaching further to grab the electrical field and hand it off to the next pole or the machine waiting on the other side. Factory engineers in the Factorio world learn early that a grid built entirely of small poles becomes a brittle checkerboard: one misplaced wall or a single missing pole and an entire wing goes dark. The medium pole, with its wider reach, lets you space connections further apart, thread power through gaps in conveyor networks, and cover the open factory floors where machines are laid out in long rows. It is not glamorous—no glowing cores, no humming transformers—but it is the difference between a plant that sputters and one that scales. As the factory grows toward the endgame, the medium pole often gets crowded out by large poles and substations, but it never truly disappears. Tinkerers still reach for it in tight corridors, around storage silos, or in the awkward gaps where a large pole's 9×9 footprint simply won't fit. It remains the most versatile link in the chain, the one you can drop anywhere without overthinking the geometry.

In Their Own Story

The rain had stopped, but the air still tasted of wet iron and heated copper. Kael crouched beside a row of assemblers that had gone silent three minutes ago, their pistons frozen mid-stroke. He'd been expanding the east wing faster than the grid could keep up, and the small poles he'd laid down in a hasty line were now two tiles short of the new furnace bank. He pulled a Medium Electric Pole from his inventory slot—its pixelated silhouette a familiar cross of grey and amber—and set it down in the gap. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then the faint blue shimmer of the electrical field rippled outward, two tiles in every direction, catching the edge of the furnace's connector and the small pole behind it. The assemblers shuddered, pistons resumed their rhythm, and the low thrum of production swallowed the silence whole. Kael stood, brushed dirt from his knees, and walked on. The factory was never finished. It was only ever a little less broken than it had been five minutes ago.

Reader's Guide

Function: The Medium Electric Pole is a passive power-transmission node. It has no input or output slots in the traditional sense; instead, it creates an electrical connection field that extends two tiles in each cardinal direction (a 5×5 area centered on the pole). Any machine or generator within that field is electrically linked to the pole's network. Power draw: Zero. The pole itself consumes no electricity and has no throughput or speed rating. It simply bridges the gap between a power source and a power consumer. Role in a production line: Use it to extend your electrical grid across factory floors where the Small Electric Pole's one-tile reach is insufficient. It is ideal for mid-game layouts with machines spaced three to five tiles apart, for threading power through gaps in conveyor or pipe networks, and for covering open areas without the resource investment of Large Poles. Technology: Unlocked via the Electric Network research. Once available, it replaces small poles in most mid-game builds. Adjacency and stacking quirks: Poles connect to each other if they fall within one another's range, forming a continuous network. You can overlap medium poles to create dense coverage, but each pole still occupies a single tile. They can be placed adjacent to walls, under conveyor belts (the belt sits on top), and next to machines. There is no stacking limit—multiple poles can occupy the same tile if you use a mod, but in vanilla each tile holds one pole. Pairing: Works seamlessly with any generator (coal, nuclear, solar, wind) and any electric machine. For very large areas, supplement with Large Poles or a Substation to reduce the number of individual poles needed.

Did You Know?

• The Medium Electric Pole's two-tile range means you can space poles three tiles apart (center-to-center) and still maintain an unbroken electrical connection, reducing the total number of poles needed compared to a small
• Because the pole is purely passive, a single generator can theoretically power an arbitrarily large factory as long as the pole network connects every consumer back to that generator—there is no distance-based voltage dr
• You can place a Medium Electric Pole on the same tile where a conveyor belt or pipe runs, since the pole occupies the ground layer while the belt occupies the transport layer above it.
• In the game's research tree, the Medium Electric Pole sits between the Small and Large poles, making it the natural upgrade path as your factory outgrows the tight 3×3 coverage of the default pole.