Lightning Rod vs Solar Panel

[Cal Thang]

Which one is more efficient?

[BahamaLlama]

Solar Panel is better than a lightning rods due to the lightning rod needing rainy days, something you "can" force, but, it's expensive, and not all rainy days are lightning storms.
I usually use Lightning Rods for the main farm and add a few Solar Panels eventually, but, I mainly put Solar Panels on the Island Farm, as it can get batteries throughout Winter as well.

[Maya-Neko]

Solar Panels are usually the better solution, as they're producing batteries at a constant rate. Though Lightning Rods are important as well, as they prevent crops from getting destroyed and they're usually accessible way earlier than Solar Panels. A combination works very good in most cases.

However if you've access to rain totems you can also use these on a day with a thunderstorm and the next day will then also be a thunderstorm, which is the fastest way to produce batteries (festivals, marriages and the 1st of each month can't be rainy though, so it's use is quite limited and somewhat luck dependand), unless you go ham on solar panels with like 100 of them for whatever reason.

[red255]

you mean for generating batteries? solar panels, you build them and wait a few days you got batteries.

lightning rods ALSO produce batteries but their goal is protecting your fields from lightning, the batteries are just a byproduct.

that said solar panels are rather expensive, but you can place them off your farm, I placed them up on the bus route before the tunnel, whereas lightning rods need to be on your farm to function

[Maya-Neko]

Publicado originalmente por red255:

lightning rods ALSO produce batteries but their goal is protecting your fields from lightning, the batteries are just a byproduct.

I would rather say, that it's the other way around. Especially given that it is heavily RNG-based to even get the solar panel quest you might need to stick with lightning rods for a while.

Overall, the chances of a crop getting hit by lightning isn't really that high to begin with, if you lay down pathes or build fences, so if lightning rods wouldn't produce any batteries, then i would rather just recommend to not build any rods to begin with and rather use the iron bar for some guaranteed income than wasting it on a low chance of secured income

[sam19x]

solar panel, you're going to end up getting more batteries from that then lighting rods since lighting doesn't happen regularly

[NBOX21]

On the other hand, if you've got many lightning rods installed on your farm like I did, there's a good chance you'll get a good amount of batteries from them with each day of lightning storms. I've had times where I managed to get around 20 or so batteries from just a single day of stormy weather, once I've got many lightning rods setup.

In addition, if you're able to craft plenty of Rain Totems[stardewvalleywiki.com] and/or manage to find some from chests, you can use it during a stormy day to make the next day stormy as well, with festivals and the first day of each season being the only exceptions to this. You're also guaranteed stormy weather on the 13th and 26th days of Summer every year.

I'd say there's pros and cons to both solar panels and lightning rods - one is more consistent but is much slower and isn't accessible until later on, while the other can be much faster and is easily accessible early on but isn't as reliable.

[Cal Thang]

Thank you guys, i think i will choose "solar panels" route for the long term.

[Stardustfire]

not sure what mods you use Maya, or how fast you slump into bed. but on a long workday there can be over 25 Lightnings, needs a Highway of Pathing Build for even a chance to not get Plants burned to a crisp without any Rods...

[Maya-Neko]

Publicado originalmente por Stardustfire:

not sure what mods you use Maya, or how fast you slump into bed. but on a long workday there can be over 25 Lightnings, needs a Highway of Pathing Build for even a chance to not get Plants burned to a crisp without any Rods...

Well, first of all, even with lightning rods, the chances of intercepting a lightning lowers with every charging rod, so even with dozens of lightning rods you'll eventuall get something destroyed, so it's not even guaranteed in the first place except for the first one

But even if one gets through, it's still only a 25% chance of it actually hitting an object on your farm. And lets say you've a field of 400 crops and something like 200 fences and floor tiles, then we're talking about 2-3 destroyed crops per thunderstorm at best. So that's like 10-20 crops per year we're talking about here to protect at the cost of delaying stuff like Keg production or sprinkler production. That's just a horrible deal, which is only viable due to getting batteries out of it, which actually indirectly boost the income a lot for lightning rods.

And i played most of my time without mods and currently with mods, which doesn't interfere with weather or lightning rod behavior.

[PichuYang]

Despite Lighting Rod is very helpful for first Summer or Fall, and fairly cheap to craft, the use of Iron Bar for other project is still important. Even placing 5 on said period is more helpful than killing Iridium Bat in deep Skull Cavern. (for the boat ticket booth repair)

Someone on reddit did a math and conclude that, you get diminishing return when you use over 35 Rods. The main purpose of Lighting Rod is utilizing the knowledge of the first Stormy Day to get few/some Crystalarium asap, or 5 Battery Packs. You do not have to use 20 or 25+ Rods to protect the farm, due to diminishing value and damage is negligible. (You don't get super lighting strike that burns whole field, just a tile.)

[FilthyGorilla]

Publicado originalmente por BahamaLlama:

Solar Panel is better than a lightning rods due to the lightning rod needing rainy days, something you "can" force, but, it's expensive, and not all rainy days are lightning storms.
I usually use Lightning Rods for the main farm and add a few Solar Panels eventually, but, I mainly put Solar Panels on the Island Farm, as it can get batteries throughout Winter as well.

Solar panels work in winter and actually are better in winter on the mainland because they don't progress in their processing a battery if it's raining. The island also rains slightly more on average than the mainland so it's much better to keep them somewhere on the mainland.