Base Power Management

[HyratelWyvern]

is a serious chore. the combination of fussy ui, crowded base layouts, and NON-RESPONSIVE POWER GENERATORS just made me close the game in annoyance because of having to babysit Refinery, block crafter, supply crafter, workbench, and Scrapper just got unweildy.

2 main options:
Make power demand responsive
Add single whole-base power management panel

[Subquake]

Craft silos, connect it to your reactors to automate carbon feeding, will make it much easier to manage. Turn off stations that you don't need/use.

[Lemdoran]

Originally posted by Subquake:

Craft silos, connect it to your reactors to automate carbon feeding, will make it much easier to manage. Turn off stations that you don't need/use.

That's the problem.

Why doing this? i mean, it just make gameplay tedious while it can, and should, be automated and responsive.

Plus, turning off stations don't stop, nor even slow down, the carbon burning speed.

Oh, and the energy storage block don't seem to work.

The value go up and down, but you can't charge them then use the energy latter as they have an output of 0.

[Memnoch]

If I accidentally leave the generator on, it sucks up all my Carbon, and empties the batteries. I don't see why there will only be power draw when a station is actually doing something. You know, like Astroneer. Even if you only leave the generator on, it just chews through all your Carbon.

[Nate]

Yeah, its like the devs haven't looked at Astroneer or Factorio or anything similar. Power gens shouldn't eat carbon if there is no demand. At this stage in development, the base batteries don't appear to do anything useful.

After advancing in the game, it won't matter with wind and solar. But it looks like those will take quite some time in game.

[Nate]

Originally posted by Azirahael:

You get more out of your carbon if you refine it first.
Lasts 4 times as long for 3 carbon used.

Thanks! Good to know.

[Maxter1o2]

Originally posted by Nate:

Originally posted by Azirahael:

You get more out of your carbon if you refine it first.
Lasts 4 times as long for 3 carbon used.

Thanks! Good to know.

4x as long to passively burn it for no reason.

[DarkRayan]

the cells are working BUT....and a big BUT at that...they give energy and mashines take it....but they dont work if there is no "flow" in the system. meaning - if there is no generation AT ALL mashines simply dont work and just sucks energy out of cells....i think its a bug...or if its intended, i see it as cell dont "generate" power....but its weird in my opinion.....

[Antiga]

Originally posted by Azirahael:

Originally posted by Nate:

Yeah, its like the devs haven't looked at Astroneer or Factorio or anything similar. Power gens shouldn't eat carbon if there is no demand. At this stage in development, the base batteries don't appear to do anything useful.

After advancing in the game, it won't matter with wind and solar. But it looks like those will take quite some time in game.

this was brought up in the playtest, majorly upvoted.
They know about it, they just have not done it yet.

That reminds me of how they treated (Original) TerraTech feedback.

[D00M BUNNY]

and wind generators don't provide power unless you are also burning carbon, unless that's just a bug on my game ATM LOL
Annoying after finally getting enough mats to build a few :/

[HyratelWyvern]

On top of all this, the Conduit speed is abysmal and can't distribute across several output silos, can't keep up with the Fragmenter chewing on a tree, it has no filtration automation to feed Only Burnables to powerplants.

This is not automation. I don't know what it IS, but automation, it most certainly is NOT.

[Hendrake]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a discount solar power rig from Harbor Freight has better power management than this thing.

[Memnoch]

I have two wind turbines, and they top up my batteries, which in turn power my buildings, so I don't need to turn on the Carbon burner anymore. I still have to turn off the machines when I am done with them though. I have 4 batteries, and two wind turbines so far.

[Hagitsume]

Purified Carbon burn around 10 minutes

[HyratelWyvern]

Originally posted by Azirahael:

Originally posted by D00M BUNNY:

and wind generators don't provide power unless you are also burning carbon, unless that's just a bug on my game ATM LOL
Annoying after finally getting enough mats to build a few :/

THey do.
But, power management is all or nothing.
Writing code to decide what happens if the base has 80% power is hard.
build a stack more wind turbines, and it will stop happening.

this is supposed to be high sci-fi. your typical home emergency generator has better responsiveness than this game's power systems. "it's hard to write responsive power usage" is an invalid argument; there's plenty of prior examples in games, *and the actual code would not be difficult*

[Falchoin]

Like a lot of things in TTW, it's more tedious than fun. I'm sure the manufactured problem of power management gets "solved" eventually by just throwing enough resources at it, but in the meantime it's a slog.