Jump to content

Minimizing Heavy-Watt Wire impact


Recommended Posts

The standard and well known solution is to put it in a walled off channel as a main bus.  Some people put it vertical through the center of the base.  I made two channels, one on the right and one on the left of the base then connected them, and even made the channel extra-wide to allow space for gas and liquid transport and connected them by a horizontal segment at the bottom of the base (a mistake am living with, I might want to go down more often than up over the life of the base).

But there are two main problems that I have been considering for days and can't figure out how to solve:

1) During the life of the base a time comes when much of your dupe traffic will have to cross one of those walled-off channels, exposing the dupes to the heavy-watt wire.  How do you minimize impact at those crossings?

2) Sooner or later your base will need to expand to the other side of the channel, and then the traffic across the heavy-watt channel will increase A LOT.  How do you handle it?

3) What is the best map-wide layout for a grid of heavy-watt wire, from which you can branch-off the lower power lines?

4) I could not find anywhere any information about how long will the reduction on morale from exposure to heavy-watt wire will last.  For example, if it only affects morale while in sight, crossing a channel would be trivial.  If it lasts for a few in-game minutes it would not be a big deal.  But if exposure causes a morale drop for a whole cycle... then it is a huge deal and requires completely different and very contrived designs.

5) I often see one or two of my dupes drop in morale from about 20 to about 10 each cycle.  How do I find out exactly *what* caused the morale drop?  I think it is related to the Heavy-Watt Wire exposure, but maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and there is a completely different cause for my dupe's morale drops.

Thanks,

zOldBulldog woofing out :)

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 minutes ago, zOldBulldog said:

4) I could not find anywhere any information about how long will the reduction on morale from exposure to heavy-watt wire will last.  For example, if it only affects morale while in sight, crossing a channel would be trivial.  If it lasts for a few in-game minutes it would not be a big deal.  But if exposure causes a morale drop for a whole cycle... then it is a huge deal and requires completely different and very contrived designs.

5) I often see one or two of my dupes drop in morale from about 20 to about 10 each cycle.  How do I find out exactly *what* caused the morale drop?  I think it is related to the Heavy-Watt Wire exposure, but maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and there is a completely different cause for my dupe's morale drops.

Click on dupe and hold mouse over Morale and you will get tooltip showing where his morale comes from.

morale.thumb.png.0e9a792b68e3697a4e83a7ec0e715462.png


There is no direct morale penalty from wire exposure.
It is giving low decor in area around wire so if duplicant sometimes jumps over gap in wall corridor with wire and mostly is in nice decor there is no big impact.

If dupe drop big in morale for one cycle, probably he missed dinner and so didn't get morale bonus from Great Hall and Meal.

Maybe check battery switching method to replace long heavi-watt wires.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A Dupe looking at a heavi watt wire for a few moments is really a non-event. It's over very quickly. Further, the way Decor works, Dupes don't instantly assess decor. Rather, they keep a running "decor" figure, which increases or decreases with time to match the Dupe's current tile. The net effect is that decor only really matters where a Dupe stops, or if a Dupe is running along a large area with high or low decor.

If you really want to minimize the impact of vertical wires, the easiest way is to wall them off with mechanized airlock doors. Because those are completely opaque, they confine the low-decor area to just the wire tiles.

5d6eca106946c_Wiredecor.thumb.jpg.1b96fe5ac820ace12ee7349534f2fb0f.jpg

You can also build heavi-watt conductive wire instead of heavi-watt wire. It's functionally the same, and made from refined metal instead of ore, but has a much smaller radius of effect. This means a column of wire has lower impact, because fewer wire tiles impact the Dupe.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Up until the game I'm playing now, I ran 4-tile wide vertical and and 3-tile tall horizontal utility shafts that are mostly granite with air tiles periodically.  At points where I know traffic is going to have to cross them, I do a joint plate with airlock hatches and just run the wire naked across.  Since I've hidden away the bulk of the wiring, the momentary decor hit is minimal... and when I finally get to the point where I have breathing room, I'll spam some statues to alleviate that.  99% of my transformers get tucked away in here, hence the height/width requirement.

Now?  They're 5-wide vertical and 4-tile horizontals to accommodate the tube network.  Some facilities have their own wire-hiding built into it, but that's mostly because I have the metal to spare most of the time and I'm trying to spare my engineers who spend a good amount of time in generator arrays tuning.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, zOldBulldog said:

1) During the life of the base a time comes when much of your dupe traffic will have to cross one of those walled-off channels, exposing the dupes to the heavy-watt wire.  How do you minimize impact at those crossings?

2) Sooner or later your base will need to expand to the other side of the channel, and then the traffic across the heavy-watt channel will increase A LOT.  How do you handle it?

3) What is the best map-wide layout for a grid of heavy-watt wire, from which you can branch-off the lower power lines?

4) I could not find anywhere any information about how long will the reduction on morale from exposure to heavy-watt wire will last.  For example, if it only affects morale while in sight, crossing a channel would be trivial.  If it lasts for a few in-game minutes it would not be a big deal.  But if exposure causes a morale drop for a whole cycle... then it is a huge deal and requires completely different and very contrived designs.

5) I often see one or two of my dupes drop in morale from about 20 to about 10 each cycle.  How do I find out exactly *what* caused the morale drop?  I think it is related to the Heavy-Watt Wire exposure, but maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and there is a completely different cause for my dupe's morale drops.

wait what? Why would you run heavy watt wire through your base at all? That is what transformers are for... You build a central power battery and use transformers to distribute power through your base using normal or conductive wires running through tiles.

1) during the life of the base, you should be aiming to minimize dupes traffic, you should be trying to put dupes into locked areas where they work according their specialization... Locking ranchers with critters, locking cooks in the kitchen, locking farmers inside farm. The problem comes with miners/builders, but they will always travel in low decor areas, so you need to give them morale from other sources.
2) Why? just build central battery next to the worlds edge.
3) Line of batteries that goes into 5 yellow transformers which go into 4 red transformers each.
4) Well, morale from decor changes quite slowly, so, little jumps through low decor areas can be neglected as long as you have high decor on both sides.
5) Rather than trying to find what caused morale drop, look for what causes them to have morale that high... Most of the time, it is actually eating different quality food. Make sure to limit their diet to the food that gives desired levels of morale.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks to all for the helpful comments. 

I think I found the main cause of the morale drop, although I can't say I understand it: 

- Some of my dupes are skipping going to the bathrooms, great hall or the nature preserve that I designed to be a required pass-through between the great hall and the bathroom.

- These same dupes used to be very religious about going to all those places early on, but now they are skipping them???  Don't they HAVE to eat and go bathroom every cycle?  The path is not blocked, why are they not doing it?

- I have 5 toilets and 5 sinks (besides showers) for 9 dupes.  Early on they would usually split up and go half to the bathroom while the other half would go to the great hall, switch places, then go to bed.

Why would they not be eating and going to the bathroom now?  Do the longer distances make them too tired so they just go to bed?  Sounds crazy.

Also, I currently have them all on the same shift, would splitting them up in 2 or 3 shifts be better?  And I'm using the default rest periods, I have not touched those.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You might want to keep an eye on how things are going, follow a few dupes at the end of the cycle and check their timing.  If you don't have enough toilets, etc some dupes might be in a position where they get done doing their business just in time for the sleep timer to kick off.

 Oh, one thing you want to check for:  look in their buff panel and look for something that says "homeostasis" or anything having to do with eating at all in those tabs.  Every now and then I get a dupe that magically has full kcal and it's not dropping.  As a result they don't eat and then get seriously grumpy when the food buff drops.  Only way I've found to fix that is save and reload.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...