[2021] Can't link Wood Pole Supports together?

It’s funny, I’ve been using those diagonal support poles occasionally in prefab building, but by chance they’ve always been next to a wall or something to hold them up.

You’re right, they can’t support each other. Their status as “support” poles is more for aesthetics. Triangular structures in general that look strong aren’t in this game, due to how the structural integrity system is a simpler approximation of real life physics.

You can still use a support pole to help distribute the load on an L shape, though:

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Any shaped block would have the same effect.

SI isn’t on (at least by default) in the prefab editor. When a player disturbs some random, seemingly unimportant block in a POI and there’s a significant collapse, it’s probably because SI is being calculated in that chunk for the first time. So it’s possible support poles you see in a POI really are unsupported.