So, new build - changes bad. Really bad.

[Nox]

Temperature damages machinery. Machinery takes infra blocks to repair. Repairs do not appear to be able to be prevented or prioritized.

There are so many ways to deadlock now. Running out of power even briefly is game over. There's no recovering because the cold will damage all of your machinery.

heaven forbid you run out of power for a moment, and then your generator becomes 'damaged' by the cold. Now it's cold, and your crew rushes to repair everything but your generator.

Not good changes. I'll see you in another build I guess.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Congrats, the game isn't for ages 7+ anymore. If you can't handle this, then you definitely prolly couldn't handle the original electrical system. Deal with it mostly, although I will admit this new system may require some balancing.

[thinkinTom]

It is quite a juggling act to try and find a balance, I suggest the following:

1) Always make sure there are a sufficient number of Heating/Cooling units spaced about the areas your working in.
2) Some machines generate a lot of heat when working, which can lead to problems, try and have a floor Heater/Cooler near these machines.

I tend to build my industry machines in one, or two large area's. I never build walls around each machine, that's too much work, just build enough walls to keep the the crew sleep and eat area's well away from your industry area, so they can be comfy, rather than cranky.

When not using the machinery, I turn them off, so they don't become a power problem, also the more industry machines you have producing the more power will be drained and
therefore more crystal, or rods get used up. Also no matter what my needs are that needs to get done, I never have more than 2-3 machines producing anything at one time.

hope this helps.

[Xanthiras]

I think it's somewhat unrealistic (and annoying on top of that) now. Given the not-quite-reliable nature of spaceship technologies and the fact that micrometeoroids, combat and accidents happen, I'd expect most equipment to be able to handle vacuum and reasonable cold - to the point that the basic list of requirements people would look for in a generator or hyperdrive would include stuff like "can handle explosive decompression of the room with no damage", and equipment that can't handle that would be considered junk (like on a seafaring ship everything critical should be secured and not be in danger from large waves). Also worth remembering that the ship without power will only cool down to the temperature an object with its properties would assume at this level of solar radiation. Which around Earth's orbit is not particularly cold, and even in outer reaches of a solar system it will take a while for the ship to cool simply via passive radiation.

So I don't mind some environmental damage to equipment, but "everything gets damaged by vacuum and cold" is just silly - decompression might damage stuff like kitchen and hydroponics, and if you spend 3 weeks without power in the outer part of the system you ship will get cold enough that some non-essential equipment will get damaged - and heat beyond 100 degrees or so should damage most of equipment much faster, though again, you'd expect power generators, hyperdrives, power nodes and such to be proofed against 200-300 degrees.

[Supajohnson]

So I decided to just deal with a solar flare a bit ago. My hanger/workshop/engine room is one big room which is dumb but whatever I've got priorities

anyway, the solar flare essentially caught one of my entire hyperdrives on fire and it was spreading fast. fast enough that I had to open the airlock and de-pressurize to stop it, further damaging everything in that room.

after everything was over it only took like 4 infrablocks to repair everything in that room. I think there's a difference between 'broken' and 'damaged'

damaged just needs tools to repair, but broken is when too much damage happens and needs a specific block to repair

♥♥♥♥ seems fine dude just play safe until you can make infrablocks

oh also there's backup power that will continue powering basic power needs, including thermal control. if you run out of power AND backup power just do better at management

[Nox]

Love the white knights and denigrators.

You can attack me all you like, meanwhile I'm changing my recommendation to "do not buy" until this gets unscrewed.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by Nox:

Love the white knights and denigrators.

You can attack me all you like, meanwhile I'm changing my recommendation to "do not buy" until this gets unscrewed.

And this is why we're on our third iteration of the electrical system, and prolly gonna get a fourth... This isn't specifically a dig at Nox, just that as the devs try to please a larger audience, it starts to water down their initial vision. Can't please everyone!

[Nox]

Originally posted by I blame Earthshaker:

Originally posted by Nox:

Love the white knights and denigrators.

You can attack me all you like, meanwhile I'm changing my recommendation to "do not buy" until this gets unscrewed.

And this is why we're on our third iteration of the electrical system, and prolly gonna get a fourth... This isn't specifically a dig at Nox, just that as the devs try to please a larger audience, it starts to water down their initial vision. Can't please everyone!

I have no beefs with the electrical system and at something like 177 hours in this game I am not a wider audience. Not a casual player, not a newb.

Making equipment get damaged in the player ship from cold means any time you have ANY failure that causes power loss, it's a cascading failure. Not only that, hilariously your generators can become damaged by the damage and your dudes won't prioritize that over fixing things that will end up being damaged by the cold again.

I'm not sure what was wrong with the earlier iterations of the power system. It worked great for me up to any amount of imaginable end-game you might envision. Hell IMO it was far superior because I could have storage and generation where I needed it and prioritize things by making one-way power conduits. The only thing I can imagine they are trying to accomplish with these other power systems is to make sure players have to use fuel for power, which becomes trivial once you are selling guns or any other manufacturable item.

[Caerold]

... can't all of your complains re:damage be turned off with a single toggle when starting a new game?

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by Nox:

Making equipment get damaged in the player ship from cold means any time you have ANY failure that causes power loss, it's a cascading failure. Not only that, hilariously your generators can become damaged by the damage and your dudes won't prioritize that over fixing things that will end up being damaged by the cold again.

I'm not sure what was wrong with the earlier iterations of the power system. It worked great for me up to any amount of imaginable end-game you might envision. Hell IMO it was far superior because I could have storage and generation where I needed it and prioritize things by making one-way power conduits. The only thing I can imagine they are trying to accomplish with these other power systems is to make sure players have to use fuel for power, which becomes trivial once you are selling guns or any other manufacturable item.

You seem to be forgetting that half the reason the original electrical system was scrapped was because of cascading failures (which is actually quite accurate/realistic). So then we got the second system with its nonsense basic vs advanced power (like seriously, should have called them AC and DC at a minimum), plus whatever other issues one felt existed with the second iteration (which, IMO, was that the electrical system got neutered because too many players complained about the first version because the second was super stupidly easy).

But expecting your pawns to fix stuff via AI in a game that literally allows you to pause and micromanage emergencies? INSANITY!!! I just think that it doesn't occur to the average player to actually lock down an entire ship, make a plan to fix the most important parts first, execute said plan, and move on. So much easier to throw a tantrum on Discord, or here. But like I said, it's possible the system still needs balancing. But if enough peeps complain, it's just also gonna get neutered instead of balanced.

Edit: Spelling. I really wish Steam would let you edit something within 5 minutes of posting without showing an edited note, long posts always have some spelling or grammar issue...

[aksel_bugbyte]

Originally posted by Nox:

Temperature damages machinery. Machinery takes infra blocks to repair. Repairs do not appear to be able to be prevented or prioritized.

There are so many ways to deadlock now. Running out of power even briefly is game over. There's no recovering because the cold will damage all of your machinery.

heaven forbid you run out of power for a moment, and then your generator becomes 'damaged' by the cold. Now it's cold, and your crew rushes to repair everything but your generator.

Not good changes. I'll see you in another build I guess.

Repairs can be assigned manually. Select a facility and untoggle the "repair" button, if the auto-maintenance system has assigned it to be repaired. The auto-maintenance can also be turned off, by selecting the ship and going to the "settings" in the lower left window.

Running out of power briefly should not cause such behaviour. There is a backup power mechanism in place, which keeps power on even if one runs out of power. At this point the priority should be shifted to seeking out more energium / energy rods, which the backup power system allows for.

The environment effects can be turned on/off with a button in the game customisation menu, the setting is "Facility Wear and Tear".

If you want to turn it off for a game in progress, it can also be turned off by editing the saved game, which you can find in the install folder:
Steam\steamapps\common\SpaceHaven\savegames\(YourSavedGameName)\save

Open up the "game" file in that folder, you can edit it with Notepad. Search for "wearAndTear", which you should find as: wearAndTear="true"

<modeSettings type="Normal" fullDismantle="true" wearAndTear="true" randomness="Balanced" crewEdit="Full" monsters="VeryCommon" solarFlares="Normal" microMeteoroids="Normal" sirenWorlds="Normal" nebula="Normal" solarHeat="Normal" interTravelThreat="MediumThreat" derelicts="Normal" derelictLoot="Normal" claimables="Rare">

Make it instead: wearAndTear="false" and save the file.

This won't instafix the devices that already were broken, but it should stop the wear and tear mechanism from affecting more in the future.

[LeftPaw]

Cold damaging your machinery. Sounds like a fairy fantasy land excuse to make the game challenging. Next we will have a crew members walks over a white line and all the crew get the space plague.
This sort of stuff really dilutes any interest in a game. It goes the wrong way turning a game that can be played for fun into one that needs to be worked for frustration.

[Fluff Bunny]

Originally posted by LeftPaw:

Cold damaging your machinery. Sounds like a fairy fantasy land excuse to make the game challenging.

Just about any equipment you buy will have operating guidelines about the maximum and minimum temperature they will function at. There is a temperature your car, phone, watch, camera, etc all start breaking.

Zero Kelvin will kill a lot of things that have not been designed to stand it...

Now you could say "but this is space surely they would have equipment that would work in the cold vacuum of space"... And that's probably true... But I bet if the ISS lost all power and went 0K a lot of things would stop working on it too.

[Xanthiras]

Originally posted by Fluff Bunny:

Originally posted by LeftPaw:

Cold damaging your machinery. Sounds like a fairy fantasy land excuse to make the game challenging.

Just about any equipment you buy will have operating guidelines about the maximum and minimum temperature they will function at. There is a temperature your car, phone, watch, camera, etc all start breaking.

Zero Kelvin will kill a lot of things that have not been designed to stand it...

Now you could say "but this is space surely they would have equipment that would work in the cold vacuum of space"... And that's probably true... But I bet if the ISS lost all power and went 0K a lot of things would stop working on it too.

I doubt ISS would have damage due to cold. The equilibrum temperature of an object in Earth's orbit is around -20 to zero degrees Celsius (can be more or less depending on albedo) which is rather modest, a pipeline in Siberia will face much more more serious environmental effects. Apollo 13 got to around freezing point during its loss of power, while it still had some heat generated, it was also designed to radiate more heat to compensate for normal higher heat generation.

And yes, all equipment has temperature range for which it's designed, but key equipment that is necessary for survival of humans will pretty much always be designed for the ranges it can expect to encounter, including the probable emergencies. So basically an oxygen generator, hyperdrive, power generator that would be damaged by simple decompression in the event of weapon or meteoroid impact would go against whole current engineering philosophy.
And we already have technologies for equipment that would operate in double-digit kelvins, like stuff designed for working with liquid nitrogen cooling systems. It's more expensive than basic equipment, but very doable

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by Xanthiras:

And yes, all equipment has temperature range for which it's designed, but key equipment that is necessary for survival of humans will pretty much always be designed for the ranges it can expect to encounter, including the probable emergencies. So basically an oxygen generator, hyperdrive, power generator that would be damaged by simple decompression in the event of weapon or meteoroid impact would go against whole current engineering philosophy.

Yeah, but the pawns on the ship aren't current engineers, they are randos thrown together. No guarantees of engineering knowledge! The game honestly should prolly have "jury-rigged" versions vs. "designed version" (that you get via research tree), but that would require multiple versions of graphics (which are a much bigger pain that just some extra code).

[Xanthiras]

It's not like each ship invents X3 generator independently. They likely need to piece together the separate manuals and so on to figure out how to build more complicated equipment, but it's likely that by this point the general safety recommendations, like what materials to use for which parts, which elements will likely need extra redundancy or protection, etc. will already be available in the materials they review when preparing to build stuff themselves.

Edit: also the research skill likely to a significant degree represents one's ability with engineering and jury-rigging, rather than actual theoretical research. So a balanced crew will have some people decent at this.