The Wiring Tool is necessary to wire "electric" devices together, but also to see and adjust their settings.
You can connect activation devices like Switches, Number Pads, Pressure Plates or Sensors to usable objects like Doors, Gates, Lamps (including LEDs), Fans, Beacons, Mob Spawners, Loot Spawners, Block Phasers, Trap Doors, Campfires, Fire Pits or Arc Signs, and you can use Gates of different kinds in between for operations (Logic Gates, Number Comparison Gates, Delay Gates or Flip-Flop Gates).
The Wiring Tool has infinite durability and can (only) be crafted in your Crafting Menu (to be opened with "q" as the default key), after the according crafting recipe has been unlocked.
To unlock the crafting recipe, you will have to
- collect some Coal, either by extracting it from Nodes in Caves, the Fossil layer underground or in Mountains; or by finding it in randomly spawning Wood Treasure Chests at night, or by killing or pet-harvesting any kind of Keepa
- craft or find a Stone Mining Cell
- and collect some Magnetite by mining it from Caves or the Fossil layer or by killing or pet-harvesting Night Rocksters, Warmworms or Rockzillas
Then you can craft 1 Wiring Tool each from
- 4 Stone Rods made of Stone, Limestone or Bedrock in a Processor
- 2 Coal extracted from Coal Nodes in Mountains or on the Fossil layer underground by using any kind of Extractor, or found in Wood Treasure Chests on the surface
- 2 (blocks of) Magnetite mined from the Fossil layer (accessible through Caves), which requires at least a Stone Mining Cell, or by killing or pet-harvesting Night Rocksters, Warmworms or Rockzillas
To use this tool you will have to place it into your tool slot (right-click on the Wiring Tool your inventory). After equipping it you can cycle between weapon, Arctek gauntlet and tool with "TAB" (as the default key) to activate and actually use it.
When activated, the Wiring Tool HUD will be displayed, looking like a blue screen hovering above the right arm of your player character.
Depending on what you are looking at (pointing with the crosshair cursor in the middle of your screen) you will be shown specific information and settings of wireable devices and objects.
Only when looking at wireable items with the Wiring Tool activated you will be able to see at least one of these small indicator icons (sometimes even several of them) on them:
Send Hotspot |
Receive Hotspot |
Now you can click on a Send Hotspot to create a wire. With the Wiring Tool activated, you can see wires of blue light running from this Hotspot to the arm of your player character. To connect this wire with any receiving object like a door or a gate, you will have to point your cross-hair cursor to a Receive Hotspot and click on it. You should then be able to see the blue wire connecting both Hotspots.
With "N" as the default key you can open the settings menu of any wireable item. In this window you can then configure the device or object.
For example you can connect sender and receiver together by simply typing the same codeword of your choice into the according arrays ("sends", "receives") of both devices instead of wiring them up manually, you can set automatic reset times, you can decide between different conditions for logic gates, you can define custom colors for LEDs and much more, depending on the device or object.
Please check out the Wiring Tutorial for an introduction into basic wiring techniques (like how to lock doors).
Type "v" (as the default key) to either show or hide the blue connection lines (like cables) between devices that you will wire up. In your control options you can also decide to have wiring details displayed or not in general.
Type "k" (as the default key) to cut wires / cancel specific connections while pointing at the "hotspots" (small white icons with arrows to indicate either "send" or "receive" contact points).