Assign Power system priority
GameSage
Join Date: 2018-01-16 Member: 235086Members
Join Date: 2018-01-16 Member: 235086Members
So on my current play through, I have a rather large sprawling base. Power system consists of 1 nuclear reactor, 1 bio reactor and 4 solar panels(soon to be more though).
After analyzing the usage of power by my base i saw that the nuke reactor was struggling to charge up. I do have 4 water filtration systems active so yeah. But my first thought considering it was night was that the solar array had been drained, but its at full charge. The bio reactor is also at full charge.
What my idea is consists of setting up a way to manipulate what power systems the base draws power from first. Uranitite is still one of the more rare materials you can find and once the maps supply of the material is used up, that's it its gone and your nuke reactors will run out of fuel before long. Biomatter is a regenerating resource in that as long as you keep one plant for making seed and use the rest as fuel your bio reactors can run forever, despite their slow charge.
As for solar, they actually stay charged through the night because everything is running off the nuclear source. Anyway, what would be a bog boon for my base would be if i could configure the power system to use the solar energy first, then once that is gone, use the bioreactors, and when those fail to keep up, go to the nuclear reactors.
Right now as far as I can tell the power system usage priority appears to be
1.) Nuclear(if present)
2.) Solar
3.) Bio Reactor
After analyzing the usage of power by my base i saw that the nuke reactor was struggling to charge up. I do have 4 water filtration systems active so yeah. But my first thought considering it was night was that the solar array had been drained, but its at full charge. The bio reactor is also at full charge.
What my idea is consists of setting up a way to manipulate what power systems the base draws power from first. Uranitite is still one of the more rare materials you can find and once the maps supply of the material is used up, that's it its gone and your nuke reactors will run out of fuel before long. Biomatter is a regenerating resource in that as long as you keep one plant for making seed and use the rest as fuel your bio reactors can run forever, despite their slow charge.
As for solar, they actually stay charged through the night because everything is running off the nuclear source. Anyway, what would be a bog boon for my base would be if i could configure the power system to use the solar energy first, then once that is gone, use the bioreactors, and when those fail to keep up, go to the nuclear reactors.
Right now as far as I can tell the power system usage priority appears to be
1.) Nuclear(if present)
2.) Solar
3.) Bio Reactor
Comments
That im going to test by running a fabricator that is on the far side of my base from my reactors and see if it draws from the solars, while my 4 water filtration systems are draining the nuclear reactor.
once a power source has been exhausted, all base systems draw from the next one until it is exhausted even if the prior one recharges fully.
That being said, once power draw ends up hitting the nuclear reactor, it will otherwise stay there as it charges faster than most bases can draw from it. Basically once you go nuclear, may as well decommission your other power systems.
You're sure about that? Like, you tried building them in different orders from a fresh base? You can use the cheat to help.
Here's what the cheat does:
Enables:
What i saw was (after building 6 water filtration systems) the bio reactor lost all 500 energy in no time flat. Then the nuclear reactor started going up and down as it was replacing energy as fast as it was draining, and the solars kept their energy, even through the night.
I build a fabricator real close to the solars and started cranking out plasteel. After about 25 Ingots, solars were still at full power.
If nothing else, this experiment has proven that it can be a bit random what power source is utilized, and switching sources does not happen until the source being used has been completely drained. Meaning that even if you're using all types of power, once the draw starts hitting the nuclear reactor, it wont switch until all installed fuel rods are depleted. Then it will go to another one at random, sticking with that source until its power hits zero, and so on.
Sort of how the cyclops, when you power up the engine, it will drain from one power cell at random until its drained and move on to another. This is another one I experimented with extensively out of boredom(boredom from having completed all 3 of the games story lines) i plugged in 5 standard power cells and i ran the sub in circles around the playable area. I used 5 as that would mean 1000 energy and I could check every 20% loss on the cells. I ran the sub until it was nearly out of power. Going from front to back port side first saying those are cells 1-3 and starboard was 4-6 with slot 6 empty the drain happened in this sequence on a continuous run.
Cell 4 drained first
Then 3
Then 5
Then 1
and lastly, cell 2.
To test if the chosen cell is random based on each successive engine start, i replaced those 5 cells and placed a new cell in slot 6. Only this one was Ion. I was testing the theory that the engine might go for the cell with the most energy. This time i checked power draw in 3% increments, shutting down the engine each time. After the first 2 runs this is what the power distribution looked like:
Run 1- cells 1-4 200/200 Cell 5 140/200 energy Cell 6 1000/1000
Run 2- Cell 1 140/200 2-4 200/200 Cell 5 140/200 Cell 6 1000/1000
After all 10 runs,
Cells 1,2,4 and 5 drained
Cell 3 was at 50% and the Ion was at around 60% or so. I ran into a few leviathans in places and had to raise shields.
In any case, what ever cell was being drawn from all systems would use that cell, as power goes from cell to engine to sub systems.
It is quite unlike the prawn suit which draws from both cells equally. If your readout says 50% both cells read 100/200 energy 50%.
Anyway, sorry for the long scientific expositional post. These experiments were very....involved.
Thank you for proving that the power system still needs large improvements! I think the order of power consumption should always be the same based on the availability and ressource cost. So for me the most logical order is:
1) Thermal power (renewable, always available)
2) Solar power (renewable, recharges using daylight)
3) Bioreactor (renewable, negligible maintenance cost)
4) Nuclear power (expensive and limited ressources)