Circuit breakers

[Your Daddy]

we have all kinds of tech in here, but for some reason when it comes to power managment we are in the dark ages..... nothing like being out exploring for new mats and then you hear the dreaded sound of everything powering down... lol

[Kraft51]

engineer your own, thats what we've been doing for the past year or so. theres actually quite a few decent designs out there if you look for them.

[Nazemec]

Originally posted by 123:

nothing like being out exploring for new mats and then you hear the dreaded sound of everything powering down... lol

Sounds like you're either still early game and rely on biomass burners, or you decide to have a small power plant and barely enough energy for some reason.

[Kraft51]

Originally posted by Nazemec:

Originally posted by 123:

nothing like being out exploring for new mats and then you hear the dreaded sound of everything powering down... lol

Sounds like you're either still early game and rely on biomass burners, or you decide to have a small power plant and barely enough energy for some reason.

i've been playing since the second round of Closed Alpha Keys were handed out. this is how we all do it, separate your grids as desired and create a breaker to cut power from the main supply if necessary. its fairly simple to do.

[Lesser Evil]

I wonder why Coffee Stain are so vehemently against batteries. To avoid parallels with Factorio ?

[T-Bone Biggins]

Once I got my first fully automated coal powerplant running I never ran into this issue of overdrawing. If I see I'm peaking above 80% of my power capacity I look for another spot and start designing a new power plant in my head. I also include contingency backups in case I have any issues, when I was new to the game I didn't know if machinery would wear out or not. Even though it doesn't it can give you time to work out any human error such as miscalculating how much water or fuel you need for a certain setup.

I connected the power lines so certain sections of the factory can be cut off by removing a single cable in case I am over-drawing.

I have fluid buffers above my coal generators using gravity so I can continue to feed the generators even if the pumps have been off for a few minutes.

I have a few bio-burners on standby in case I have to prime my water pumps from a dead stall.

I have a personal chest full of coal near the generators in case I gotta manually feed them.

I now have 3 separate coal power plants all hooked into the same grid which act as redundant backups to each other.

The irony of this is I had to rely on my backups twice now. Each time was due to me improving or retrofitting parts of my power setup. The worst one I had to rely on my fluid buffer feeding my plant using gravity when I was re-doing pipes but ran out of copper sheets part-way in. By the time I finally got back from my copper production area the buffer ran out (so now I have 3 buffers on same power plant). I disconnected the rest of the factory, kicked on bio-burners, re-primed the water extractors and in a minute the pipes filled up and got it rolling again. All of this was because I made a noob mistake and didn't have the right amount of Mk1 pipes to feed my power plant at 100% capacity. It worked at first only because the generators were not running full-tilt.

[Xilo The Odd]

i'd be happy if biomass burners could be fed via conveyor. i think that would solve the issue or most people. chop down a tree, setup some constructures to break down the mats into biomass, package that into biofuel logs, feed directly into burners as needed. until you get coal, the desire to explore is down if you want your factory running 100% uptime to get you to coal power. which can get boring.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by Xilo The Odd:

i'd be happy if biomass burners could be fed via conveyor. i think that would solve the issue or most people. chop down a tree, setup some constructures to break down the mats into biomass, package that into biofuel logs, feed directly into burners as needed. until you get coal, the desire to explore is down if you want your factory running 100% uptime to get you to coal power. which can get boring.

Build more biomass burners than you need, they all burn at a slower rate. It shouldn't take long to tier 3 to coal if you focus specifically on going for just that. And the Mk2 belts so can you run 8 coal generators off a single 120/min coal feed.

[gussmed]

It’s deliberate that you can’t automate biomass burners. It makes coal power a significant change, and not just a numeric one.

It’s somewhat hard to know exactly how much power your factory will draw at peak. At any given time much of it’s going to be idle - at least, that’s my experience. Unless you’re Sinking absolutely all of your overflow, that is.

I do try and keep an eye on it, and when the current draw gets to about 75% of capacity I build more power plants.

[ThatTimGuy]

The solution so far has been to overproduce power. The circuit breaker won't trip until power demand exceeds capacity. Fortunately, power building dynamically reduce production to match demand: For example, if total demand averages 40% of capacity, power plant fuel will be consumed at an average of 40% of the listed rate. With this being the case, there is no penalty for building an excess of power producing buildings. While this is fine for fully automated machines, players generally aren't going to want to manually feed dozens of biomass burners. It takes less player work to refill 50 solid biofuel in 10 burners than to refill 10 solid biofuel in 50 burners. As a result, there exists a motivation to limit construction of biomass burners.

It would be nice to be able to implement some form of selective tripping of circuit breakers. If power consumption spikes above capacity, possibly because my burners just emptied or I carelessly put a new production facility online, I would prefer to have my assemblers trip off to keep buildings necessary to power production running, like coal mines and water extractors servicing coal plants. However, if you design and build your power plants to maintain a healthy margin between capacity and consumption, this will always be a moot point.

[Levnekaethian]

I've just gotten into the habit of making a metric **** ton of coal power when I achieve it. Coal is so easy to get as it is anyway and its perfect to hold you over for a very long time.

[Celsus]

The wall connectors make it really easy to create neat looking master control rooms. Centralized power distribution is the ♥♥♥♥.

[Kraft51]

@Nazemec ... sorry, no idea why i thought you'd quoted me. you most likely already have but disregard my reply lol.

[Nazemec]

Originally posted by Kraft51:

@Nazemec ... sorry, no idea why i thought you'd quoted me. you most likely already have but disregard my reply lol.

Yeah, your last reply kinda confused me, but heh, no worries. :P

[Kaeru Gaman]

I would like to see some better circuit control by dedicated building.

a circuit breaker is one thing - another would be some, how would I call it, flow control.

Imagine you have a refinery factory set up at an oil well. part of this factory are a bunch of coal generators burning petroleum coke. you may want to make these burners burn a constant flow of PetCoke to get rid of your residue constantly.
sure, you could insert an smart splitter and direct the overflow of Petcoke into a sink...
but I think it somehow would be nice to connect this refinery to the main circuit but let it only drain power when the demand exceeds the production of the burners...

just to throw the idea in for discussion.

[Your Daddy]

i have the early access edition ...... i have a grouping of 3 bio mass burners set up to prime my 4 water pumps to fill the expansive water buffers that feed my 14 coal plants I've just got the gasoline generator, so that helps a lot as i unlock more parts i find my self moving things around a lot and redesigning for better work flow .... how to you create breakers? one good idea for another add-on for electricity is maybe different lights, like x-mas lights or a x-mas tree, spot lights etc. Wireless energy transmission could be some watt easily made for higher tier upgrades (Tesla style) like instead of hooking up wires, you could put this attachment on the building and it could draw energy from a Tesla coil or emitter,.... just thinking of different cool ideas for the game