Power priority options

[Spirit_OK]

As of now. the bio-fuel generator seems to have a very generous cap on how much fuel it can burn in a game tick, and it has a first priority to deliver power to consumers. Accumulators seem to have last priority and work only as a backup.

In high-load grids it leads to constant switching of primary/backup and needless recalculations of a grid when the generator drains and the engineer refuels it back only for it to drain again 5 seconds later. This process is also very fuel-consuming and can burn through multiple stacks of fuel quickly.

I believe most players want to conserve fuel and cut short the time expences linked to fuel production (farming/gathering/moving/etc.). This is the main reason to move to solar at all.

1. Can we have a toggle somewhere to prioritize solar power and accumulators higher than the bio-generators? It could be as simple as a toggle "primary/backup" on producers, slider on accumulator "Allow discharge: 0%-25%-50%-75%-100%" to let it carry the grid through the night until solar kicks in, or as complex as another GUI window to assign priority to consumers and generators, set aside devices that should shut down when running on "last priority" power, and so on.

2. The solar panels don't work at night. Can we have a device that have input and output ports and switches off the output (effectively shutting down part of the grid) based on some condition? Nighttime, rain, manual switch..
Even better - could it be a transistor-like scheme and allows passage of current from port A to C, if B is powered at all? This covers both nighttime (if B is powered from solar) and backup power sensor (if B is powered from primary source).

[Legorushka]

Hi! Thanks for the feedback!
We designed electricity system to keep it as simple as possible. So was the approach to accumulator. So that players can connect it anywhere and it will work without any additional steps.

[Spirit_OK]

Originally posted by Legorushka:

Hi! Thanks for the feedback!
We designed electricity system to keep it as simple as possible. So was the approach to accumulator. So that players can connect it anywhere and it will work without any additional steps.

Well, it works, it is simple, but sometimes you want all solar+batteries and a backup biogenerator just for the rainy days. Now the biogenerator works through the night to keep battery topped up, it is not necessary and a waste of resources that consume player time to obtain. I suggest a huge decrease of management tasks at the cost of tiny complexity increase :)