self-sustaining mid-game energy source

[Neotuck]

This is why I rarely use oil wells, by the time I have used up all the oil in the oil biome I have covered most of the surface in solar panels 

[Mojo Filter]

13 hours ago, lee1026 said:

I am not saying that it can't be done, just that no one actually done it. In any event, there are way easier ways to get to 2K watts with way less effort and drain on CPU speed.

I stacked three of them up in my last base.

The build is super easy and even my five year old laptop didn't take that much of a performance hit since all the shine bugs are confined to a single tile. It takes patience to get it up to full power, but once it's there, you have a non-stop source of power for the rest of your game with no further input or resources.

I would probably not turn to to it for churning out 10k watts, but it is fine for covering your basic needs and then using automation to fire up other generators on demand.

[suxkar]

2 hours ago, Neotuck said:

This is why I rarely use oil wells, by the time I have used up all the oil in the oil biome I have covered most of the surface in solar panels 

Forgive my slight off topic, but I'm curious to know. From what I've seen you have been around from a long time, so it feels natural to guess that you have probably tried many late game designs, yet you say you don't use oil: do you get that much from solar panels or are you content with being capped with energy?
How much power do you get on average from a full sky? Doesn't regolith/regolith disposal kill your fps?

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, suxkar said:

Forgive my slight off topic, but I'm curious to know. From what I've seen you have been around from a long time, so it feels natural to guess that you have probably tried many late game designs, yet you say you don't use oil: do you get that much from solar panels or are you content with being capped with energy?
How much power do you get on average from a full sky? Doesn't regolith/regolith disposal kill your fps?

A solar panel can reach max efficiency even if only half is exposed to sunlight so you can stack them like pyramids.

I don't remember the exact amount but it's usually over 40 Kwatts.  I tend to divide them in half for two separate circuits leaving a gap in the middle for rockets.  The important thing is to have a large bank of batteries to store power for nights and meteor showers.

I usually use sweepers and robo miners to clean the regolith and yes FPS gets bad, but manageable if you are careful with other reasons that can cause slow FPS like poor storage or too many critters.

I'll be trying a new design that involves sweepy to see if that helps save power and reduce FPS lag

[lee1026]

You can kinda work out max solar potential. There are 256 cells at the top of the map. Each panel is 7 cells wide. Let’s say 4 with good stacking. That is 64 panels at 380 watts each, for a combined daytime max of 24kw. There is nighttime and bunker door closing due to regolith storms, so you are looking at somewhere on the order of 10kw when you max the system out and with perfect play with loads of batteries. 

[suxkar]

3 hours ago, lee1026 said:

You can kinda work out max solar potential. There are 256 cells at the top of the map. Each panel is 7 cells wide. Let’s say 4 with good stacking. That is 64 panels at 380 watts each, for a combined daytime max of 24kw. There is nighttime and bunker door closing due to regolith storms, so you are looking at somewhere on the order of 10kw when you max the system out and with perfect play with loads of batteries. 

I personally find that very poor considering you get the same from 5 petroleum generators running on 3 oil wells with a pretroleum boiler, plus the free water and CO2 for slicksters, without the huge hassle of regolith removal, although I guess sweepy might help with that

[TheMule]

20 hours ago, suxkar said:

I personally find that very poor considering you get the same from 5 petroleum generators running on 3 oil wells with a pretroleum boiler, plus the free water and CO2 for slicksters, without the huge hassle of regolith removal, although I guess sweepy might help with that

Not to mention that in order to reach max potential you are left with zero room for rockets.

[Gurgel]

On 3/30/2020 at 6:04 PM, lee1026 said:

You can kinda work out max solar potential. There are 256 cells at the top of the map. Each panel is 7 cells wide. Let’s say 4 with good stacking. That is 64 panels at 380 watts each, for a combined daytime max of 24kw. There is nighttime and bunker door closing due to regolith storms, so you are looking at somewhere on the order of 10kw when you max the system out and with perfect play with loads of batteries. 

Does stacking actually improve energy generation? I think I tried it once and only had it use more space. I did not invest much time into that though.

Never tried it again, as solar (single row, no stacking) together with nat-gas power cells and hydrogen from making oxygen for breathing usually generates far more power than I need.

[lee1026]

Stacking produces somewhat more power because daylight hits with more lux than a panel actually needs. 
 

I haven’t bothered to do any of this in recent maps because I like turbines too much. The game thinks heat is a punishment, but I use heat very productively. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 3/31/2020 at 5:13 PM, lee1026 said:

The game thinks heat is a punishment, but I use heat very productively. 

I disagree.  The average player sees heat as a problem, but I don't believe it is a punishment.  Everything has a trade-off.  The trick in sustainability is to use the 'waste' of one system as the 'fuel' for the next  Possible example: The waste from hatches can be burned as fuel in generators, producing CO2 that will feed slicksters, which produce oil  that can be refined into petrol, which can be burned in other generators, producing polluted water that can be filtered into clean water, leaving behind polluted dirt that crabs can eat, giving you sand that you can feed to your hatches.

[Steve Raptor]

On 30.03.2020 at 2:12 AM, SamLogan said:

You're looking to much complicated. You go to magma biome and setup the petrol generator, you will have huge amount of electricity. It's easy to generate 2000 to 6000 Watts.

Here's a schema :

Its much better to remove the CO2 from the generators with Slicksters instead of skimmers and sieves, you save a lot more power that way.

[lee1026]

You need a near absurd amount of slicksters to remove all of the CO2. Nothing that my fully automated ranch with its 500 self-reproducing glum slicksters can't handle, but I don't think most people have that up and running.

[Neotuck]

8 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

Its much better to remove the CO2 from the generators with Slicksters instead of skimmers and sieves, you save a lot more power that way.

A carbon skimmer removes about 180kg CO2 per cycle, that's about 36 wild slicksters or 9 tame ones

Do you have the dupe time to spare on grooming?  Can your computer handle the drop in FPS?  Or can you spare the watts?

There is no better way, just player preference on what is available 

[lee1026]

My preference for CO2 disposal from petrogens is to lock them in a liquid locked room. Petrogens will never over pressurize, so they don't care if they are locked with a few tons of co2 per tile.

 

Unless if you actually need pwater for whatever reason, I think this beats carbon scrubbers, hands down. No power, no fuss, and you preserve an important resource (ability to dirty water) for a time in the future.

[TheMule]

5 hours ago, lee1026 said:

You need a near absurd amount of slicksters to remove all of the CO2. Nothing that my fully automated ranch with its 500 self-reproducing glum slicksters can't handle, but I don't think most people have that up and running.

About 2 full stables of tame happy slicksters (so, 16) per generator, assuming it's running 100% of the time.

IIRC, for the typical 3 wells / boiler / 6 gens / molten slickters setup it's about 85 molten slicksters if you assume perfect efficiency at all stages and you burn every single drop of petroleum instead of using it for something else (plastic, visco-gel, supercoolant...). I go with 80, and of course they are at risk of creating a vacuum if I start using too much petroleum for something else.

2 +11 ranchers barely manage to groom them all, but again it's not necessary to have 100% uptime on boosted metabolism. I still have to find a setup I really like tho. 2x48 vertical stables aren't great for gas diffusion, even 3x32 struggle.

[lee1026]

Have you considered using an critter dropper to rely on glum animals instead?

 

Fed glum animals will lay one egg before dying as long as they are not cramped. So if the egg is removed to a hatching chamber and then the babies are moved back into the main ranch via the critter dropper, you can maintain a stable population forever.

 

Granted, for the 6 petrogen setup, you need like 400 glum slicksters, but I can get that to work. There are weird problems when there are so many slicksters. For example, my chef stopped making surf-n-turf because he decided to spend his entire time on making BBQ from the neverending flood of meat that comes pouring down the conveyor.

 

[TheMule]

1 hour ago, lee1026 said:

you need like 400 glum slicksters

That would kill my fps for sure. I don't have that luxury. In fact, I turned to destroying CO2 with doors. In the end, fps is a resource. Its scacity is by far the no.1 reason I abandoned my colonies at some point. I might give the 80 slicksters option a try again in the future it seems the game has been optimized since then. First I need my current problem, crashes.

[lee1026]

My game actually runs surprisingly well with so many slicksters. I am actually not noticing anything as the number of slicksters ramp up.

[Male_zvire]

For me, it's diversity: my base is using:

• 1x steam turbnine from hot steam vent
• 2x nat gas geysers connected to three nat gas generators (unused nat gas is sotred for non-active time)
• 6x coal backup generator (only when smart battery send signal - low energy)
• 2x petroleum generator - now suplied from reffinery, but recently i found small volcano; i plan to use volcano for crudeoil - naphta conversion + steam turbine while no naphta is needed.
• LOT of batteries