Factorio Forums

Would it be possible to add support for negative values to the efficiency of lightning rods? The idea is to allow you to have lightning strikes that require excess power to protect against instead of generating power, as a modded environmental hazard.

+1, seems like a cool idea - even if it was a separate parameter and not directly “negative efficiency”

+1

What happens if there is no more energy left in the energy source?

Bilka wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 3:00 pm What happens if there is no more energy left in the energy source?

Presumably it'd just stop working? thats the only way I can see it working personally (presuming you mean "the electric network" in this context )

no, I mean when lightning strikes an empty collector. should it damage the collector or do nothing? should the collector stop protecting the area?

+1

Damaging/destroying the collector seems reasonable - if the collector is destroyed, it would then stop protecting the area it's supposed, as a natural consequence. So protecting the area would consume energy, or entity health if there is no energy.

Damage could just be whatever the lightning would normally do to an entity.

To protect against people spamming unpowered collectors (if this is a problem), modders could use a dying_trigger_effect to zap nearby collectors, or a (damaging) explosion upon destruction.

To make sure my reply doesn't give a wrong impression: I am not working on this currently, it seems like too risky of a change with not clearly specified behaviour.

Throwing my two cents in for a more concrete implementation idea:

If efficiency is negative, strikes will drain from the buffer instead of filling it.

A new field, minimum_buffer_content (value: float), is mandatory if efficiency is < 0. At runtime, if the current buffer energy is below this percentage, the attractor does not function. Value must be > 0 (a value of zero would act the same as efficiency == 0) and <= 1.

energy_source is now mandatory if efficiency ~= 0.

I'd say if it doesn't have enough energy available in the buffer, then the entity should explode. That, or some trigger event should be triggered, so that any number of effects can be defined (like how nuclear reactors explode, but burners dont).