Possible change for radiation generator

[oconzer]

I'd personally like to see the radbolt generator changed if possible to where the part that collects radiation was changed into its own special background tile building and the firing mechanism to its own special building.

Radiation collector (bottom part of the radbolt generator)

• 60 watts power required to collect radiation
• Doesn't create radbolts (radbolt generator required to do so)
• Requires connection to a radbolt generator to use power (otherwise does nothing)

 

Radbolt Generator

• 240 watts power required to fire off rad bolts
• 120 watts power to collect radiation to convert to radbolts from adjacent radiation collectors.
• Converts radiation at a rate of 5% of all radiation collectors collected radiation within 4 tiles of itself within the same room. Radiation collectors that are within 2 Radbolt generators range would only work with 1 using the following order top-left to bottom-right.

 

The reason I'd like to see this changed is so that you could make radiation collection of shine bugs (and space maybe) more feasible without having to resort to abusing the poor bugs by sticking them in a single tile to use for radiation generation. It would still also have uses for other radiation collection too, but that's the main reason I'd like to see this change.

EDIT:

Also thought about just the possibility of changing the radbolt generator so it pulls radiation from tiles around the one tile it currently collects from to 1 tile around the "collector" part. Of course the radbolt generator would need to be changed to only use 1.5% of radiation total collected from all 9 tiles for generating radbolts.

[Gwido]

Poor shine bug.

Why do you trap him, when there's a far better way to create radiation with a weez wort ? O_o

[oconzer]

13 hours ago, Gwido said:

Poor shine bug.

Why do you trap him, when there's a far better way to create radiation with a weez wort ? O_o

I personally haven't but the current radiation generator how it works If you want to use shine bugs for radbolt generation, you have to stick them in a tiny spot near radbolt generators since they tend to fly into the path of the rad bolt or fly away from it that it's not generating much radiation.

[NeoDeusMachina]

4 hours ago, oconzer said:

I personally haven't but the current radiation generator how it works If you want to use shine bugs for radbolt generation, you have to stick them in a tiny spot near radbolt generators since they tend to fly into the path of the rad bolt or fly away from it that it's not generating much radiation.

I don't really see a need for such a change if I am being honest, and one of the main reason why people stack shinebugs in a single tile is to limit their pathing to improve performance. Shinebug reactors (for power or radbolt production) require a lot of bugs, and that was made worst (by a factor 2) in a recent update now that bugs produce half the amount of radiation they used to. Even if your suggestion was implemented, I would expect to see builds with shinebugs stacked in a single cell regardless.

[oconzer]

9 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

I don't really see a need for such a change if I am being honest, and one of the main reason why people stack shinebugs in a single tile is to limit their pathing to improve performance. Shinebug reactors (for power or radbolt production) require a lot of bugs, and that was made worst (by a factor 2) in a recent update now that bugs produce half the amount of radiation they used to.

From what I've seen when I looked up shine bug reactor its not done because of performance as far as I've seen. Its done to maximize the light / radiation in one tile so that you can get the maximum effectiveness from solar panels / radbolts from radbolt generators. If they were allowed to fly around sure it would probably make slow PCs have issues (not that ONI is perfect in its optimization), but then you'd lose some of the power / radiation randomly based on where the shine bugs are.

[NeoDeusMachina]

53 minutes ago, oconzer said:

From what I've seen when I looked up shine bug reactor its not done because of performance as far as I've seen. Its done to maximize the light / radiation in one tile so that you can get the maximum effectiveness from solar panels / radbolts from radbolt generators. If they were allowed to fly around sure it would probably make slow PCs have issues (not that ONI is perfect in its optimization), but then you'd lose some of the power / radiation randomly based on where the shine bugs are.

Indeed, and I did say "one of the main reasons". When you look at the current late game performance in ONI SO! (and a quick search on the forum will give you a good idea of what I mean), things like dupes and critter pathing is a big concern, and you need a lot shinebugs to get good results in a reactor. People have come up with all sorts of strategies to mitigate performance issues, like vacuuming entire asteroids, filling them up with tiles, avoiding "mixed" gases, limiting dupes number and pathing, limiting critter pathing as much as possible (that includes the 100+ shinebugs you might want to use in a reactor), avoiding ranching altogether, avoid revealing problematic asteroids (e.g., moo asteroids where the gassy moo count and pathing can become a concern), etc.

I have built shinebug ranches and reactors frequently since SO! EA started, and I can guarantee you that I will personally never build a reactor where shinebugs can roam free. It is inefficient (as you pointed out) and causes performance drop. Even if the radbolt generators were modified to capture radiation in a certain area as suggested, it would still be more efficient to stack shinebugs in a single tile centered on the area collected by the "new" radbolt generator... I unfortunately don't see how it would make it so that people would suddenly start letting shinebugs roam freely.