I spent the better part of the day trying to do something basic with electricity: Keep the lights on at night. So I place down a few solar panels and hook them up to a battery. Immediately run into a problem: Where do I hook up the panel? Turns out it's hidden away in the back right corner of the thing. Okay. That solves that. Battery has a visible input/output side to hook up to. No issue there. Then comes the time to hook up all my panels to the battery. Turns out the battery only accepts one input at a time. This seems fair enough. I make myself a Root Combiner and combine my solar panels into one line for the battery. Then I notice that the power output for the panels and the storage capacity for the battery are in entirely different units for some reason.
Why? Why are the panels using some arbitrary power rating while batteries use a unit of time? What does it even mean? Do they literally only run a certain amount of time no matter what the output? Does it vary? If so, why not keep the units consistent? Even using real world units would be less confusing than this. But never mind. I keep the system running for a bit, and I notice the battery isn't charging very quickly. "Must not have enough power", I thought. So I try hooking up two Root Combiners to a third root combiner. Surely it would combine both inputs into a larger output to speed things up, right? Nope. The Rooter didn't recognize the other two. So I'm stuck with a maximum two panels per battery. At that point I figured I'd just have to make two batteries. No big loss there. So I remove the third rooter and connect the original. Then I notice the battery only accepts 10 power at a time. This whole time, I've been hooking the system up entirely backwards; a single solar panel can feed up to three batteries.
One Splitter later, I start hooking up my batteries to a rooter to start passing the power on to my sole light downstairs. At which point I noticed yet more problems with the system: The rooter consumes power from any number of batteries equally and actively drains them even when it's left alone. To make matters worse, it turns out the outputs don't actually tell you how much power is being output/consumed. The splitter receives up to 30 power from a single panel on the input side, yet when hooked up to three different batteries, each output reads at a full 30 each. I've also tried an electrical branch to feed the batteries and the light simultaneously off the panel itself, but it seems the branch is broken, or the readings are, as no matter what I set it to, I always get a reading of 9 on the branch. None of the logic gates are of any use because they use power too. Even a simple switch drains my batteries when flipped on. I can't make a daylight sensor since timers drain my batteries, rooters don't connect to any blockers I might use to stop batteries from losing energy.
Simply put: How am I supposed to do anything when the batteries are useless and the circuitry so obtuse?
after a few days of trying out this micky mouse system i went back to lanterns and tuna lights, they work much better and as there is no indication of how you are supposed to connect power two floors below your batteries i will continue to use the old light source.
Also imagine the fun when a bp wipe comes up , another big bunch of blue prints to get = massive grind.
Its dumb! they should do away with all these stupid components and making us learn the BPS, and just leave the Solar panel jumper cables a rechargeable battery and an electric light to use int he base thats it!
All we wanted was a way to have lights in our base without wasting fuel! Modded servers just use Trim Fuel plugin for this. Who at Facepunch thought instead of optimizing the game and adding more useful items we wanted pressure plates to open our doors?
Fire that guy!
I agree that it needs a lot of work and a lot of what has been mentioned is a problem.
But we have figured out on our server how to make a daylight sensor light.
Solar panel battery splitter pass through blocker
solar panel gets hooked up to the splitter splitter gets hooked up to the battery and the pass-through connection on the blocker
Then hook the other end of the battery to the inn on the blocker and then the out from the blocker goes to the lights in series.
I believe that's the setup we use, I know the components are correct but since I'm not looking at it right now I'm only about 90% sure that I have the order correct.
That's almost the system needed to stop battery drain save for the OR switch before powering the lights. It eats up large portions of the power input, and in a reasonable world, would be entirely unnecessary; but it is technically possible to stop the drain.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/164121/22d4d450-e2a4-4321-9e46-e87c613cfefc/20181210231617_1.jpg
Blah, don't worry. You can always use the perpetuum mobile machine. ^
It does eventually drain. Just had my base go dark. This update just keeps getting worse and worse.
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