Getting Started with Power

[Moister Oyster]

Just picked up this game recently and am loving it. What I am having trouble figuring out is the power and how to get everything working together. I know there are generators, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries and I wanted to know if it's as easy as running the solar panels into batteries and then running that into whatever I want it to power. I am unsure if wind turbines work the same as far as storing and distributing power. The generators appear easy enough, just throw resin on and they burn that to power whatever they are plugged into. I am not at the point of finding Lithium yet for batteries, but I hope to be in the near future. I have tried finding solid information about this online, but haven't come across anything yet.

[4evernomad]

The power system is a flow, the default state is both ways, so anything attached to your base is powered, if you place a generator on one platform and connect it to multiple other platforms, they will all share that power source, the current load is visible from the power slots on platforms, full yellow is max power, red pulsing is most limited.

Power also can be controlled with extenders, they cause power to flow in one direction only, allowing you to create efficient pathways around your base, the direction is shown with chevrons on the cables, if a bidirectional cable it's a solid bar, the width of which also shows the flow level.

[Moister Oyster]

That's some good information to know. Still pretty new to the game, but I plan on playing it a lot more.

[thoth]

https://astroneer.gamepedia.com/Extenders although most of the other discussion about power on the wiki are inaccurate/obsolete (refers to the internal batteries that existed before the base-building update, complete with outdated screenshots) and I can't be bothered to create a twitch account to edit it.

As for lithium, a medium battery shouldn't be used to store power in a base. A medium or large rover is much cheaper energy storage. The best use for a medium battery is to mount it on the bumper of a large rover to extend its range. Small batteries are useful for charging rovers when away from base (as detailed in the youtube video I posted a few days ago)

[Moister Oyster]

So if I am understanding you correctly, building rovers and working those into my base's power is a more efficient way of powering my base? I will say compound is way easier to find than lithium (considering I haven't found any yet), so I can kind of see where you are coming from.

[4evernomad]

Thoth was correct, but battery rovers are not intentional and they are making changes to remove that function, the next update will make all vehicles use directional power when attached to the base so they don't discharge, this essentially removes the ability for them to be cheap batteries.

It is so easy to produce power, it's expected that you will require a rare resource like lithium if you want to store power, so I would stick with that thought process.

[thoth]

The recent updated did NOT prevent rovers from supplying power. I just tested it attaching a fuel condenser to my rover (and nothing else) after the rover finished bouncing around following the dismount, and the rover powered it.

But the power readouts on the rovers are much smaller now. I don't know if they kept the capacity the same and mapped it to fewer bars, or if they reduced the energy capacity of the rovers (although they probably changed the energy consumption at the same time because I have not noticed a change in their range, but I lack hard numbers to back up this feeling).

Maybe if I get bored later I'll run some experiments to compare the energy storage of batteries -vs- rovers and compare it to the behavior illustrated in some of my older recordings.

[Moister Oyster]

Thanks for the heads up on that. I have been playing the game some more and have 4 batteries going which is helping my power situation a ton. Not sure if it was just me, but geting to the point of having consistent, reliable power was a long road.

[4evernomad]

Originally posted by thoth:

The recent updated did NOT prevent rovers from supplying power. I just tested it attaching a fuel condenser to my rover (and nothing else) after the rover finished bouncing around following the dismount, and the rover powered it.

But the power readouts on the rovers are much smaller now. I don't know if they kept the capacity the same and mapped it to fewer bars, or if they reduced the energy capacity of the rovers (although they probably changed the energy consumption at the same time because I have not noticed a change in their range, but I lack hard numbers to back up this feeling).

Maybe if I get bored later I'll run some experiments to compare the energy storage of batteries -vs- rovers and compare it to the behavior illustrated in some of my older recordings.

Yes, I realised this myself as well, I got the info from a dev stream where they were discussing the exploit and they were saying it will be removed in this update with the directional cables on rovers, but it looks as though they changed their mind, for now.

They were also talking about the new power usage on the rovers, it was said that although the readout is much smaller the amount of power is the same as before, I'm not entirely sure about this as they do appear to run out very quickly, but it could just be me.

It will be interesting now we have the splitter to see what the values are for all power options, but there's definitely some bugs with that. I watched a stream a few days ago where they were checking the output with splitters and the maths didn't work at all, it was a solar array producing 16 on its own and a battery array producing 40 on its own, but the total output was 104.