Factorio Forums

Currently, the minimum darkness of a surface is hard-coded to be 85% at the deepest part of the night, calculated by time-of-day.

I am writing a mod that implements underground surfaces, and thus I would like to be able to force significantly deeper darkness.

If the override value is simply "How dark is it at evening-o-clock?" and I need to freeze the time of day on the surface, that's obviously fine.

I've looked into this before and got stuck on the fact that the darkness % effects solar panels directly - not just visual.

I'll see again but I don't remember it being something easy to work around.

I mean, it's perfectly fine that this directly affects solar panels - I want to make the underground extremely dark, which should also naturally make solar panels next-to-useless. I don't want placing solar panels underground to be a viable source of energy

So that sounds just fine to me!

Yes, but you don't want your solar panels to produce negative power, as it could do when it goes an extra 15% below it's "zero" point.

I mean, sure. On the other hand, power_output = max(power_output, 0) isn't exactly a MENSA brain teaser

I added this (I have source access). It is in a version that was released recently.