Factorio Forums

In my factory my steam engine power block suddenly has an empty "Performance" meter and is not producing any power (they are not listed as an energy generator when opening the power pole with beside the engine)

Earlier in the game they worked and as I added more and more solar panels I noticed that the steam engines are not helping anymore.

They have plenty of burnable material (solid fuel), the water flow is connected and the boilers show full water and full heat.



The savegame (created in 0.12.2-4) can be found here:
012bug.zip

Haven't downloaded the game, but seems to me you have two separate networks...
Are you sure the medium poles you are probing are connected to the small poles at the steam engines?

Edit: Ok, I downloaded and tried, and it is the same network alright, but nothing seems to be suffering from lack of electricity.
Looks to me like it's a bug in the demand-satisfaction display, but I'm not sure.

That save is definitely wonky. Notice how all your assemblers and other buildings have all the electricity they need. It appears that the steam engines are stopped because your solars are producing enough – the bug is that the power poles and the electricity info screen display completely ignore your solar panels. This can be seen nicely if you just disconnect your steam engines – the factory continues to run because your solars can keep up with it just fine, but power poles and the electricity info pretend that there is no power coming in, despite admitting that power is being consumed.

Any idea how this might have happened? Did you play with any mods that you removed, perhaps? Anything that could possibly affect the solar panels or the electric network in any way at all?

i noticed when running on pure solar no acumulators that the satisfaction part does not display at all ... seen in 12.2 not sure if still present in 12.4

Oxyd wrote:That save is definitely wonky. Notice how all your assemblers and other buildings have all the electricity they need. It appears that the steam engines are stopped because your solars are producing enough – the bug is that the power poles and the electricity info screen display completely ignore your solar panels. This can be seen nicely if you just disconnect your steam engines – the factory continues to run because your solars can keep up with it just fine, but power poles and the electricity info pretend that there is no power coming in, despite admitting that power is being consumed.

Any idea how this might have happened? Did you play with any mods that you removed, perhaps? Anything that could possibly affect the solar panels or the electric network in any way at all?

Nope. Pure plain vanilla. The savegame is from 0.12.2-4 and migrated to 0.12.4-3 in one step. However I disabled the night-cycle.

Perhaps this happened when I connected (and possibly dis- and re-connected some times) the solar panels and the steam engines to the main power grid?
Kovarex has stated he made some optimizations regarding the calculation of solar power fields.
The solar power field started smaller and was extended in several steps by placing additional blueprinted "tiles" at the borders of the existing field.

The steam engines are working fine in your save game because your energy demand is fully covered by the solar panels. The problem is that solar panels alone are not counted towards the electric demand satisfaction.

How i think it works atm: * Your factories current consumption is between 10.2 and 11.2 MW.
* The factories power production capability is 10* 510kW.
* Therefore the electric demand satisfaction shows about 50% satisfaction.
If you build 20 accumulators the satisfaction is displayed as 100%... (20*300kW + 10*5.1kw) / 11 MW


You can reproduce this by starting a new game building 2 radars, one connected to 6 solar panels and one connected to 6 solar panels + 1 accumulator. Both radars run at 100% but only the one with the accumulator has full electric demand satisfaction, the other has none.

edit:
attached savefile with 3 solar panel / radar setups all running at 100% but only one displaying full satisfaction.

Thanks for the report. The problem really is that solar panels are not included in computation of electric demand satisfaction (thanks for finding that out). This is fixed for 0.12.5.

yay! Good job and thanks anyone who added further analysis