Light Sensor

[Geartwo]

It would be great if you put a day/light sensor in the game for better use of solar engines.
These Sensor cold be between two electricity pylon and during the night it woldnt conduct electricity.

Thanks for read my Post

[ssilk]

It would be great if you put a day/light sensor in the game for better use of solar engines.
These Sensor cold be between two electricity pylon and during the night it woldnt conduct electricity.

The best light-sensor is the solar-panel itself! Combined with an accumulator you can very well estimate if the capacity of your accumulator-bank is sufficient to bring you over the night.

It is explained in detail here https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=8&t=976
See the example of user tonberrytoby, I use that layout, because it is most efficient and easy to manage/tune. Add lamps to make the reaction faster and add accumulators to make it slower.
I use it currently in nearly every map because it spares you really much coal, if you have enough solar-panels/accumulators.

Some about handling: I never used more than 12 steam-engines (24 burners, 3 pumps). The power is normally enough to bring you to the stage of producing blue potions, which is needed to have solar-panels. If I used more steam-engines (to build more mines to achive that stage faster), I had problems with finding enough nearby coal. (this is another point, but this is in my eyes a problem to play the game faster - there should be a way to cut MANY wood to fire it in the burners). After that stage I produce about 150 solar panels and about the same number of accumulators and place them normally outside, leaving big paths between for the car and walking... You don't need to build them all at once. I put the solar-panel/accumulator-production at the end of the production-streets (=lowest prio) and have a look from time to time to the power-statistics, if I have too less power I stop researching and solar-panels/accumulator is produced then.

But going back one step, your idea is of course better (already mentioned many times here), because the afford of building that "sensor" is big and not quite easy to understand. But I thought more of a "power-sensor", which knows the left accu-capacity, the steam-engines output and current energy-usage and calculates the time, when the steam-engines should be switched on (or not so important parts of the factory switched off) itself.

Thanks for read my Post

Please.