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I've been toying around with a few ideas for power generation. I'm aware that with the wrong balance they could be completely broken in our game, but I'm more concerned with what we can do to make them work. Gravity Generator (a.k.a. Waterwheel): This is a 5 wide by 3 tall generator that takes up to 1 ton of any liquid in it's top port and 4 seconds later drops it out of the bottom port on the same column. It's max throughput is 5 tons of fluid per second. Max operating temperature is 60C so will not work with hot liquids due to the early materials needed in it's construction. Idea is for early game when the player has a lot of water sources they want to move downward, and this will allow them to gain a temporary power source moving a lake to a reservoir. Problems: Easily exploitable if it's cheaper to pump water from the bottom of the map to the top of the map than the power you get from dropping water through a series of water wheels all the way down. Solution for this problem? Make it produce less than that. One method of moving water into a pipe from the world does not require power, but instead creates power. The steam turbine. Possibly not an issue as 2 kg/s of water will not produce much power at all if #1 is taken care of. As such, exploiting this would give a mild boost to the Steam Turbine's output, far less than tinkering with the turbine. Heat Transfer Generator (a.k.a. Thermopile/Thermocouple): This is a single block generator that can be rotated in 4 directions. Depending on how it's rotated, it produces power when it transfers heat through in the direction it's oriented. Half the heat absorbed is turned into electricity, the rest is moved across or rests in the generator. Max operating temperature is 500, but it will reliably keep itself at the midpoint of the temperature difference. Note: Does not care if the sides contain, gas, liquid, or solid, it will operate the same for all. Power generated is determined by how stark a gradient you have on either side of it, but it will not start generating power till it reaches the mid point temperature +- 20K between its two sides, so it has a warm up/cool off time before starting. Note: Will actually attempt to equalize heat with all 4 sides equally, but power only is generated when heat moves in the set direction based on the gradient. Problems: Could easily replace Steam Turbine. A possible solution is to make each individual one less efficient at deleting heat, and more required to achieve the same deletion. Another possible solution is to make them require expensive material processing to be made. E.g. thermium. May have more problems, I haven't thought much about this one yet. What do you think of these ideas? They certainly seem to fit the theme of ONI, I feel.

First off, what does SPOM stand for. I know what it is, but where did the acronym come from? Second, what are the mechanics that allow you to create a 100% uptime SPOM? How do you keep even one from becoming overpressure? I've seen designs for 100% uptime SPOMs but I haven't yet figured out how one keeps it from fully pressurizing it's room even from the start with 4 or more gas pumps right above and below it.

Please let us change the priority of generators so that we can get our electrical engineer dupes to tune them up in a timely fashion. It's really annoying that I'm wasting 1kW of potential power on my petroleum generator because I literally can't change the generator's priority from 5 so my dupes never get around to it...

This is my new favorite way to do this, it's efficiency is practically perfect. It doesn't "require" steel. You'll need plastic and a little lead.

My take on a volcano tamer. I wanted to do something that was useful mid game, no space materials and simple but also possible to expand on later. The idea is to have a base for power generation that can be set up early mid-game when you do need power but be able to ad-on stuff like sour gas boiling later on. If you only plan to use it for power the same build can be sued with just as slightly bigger power room. Very little automation, materials used obsidian, wolframite/tungsten and diamond. I might ad that I use an external cooling loop for the turbines Automation layer. The and-gate with an atmo-sensor is just a manual override to shut down the system and not needed for the build. The idea with the convoy rails taking the long way around is that I later can connect other modules later on before it go down to the power room. (Like boiling oil)

Hi folks. Am I the only one to think that the Power Control Station (let's call it PCS, I'm lazy...) uses are awkward ? I explain myself. I use to build PCS into each gen room, 1st because I want those to be tunable if needed, 2nd because I like the concept (and the color ) of a Power Room. Then I manually enable or disable PCS by selecting the metal that should be used to create microchip (or eventually a manual interrupter). Lastly, I've enabled only the PCS into my petro gen room. But what's happening is dups are coming into my petro gen room just to take microchips on the floor, then go into other gen room to tune-up other gen... (I want the dup/time to be used only for 1kW gain, not for 400W gain on NG gen or H gen, for example) That completely messed up any organization about it. Am I misusing this "system" ? Does someone noticed something that could help me to efficiently manage this mess ? (except just blocking dup access to gen room). @Klei, if you read us : is it working as designed ... ? ^^ Are you planning to save microchips only for power room where those have been manufactured ? Thanks all !

This is a DEEP dive into every nuance of generating power by leveraging magma melt from regolith. Meteors supply about 3 rails worth of regolith, so you could potentially produce 39,000 watts of net power output this way.

I've seen a lot of discussions around ethanol power lately and wanted to share my ethanol power calculator to maybe show people that ethanol is not as bad as a power source as they think. Here's a spreadsheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jMNLjFQRt1K34w8sbq5GTD4YKWZ76rH0j6vcqzHV2BE/ You can copy it to your new document to change values, right now it has numbers from my current base as an example. How to use? Just fill in numbers in "Main Questions" section. If you want some water and ethanol balance numbers, also fill in "Extra questions", otherwise change those numbers to zeros. The panel on the right is just calculations, your main answers are in the answers section. Below is a little FAQ with some confusions I often see around. What do you do with so much CO2? How do you calculate sweeper power consumption? What is a "seconds to gather a branch" value? Your setup will overheat in time and would not work sustainably. It's wrong! Everybody knows that after all the infrastructure ethanol generator only produces 137W! Why don't you count the extra power wasted on extra distillers for nosh sprouts or electrolyzer? It's wasteful to have a powerplant with more than half of its produced power used on its own infrastructure! Any screenshots from such powerplant? Please correct me If you find any mistakes either in this post or in the spreadsheet, I'll try to fix and edit it.

I have a circuit behind a small transformer, with no generators or batteries on it, but it is still getting an overload. I did something different this time but I thought it should work. My setup is the following: 2x Petrol Generator (ethanol)+ Smart Battery -> Heavy Watt Wire -> Large Transformer -> Conductive wires -> 2x Small transformer -> Normal Wires Thus I have 3 circuits, each with different types of wire. Heavy watt: generators and battery Conductive: has no batteries or load, except for the small transformers Normal Wire: has all the consumers, no generators and no batteries. The idea is to use the 4kJ large transformer to power (eventually) 4 small transformers, and keep the heavy watt wire isolated to only the generator room. I thought the regular wire circuits could be used in 2 different ways Without batteries and above 1kW consumers -- produces brownouts but no overloads With batteries and under 1kW consumers -- shouldn't brownout and can't overload. Yet I'm getting an overload in the regular wire circuit on the first variation (see pic) Circuit status is 1260W, but the only thing powering it is the small transformer. Then when I connected a third small transfomer to the conductive wire circuit, I am getting overloads on the conductive wire circuit. But you can see in the second screenshot, there is 0W on this circuit. Can anyone explain why this use of transformers shouldn't work?

It's really not clear that the petroleum generator can use ethanol as fuel. Yes, it says "combustible liquid", but there's no indication anywhere that it actually can take ethanol as a fuel source. I recommend maybe just changing the first line to "Converts Petroleum or Ethanol into electrical Power."

When you put a bunch of generators and 2 transformers on a 2kw wire, theres big chance it will overload altho its showing 2kw current load. Adding a small buffer would reduce that kind of edge cases.

You should maybe add a mass creator, a 6x6 tile big machine that can consume 2000 W for generating any discovered solid (1 kg/s,), liquids (requires piping) and gases (requires gas piping).

Well, I guess I should start a new series on exploits. Here's a rough sketch of something that I'm pretty sure can be improved on, but I figure I'll let someone else tinker with it. The top tepidizer keeps the petro and crude at around 300C, cycling on/off every 1 second with a typical pulser (not gate followed by a buffer). The bottom tepidizer engages only when the liquid level reaches 1kg. Its purpose is to make sure any liquid becomes steam (so another 1 second pulser). The tempshift plates in the upper chamber keep the 2 innermost inlets for each turbine around 300C, while the three outer inlets are around 110C. The point is that you only have to heat some of the incoming steam. Tepidizers are made of steel. You need enough steam in the room to keep the center two steam tiles just below the turbines to stay above 500g. I bet I could get this even more efficient if I keep the entire room at very high pressure, increased the walls on the central heating element so there was only a 1 tile passageway, and then made sure only 500g of gas stayed in the center region. ONI physics... The current build above uses about 1/3 of the power generated, leaving you with over 1000W to use however you want. It will run forever without needing any thing else (aside from an occasional flash of cooling to keep the top chamber under 100C - something a simple aquatuner that runs almost never can take care of). Free infinite power. Not as good as the old Steam Behemoth, but definitely simple to build. Please post any other steam turbine exploits you know of, that provide infinte power. Or feel free to improve this to get the efficiency up (I'd rather it use only 1/5 of the power or less, instead of 1/3, to keep things going). Smaller is also better. Built in cooling for the top could be nice as well.

So I've been doing some calculating with the new power systems and getting power from the wood verse coal. Say you have domesticated tree that you are growing. It takes 70KG of polluted water per cycle to grow the tree and 4.5 cycles to complete the tree's growth period. That comes out to 315 Kg of water PER HARVEST of the wood. This gives us 300 Kg of lumber. When put into a burner, wood will burn at a rate of 1.2 Kg per second to give you 300 watts per second. That translates to 250 seconds worth of power, which is less than half a cycle's time. So to constantly power a base using only 300 watts (terrible) for one cycle, would take 630 Kg of polluted water, 10 cycles, and a ton heat to manage. Am I missing something about this resource? Because these stats are abyssmal (pun intended), and a huge waste of resources. I guess I could see this as an extra challenge to folks, but for most of the asteroid types to start with this biome now... it just feels like there is a huge gap in difficulty from the 2 starting biomes, and may need some balancing. Now I should say that this is more of a first glance for me, so please let me know if I've missed something about this new system.

I was thinking in maxwell quotes from the final chapter, in the nightmare throne, in this, to be more precise: "Or maybe They've grown tired of me." "Heh. Took them long enough." "They'll show you terrible, beautiful things." "It's best not to fight it." "There wasn't much here when I showed up." "Just dust. And the Void. And Them." "I've learned so much since then. I've built so much." "But even a King is bound to the board." "You can't change the rules of the game." "I don't know what they want. They... they just watch." "Unless you get too close... Then..." "Well, there's a reason I stay so dapper." "What year is it out there? Time moves differently here." "Go on, stay a while. Keep us company.""They" or "Them" are beings of terrible and unfathomable power, beings who are best not to fight.... They just watch, (unless you get too close in your shadow control capabilities, and they ****** you), only watch, day and night.... And then, i watch this video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BUcTVIV5y0 And i watch a dark observer watching.... an observer i already know too well, when my characters go insane, (second number 00:45) we can se another one in the william carter puzzle number 6, and another one in the pics of maxwell´s house. Sometimes, we can see them even while sane: http://dont-starve-game.wikia.com/wiki/File:Shadow_watcher.png I think they are the beings who retain maxwell captive, the source of all the "allucinations" (we already now oficially that the allucinations are real beings and not allucinations at all, not only because they can move the webs of a spider den and alert the spiders even when you are far, but because a totally official phrase says: "Low sanity is not fatal, but strange creatures from another time and place are attracted to madness." And, we can craft things with the substance of their bodies) They are watching in every moment not only maxwell, but everyone in his realm, that maxwell built for them, even if normally we can only see them at low sanity (normally, sometimes we can see them sane) What do you think? You believe the same as I ? What do you think is its real purpose? Why only watch, if you have power for create or destroy almost everything? I´m open for all kind of theories, critics or just opinions.

Now I know this game is supposed to be challenging and all. But I got really pissed today when Willow's perk didn't come into action today in time, which caused the death of her in one hit from a grue(hit by a hound (log-suit went) and tree guardian right before night) . ( At least this time it wasn't from a tallbird).Don't you think her fire action should come right before the grue hits? Along with the fact that if you should be standing in one place that the fire should continually keep going?Hmmm...Because shes almost as useless as Wes otherwise!

Will we have to make a new world for the winter update, and in case of YES, does using the wooden thing counts as "New" world?

I'm sure Hard Mode has been suggested before, but this is a different way to look at difficulty. Normally, when you have difficulty modes, the game simply lowers your damage and health, and increases enemy damage and health. This is often an ineffective difficulty choice, and can simply make a game tedious rather than difficult. Don't Starve is already a difficult game. Enemies can mess you up real quick-like, and you have to stay on your toes especially in combat. However, I suggest a hard mode in the game that does one thing: All resources finite. Bushes will eventually stop producing berries, grass will eventually no longer grow back, the rabbit population will dwindle, ponds will run out of fish and die off, pigs will no longer immigrate, and so on. This will force the player to always be on the move. A biome will eventually become useless, and the player will have to go where the food is. While I'm sure that Winter will incorporate some of these elements, I'm sure that plenty of food sources will be milked. And judging by the nigh-hostile reaction to pig houses only spawning three pigs, a lot of people do not want something like this. But a mode would be perfect, now when someone brags about surviving 100 days on Finite Mode, maybe someone will actually be impressed.

]http://imageshack.us/a/img248/4418/deeptest.gif should i get these pig houses all the way up here and bring them over here to my base sense i rarly go up there , i know it will only give me half the houses http://imageshack.us/a/img802/7720/jakassme.png