Factorio Forums

I was wondering what is more UPS friendly, cut power or insufficient power.

Cut power:
Area is disconnected from the power grid / there are no power suppliers in the area / yellow "plug" icons are flashing over entities

Insufficient power:
Area has power suppliers, which are not producing power / red "power" icons are flashing over entities

The reasons I ask this are these:

• I use power switches to disconnect production lines from the power grid to save idle power.
• I read that every entity, which is disconnected from the power grid, checks every tick if it has power, which is said to be very UPS unfriendly.
• I was wondering if I can circumvent this by just putting one accumulator into an area.

Thanks!

Just use the debug view and check the sleep mode indicator (small red circle). I'm guessing that machines only sleep at full power.

Intuitively, it would make sense that both are very close to just as bad, since they're both still the same state where the entity is polling for power all the time. I don't think it's the "disconnected" part that takes the UPS, it's the "checking for enough power" part.

That said, if you want to try, you can maybe put a ton of overlapping entities in editor mode until it starts having an UPS impact and then test it. (Make sure the UPS impact exists even when they're offscreen in case it's a rendering issue, F4 is your friend.)

eradicator wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 04, 2021 1:10 am

I think I found it. "show-active-state" shows little red circles over entities, which are not in a working state.

Studying it, it seems that being cut off vs insufficiently powered makes no difference regarding the state. Also entities which were inactive under power, also stay inactive if cut off from the power grid or are insufficiently powered. Only entities which were cut off or went insufficiently powered mid-work are staying active (assemblers, inserters).

@MEOWMI: Therefor you are right in the way, that these options are equal regarding entity updates.

But I am reliefed, that un- and insufficiently powered entities appear not to go into active state - which seems to be, by what you both write, the key regarding UPS friendliness.

Impatient wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 04, 2021 1:57 am

also stay inactive if cut off from the power grid

Interesting. So if you can design a contraption to first force everything into sleep mode by input starving / output blocking and *then* cut power... then you can save power and UPS at the same time. I'm sure some people would be very interested in this.

eradicator wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 04, 2021 2:35 am

Impatient wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 04, 2021 1:57 am

also stay inactive if cut off from the power grid

Interesting. So if you can design a contraption to first force everything into sleep mode by input starving / output blocking and *then* cut power... then you can save power and UPS at the same time. I'm sure some people would be very interested in this.

It's been years since I had a discussion with the devs about unpowered inserters waking up when items pass by them on belts and never going back to sleep.
Since then I always used combinators to first block all inputs before powering off a module.