Power Management
I’ll post some general power management tips and tricks here.
Tip 1: Suit Charging
At the moment it seems your suit can only be charged from:
- A solar panel during the day
- The power output INSIDE the rover
- The power output in the cantina (possibly also garage, don’t thing I’ve tried)
Charging from batteries / transformers does not work
Tip 2: Extensions
Both batteries and transformers can be extended multiple times. Took me way too long to figure out the “multiple” part.
Tip 3: In Most Cases Low Power = No Power
If your base requires 100 kW and it only gets 99 kW nothing will work. Airlocks won’t automatically open, plants will wither and storage / benches will stop working.
Main Tip: 24h Power And Reduced Transformer Reconfiguring
There are (at least) two ways to add batteries in your grid. On the producer side (solars) or the consumer side (base). When I started I went for consumer side batteries connected straight to my base. This required tinkering whenever I added something. Mid game I grew tired of this and realized I could also put batteries straight after the solars. So much less hazzle. This is what I ended up going for (note that my numbers are from a maxed out electrical tech tree)
A battery with all extensions can hold about 1920 kWh. Assuming 12h darkness this will support 1920 kWh / 20h = 160 kW, so set battery output to 160 kW. To both charge the batteries and provide the output I need (at least) double that to 320 kW from solars during the day.
A medium solar provides 42 kW so 8 of those gives me 336 kW. Close enough with a little extra production capacity for sand storms. I consider this a power production module. Solars -> Transformer -> Battery -> Distribution
My distribution is 2 tiered. Major and minor. The major receives all power from the solar modules and splits it up to my main structures as well as a couple of minor distribution transformers. The reason for the minor ones is that (afaik) you can’t set fractional percentages in the transformers.
To work around this i provide the minor ones with around 100 kW because then I can pretend that I configure the minor ones in kW. The well gets 15% (so 15 kW), the big grinder 20% (so 20 kW), the antenna 4% (so 4 kW) and so on. This makes it easy to reconfigure when adding more power. I just have to keep the minor distribution transformers at at least 100 kW and they will do the rest. Previously I tried to remember that yeah, this one requires X kW and this other Y kW. Nope, always 100
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