Power randomly stopping

[SoaringMule967]

For some reason I have encountered this in mutliple play throughs and it has ruined three of them. I built a geothermal genorator and it completely supplied my base for weeks then one day it just stops. I have no idea what cause it, I have checked the power lines and everything seems to be in order. What in the hell do I do? I can't spell so I do apologize.

[Narrowmind]

Why do you fault the geothermal as stopping? How do you know that? Are you using a lot of sun lamps?

[Hedgie]

Was it a solar flare, do you have mods, can we get a screen shot?

[Raymond]

are you sure you have enough juice in your grid to keep the base going? Check the power in the grid again. If you have less power than the power needed to run the machines not receiving power at the moment, then you don't have enough power.

[olympe]

What the others said.
Not to mention that sometimes, power plants shut down and need to be repaired with new components.

[SoaringMule967]

Its none of that. I don"t use sun lamps but rather massively overgrow the amount of food I need then deep freeze it. it will go from 3 full batteries with one geothermal plant then randomly my batteries will be empty and all my appliances out of power. I"ve checked all the cords, I checked the geothermal plant for any problems and didn't see any. It genuenly seems like my power just flat stopped working. I've encountered this bug multiple times, it could be I did something wrong but it is genuenly an over night change. It'll be working for weeks then just stop for no reason without me adding to the power consumption.

[Razor 2.3]

Temperature regulation has a variable power cost. If it's colder than normal or hotter than normal, then the heaters or air conditioners will draw more power than normal without your intervention.

[MrT]

So your saying it's not a solar event.

[TwoTonGamer]

Everyone is going to want to see screenshots to study your power grid.

Take a zoomed out screenshot while you are in the power tab, so that the grid is highlighted.
Take another screenshot while you have an electric item selected so that we can see the power supply and usage.

Upload screenshots to your Steam profile and then you can link it to the forum.

First guesses, you are using more power than is supplied by all the generators, or the grid was damaged at some point and is no longer complete, or solar flare event.

It isn't the solar flare event, is it?

[Razor 2.3]

Probably not solar flare if the batteries are dead.
Actually, you might want to try Colony Manager. There's a mid-game research that'll let you keep track of power generation and usage.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=715565262

[SoaringMule967]

No idea how to post a screenshot here though. No its not an event. I have a few hundred hours in this game between online and offline play and this seems to happen to me regularly.

[CactusCraze]

My only guess is your using more power then you producing. This has happened to me before. Also make SURE your powerlines are connected because that has got me multiple times.

[Raymond]

Originally posted by ZzcactuszZ:

My only guess is your using more power then you producing. This has happened to me before. Also make SURE your powerlines are connected because that has got me multiple times.

F12 in game. then go to library, rimworld, go to screenshot section, choose "manage my [num screenshot] screenshot", choose the screenshot you want to upload and choose upload to steam. Then choose view online for the screenshot you just uploaded, choose share and copy paste the share link.

[Jigain]

One geothermal generator won't get you very far in the long run.

Just for reference, it could power no more than 18 coolers before running out of juice. That's not me saying "as long as you have less than 18 coolers you're fine", that's me saying "if you are using more power than the equivalent of having 18 coolers, you don't have enough power". And a lot of things use power. You probably have a stove at least (1.75 coolers right there). If you have the standard assortment of a tailor bench (0.6 coolers), smithy (1.05), machining table (1.75), smelter (3.5), and crematorium (1.25), you're down a fair bit more (now you'd have enough power for 8.1 coolers). Then it kind of depends on what else you have. Autodoors are the equivalent of 0.25 coolers each. Mini-turrets are 0.4. Heaters are 0.875. A regular tube television is a flat 1. I don't remember how much standing lamps use these days, I'm pretty sure it was recently drastically lowered, but just for example, with the power usage they used to use, they'd be the equivalent of 0.375 coolers each.

So yeah. Using the above example as a rough guide, you should be able to estimate whether or not you're potentially consuming more power than you're generating. Or hey, if you don't want to do any of the thinking, slap down a wood-fired generator or two and see if that gets things going - if it does, you weren't generating enough power, and if it doesn't, you have some other issue.

[SoaringMule967]

Thank all of you. I am a history major in college so figuring out the math was well beyond me. I just assumed that a geothermal plant would be all the power i needed for the first few years of the game. I tend to rush it as my first tech because of that assumption.

[Jigain]

That's fair. Unless you're building a really large base, I find 2-3 geothermal generators to be sufficient. If using sun lamps, add about one for each sun lamp in use.

Personally, though, I tend to favor the chemfueled generator. Lasts a long time without needing refueling, can place them anywhere, easy access to chemfuel once you have unlocked the refinery and you're growing a surplus of foodstuffs. A sun lamp covered field of growing foodstuffs like corn will provide enough chemfuel to cover the cost for running the chemfuel generators powering the sun lamp, plus a healthy surplus to make into food.

Each generator has their advantage and disadvantage - the geothermal one being that you can't place them just anywhere.