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My question(s) going about how the electricity in devices works. I'm sorry if that questions are already been answered, but I found nothing interesting. And of course, some of the question I think I already know, but I want to use this thread, to bring all knowledge about this together and check, if everything is correct.


So, what I know is, that all devices have a maximum power. The most (all?) have also a drain, a usage of power, even if turned off. Right? What are the togetherness of energy-usage, speed-factor and pollution? How is that influenced by the modules?

Does devices have an inbuilt "accumulator"? I know it from the laser turrets. But does every device have it? Which capacity?

There is a dependency to the pollution. 100% dependent on the used power?

How is it with the inserters? Do they use power by moving or by "action"? I saw for the inserters something like

energy_per_rotation = 5000
energy_per_movement = 5000

What unit is this?

ssilk wrote:My question(s) going about how the electricity in devices works. I'm sorry if that questions are already been answered, but I found nothing interesting. And of course, some of the question I think I already know, but I want to use this thread, to bring all knowledge about this together and check, if everything is correct.

So, what I know is, that all devices have a maximum power. The most (all?) have also a drain, a usage of power, even if turned off. Right? What are the togetherness of energy-usage, speed-factor and pollution? How is that influenced by the modules?

Every machine has buffer. Some of the machines have it set in the datafile, some of the machine have the buffer size set dynamically depending on the consumption. WHen you add modules to assembling machine for example, its consumption rate can change, so the size of the buffer (battery) will be updated as well.

energy_per_rotation = 5000
energy_per_movement = 5000

What unit is this?

Jouls, this means 5kJ per rotation or movement, so the total energy consumption depends on the speeds.

Pollution is not directly correlated with energy usage, as radars and roboports make no pollution in of themselves and assembler machine 1's make relatively more pollution for their energy usage than the more advanced versions. However I do believe that any percent change to energy usage due to shortages or modules results in an equivalent percent change in pollution. So -80% power usage equals -80% pollution, +400% power usage equals +400% pollution.

While testing out energy usage of buildings I found out 2 things that I found fairly interesting. One, while most buildings have a small power draw when idle, the mining drill does not, so if it isn't mining it draws 0 watts. It may be possible that there are other buildings like this. This means there is nothing wrong with just letting your drills sit there after it's exhausted its mineral supply if you don't need the drill somewhere else and you are lazy like me. Secondly, modules do not affect power usage while buildings are idle. Probably not a significant effect, but it makes me feel a bit more at ease at cramming productivity modules inside of everything