How to recharge the Cyclops?

[Squirting Elephant]

Other than manually taking out the batteries and replacing them all the time. I tried parking it close to a base but it does not charge.

[bobidog]

Answer is in the question - "manually taking out the batteries and replacing them all the time".
There is no other way.

[Icarus]

Isnt there an upgrade for it that will produce energy from heat ?

[turboslug]

[Cyclops thermal charger module] exists, but it requires materials from late game area, so manually changing powercells is for the only way until then.

[bobidog]

Originally posted by Uhtan:

Isnt there an upgrade for it that will produce energy from heat ?

Can you produce energy from heat in the upper waters until the moment you craft an upgrade?

[Icarus]

Originally posted by bobidog:

Originally posted by Uhtan:

Isnt there an upgrade for it that will produce energy from heat ?

Can you produce energy from heat in the upper waters until the moment you craft an upgrade?

Dont think so , i guess you need the upgrade installed first , then i think you can (should) use any heat source , anywhere .
So building ur ''docking'' area near one of these may be ur thing..

[Squirting Elephant]

Okay thanks :(

I suppose it cannot charge it's own batteries in a battery charger :P That would be weird.

[Amanoob105]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

Okay thanks :(

I suppose it cannot charge it's own batteries in a battery charger :P That would be weird.

It used to be able to. Can't think why they removed that.....

[Squirting Elephant]

Well so far this battery charging&switching is making me nuts. Only 2 batteries per charger and I need 2 batteries just for moving forth and back + another 2 or so just for idle power + more for everything else...

I mean you can just make a temp-base with 2 solar + charger wherever you park the Nautilus but it's just such a pain to do this all the time.

EDIT:
nevermind it seems I have the "Cyclops Thermal Reactor Module" unlocked all this time and there is a thermal thingy next to my base so... That should solve it if I park it on top of it I guess.

[Amanoob105]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

Well so far this battery charging&switching is making me nuts. Only 2 batteries per charger and I need 2 batteries just for moving forth and back + another 2 or so just for idle power + more for everything else...

I mean you can just make a temp-base with 2 solar + charger wherever you park the Nautilus but it's just such a pain to do this all the time.

EDIT:
nevermind it seems I have the "Cyclops Thermal Reactor Module" unlocked all this time and there is a thermal thingy next to my base so... That should solve it if I park it on top of it I guess.

You do know you can have more than one battery charger, charging at a time right? Or that you can make more batterys?

Personaly I have the six in the cyclops, at least six (if not closer to ten) stored on the cyclops and three chargers in the base with six more batterys to be swapped out next time I'm back home. Naturally right next to the door I park the cyclops infrount of.
This way I only have to take the dead ones out of storage, swap them out with the ones in the chargers and put the new ones into storage on the cyclops for when I'll need them.

I do all this because I'm very lazy and don't want to have to keep going back and forth between my base and cyclops.

[Squirting Elephant]

I know but finding that red aluminium oxide thingy is a real pain and I died early game (got stuck...) losing a lot of power cells that I had to recraft. I noticed that changing the object-graphical setting to "fade-out" increased the range for finding them which really helped. But they are still a pain to find to make plenty of chargers.

However so far the cyclops is not that useful. It consumes enormous amounts of power even when idle and stationary and also is very fragile to attacks like it is maded out of glass. Just making temp bases for the Seamoth to dock and craft some stuff seems to make more sense. Only requires a single solar thingy to power.
And I need 4 power cells just to go from my base to the island and back + extra power for idle time and possible crafting and etc. Pfff.. Too cumbersome really.

Also my idea for the thermal thingy is a no go because it requires a component I don't have yet. And the Prawn is another problem. Say you park above a 500m depth biome and you release the Prawn there to harvest some stuff... How do you get back onto the Cyclops? Yeah... It should have a steel cable or something to reel it back into the Cyclops.
The only reason so far to use the cyclops is to drop the Prawn of somewhat closer to where I gotta be. But it's not very effective.

[Windzor]

I think at some point they're adding the potential for wireless charging of the Cyclops via power transmitters, so as long as you park the Cyclops near a transmitter it should start accepting power. Not sure when that'll happen though.

Later on you can craft better power cells that have 5x the capacity of the normal cells, that lets your Cyclops run for ages between charges, just one of them gives the Seamoth like 50km range per cell or something, so 6 of them in the Cyclops is pretty nice, that's like end-game though.

Releasing the Prawn over an abyss is a pretty poor idea since yeah, the Prawn has trouble with vertical climbs if there's nothing to grapple on to. If there's no hope of being able to reach the Cyclops again with the Prawn, even with the grappling hook and the jetpack, then your best bet is to exit the Prawn and swim back up by yourself to the Cyclops, and then bring the Cyclops down to the Prawn.

The Cyclops kind of breaks the entire flow and atmosphere of the game, the developers seem insistent on iterating upon the idea until they get it working though. The problem is that the Cyclops is either too safe and powerful and destroys any tension or fear once you get it, or too cumbersome and weak and thus not worth using at all. If you don't feel like using the Cyclops I don't blame you, the Prawn can get pretty much everywhere by itself anyway, it's just slower.

[derpderp]

you could use 3 power cell chargers.. or just a moonpool and a seamoth/prawn and switch the cells in them with dead ones while they're docked.

Moon Charges much faster than a power cell charger.

I just ran 3x engine efficiency mods untill I got into the lava zone then swaped two of those with two thermal recharge modules.

you're pretty much at 100% power in the lava zone.

even when running regular power cells when I first built the cyclops I only swaped out about one set of power cells between the time I made the cyclops in the safe shallows till when I was parked beside the thermal power plant in the lavazone and made ion cells right in the cyclops only minutes after getting the blueprint.

[straykaiya]

Not sure if it has been suggested. But a pretty fast way (during the day), is to head to the surface. Take all teh batteries out except one. Then park the seamoth with the solar charger module next to the cyclops. Swap out teh batteries as they will charge pretty fast. Then go swap out the last powercell, charge it, and then dock up in the sub and go.

There are MANY places in teh game that have thermal vents. Always a good idea to make a simple "outpost" for stopping over and charging the powercells, once you can make the bio reactor and the thermal generators. Endless power.

[Squirting Elephant]

Yeah has been suggested. This indeed charges MUCH faster but it's still cumbersome.

I ended up using the Cyclops only as a cargo transport and to transport the PRAWN to a place really deep (one-way). After that I was like... Useless Cyclops... I build a base at 900m depth with a thermo thingy and I put max amount of efficiency modules into the cyclops. And a seamoth with 4 storage modules isn't too bad either for a transport.

Also is there no power switch for the cyclops? Everytime I park it somewhere I gotta remove all batteries otherwise it will be empty when I get back.

[Windzor]

As long as you turn the engine off, and make sure not to leave stuff like silent running and the shields active, it shouldn't lose power whilst you're away. I believe there was a bug that would cause it to lose power over time for no reason though, I thought that got fixed though.