My power is low, and... (feedback on light requirement in rooms)

[orost]

My power is low and flickering on and off. My engineer could easily fix this by tuning up the generators in the power station, and before the last update, that's what he would have done. But as of 351082, every time the power flickers out, the light goes out, the power station stops being a power station, and his task to tune the generators is interrupted.

It's good that when lights are required, they are also required to actually work, but it's a bit too much that the instant they go out for any amount of time the room stops functioning completely. I can work around it, and I will, but it is annoying and unnecessary. My preferred solution to this would be to make a working light not a hard requirement for the room to exist, but rather to put a hefty speed penalty on room-related tasks done in the dark.

edit: also, does anyone else have trouble in rooms in general right now? I set up priority power so the power station is always lit, but the microchip station is complaining about not being in a power station, while the room overlay shows everything is correct. 

edit 2: save and reload fixed that.

[Oozinator]

You can easy build a manual wheel + battery - give it higher prio and only power some lights with it.
 

[ray-jr]

Yes, you can "easily" do a lot of things that are tedious and not fun, but that doesn't negate feedback saying "I think this is tedious and not fun".

I tend to agree here, I think the active light requirement for rooms is creating more problems than it solves, and there are better ways to encourage the use of lights than to tie room definition to the presence of active lights. Based on various bug reports already, I strongly suspect a lot of room-related problems in the preview branch are because now the game has to re-calculate "room-ness" every time a light source turns on, turns off, or moves, and it's going to continue to be a source of legitimate bugs or just player confusion above and beyond any value it is adding to the game.

[abud]

11 hours ago, orost said:

But as of 351082, every time the power flickers out, the light goes out, the power station stops being a power station

This is new info for me. Somehow my rooms keep their function even though I disabled the lamp manually, but won't function if not enough power. Interesting...

[abud]

I double-check my power generation. Yes, It mess because of this update

Usually, I disable both power station, but I enable it to see how buggy lamp update works.

In the bottom (coal generator), every time dupe entering room (detected by a motion sensor), it invalidates errand on power station. Become blank, empty and not filled again no matter what I do until I save-reload the game. It's invalidating power room.

After next reloading, I disable lamp on top of hydrogen generator to see what happen. It turns out, power room works okay with disabled lamp and buggy with them enabled by motion sensor. I didn't test what happen if that lamp always on though.

 

[IS_Kyro_]

Well good. Agree that when generator shutdowns tuning process must not be interrupted.

According your lights & rooms problem:

1. build a separate 1 kW Electrical system with two batteries and a wheel. It will be charged once per 5-6 cycles(depending on how much lights do you have) and forget about this problem.

2. Build a 1 kW transformer from main E-line to 1 kw Lights line put 1/2 smart batteries on this line and automation(when bateery is fully charged transformer stops / when battery is 30 transformer starts) & forget about this problem=)

Si

[Gwido]

Interesting info about this light requirement. I always wonder how duplicants can even work in a base without any light.

 

On 11/07/2019 at 7:31 AM, orost said:

My preferred solution to this would be to make a working light not a hard requirement for the room to exist, but rather to put a hefty speed penalty on room-related tasks done in the dark.

This would be a good thing. And it will improve the use of light bugs and lure.