Does a beacon consume too much energy?

[pkmitl3000]

I found that using a beacon with efficiency modules is not an efficient way since a beacon itself consumes 750kW, more than energy saved by modules.

Using it with speed modules, affected machines also consume additional energy. Plus the 750kW consumed by a beacon, this is also inefficient.

I think a beacon should consume less energy or do not spread energy consumption onto affected machines.

[bobingabout]

It does have a bit of a heavy energy price tag. Though keep in mind that it can cover far more machines if strategically placed than placing the modules in the machines themselves, and can be used on top of them too.

I typically place green modules in the machines, and raw speed modules in a beacon. Those are modules from my mod, I'd still do the same with equivalent base game modules though.

[frekkerebba]

As far as I understand, the beacons also use power when the buildings it affect are inactive.
This is a huge problem. Only way to use beacons are to abuse the broken and overpowered solar panels and accumulator.

[bobingabout]

Only way to use beacons are to abuse the broken and overpowered solar panels and accumulator.

Which is a debatable argument in itself.
They're in no way broken (They do exactly what they advertise without flaw, therefore, not broken), and overpowered is a matter of opinion. In my opinion they're a little too reliable, but not overpowered. But this isn't a debate for here.


Okay, it's true that they always consume power, even when the buildings they are boosting are inactive... but produce no pollution for doing so, so as stated above, solar panels, free energy, no real loss.
on the other hand, reducing the energy consumption of the factory does reduce pollution.

I suppose this is just another one of those balance issues.

[Koub]

I think that with 0.13 new signal combinator sensors/actuator things, there's high chance we'll be able to turn beacons off (by unpowering them when the machines they boost are inactive). At least I'd expect that to be possible.

[BlakeMW]

Beacons don't use much power when they cover 8 machines, 480kW / 8 = 60kW per machine, that'll be only a small fraction of what each machine is using.

When speed beacons are combined with assembler 3 with 4x productivity modules they actually result in energy savings per item created by dramatically reducing the crafting time to complete a item.

[MeduSalem]

As far as I understand, the beacons also use power when the buildings it affect are inactive.

I think that with 0.13 new signal combinator sensors/actuator things, there's high chance we'll be able to turn beacons off (by unpowering them when the machines they boost are inactive). At least I'd expect that to be possible.

Beacons can be shut down already if one just outputs their modules with inserters, like I did here:

viewtopic.php?p=156540#p156540

Without modules they don't consume any energy. And you can re-insert the modules with inserters once you want to push the speed again. You can even switch from Speed Modules to Efficiency Modules and back if you like and if it makes any sense.



That said, an easier way to do it could be preferable for some. As well as an overall less energy consumption of beacons in general.

[albatrosv13]

deleted

[joseph222]

I found that using a beacon with efficiency modules is not an efficient way since a beacon itself consumes 750kW, more than energy saved by modules.

Using it with speed modules, affected machines also consume additional energy. Plus the 750kW consumed by a beacon, this is also inefficient.

I think a beacon should consume less energy or do not spread energy consumption onto affected machines.

For me my factory got

1.5GW

of electricity so it was no problem putting beacons.

[AlexTheNotsogreat]

I think the beacons consume a balanced amount of power for what they do. What we really need is an advanced beacon that has much higher range, so you only need 1 or 2 large beacons, rather than, say, 20 basic ones for my steel setup.

[Harkonnen604]

Wouldn't it be logical for beacons with efficiency modules to affect themselves?

[Qon]

I think the beacons consume a balanced amount of power for what they do. What we really need is an advanced beacon that has much higher range, so you only need 1 or 2 large beacons, rather than, say, 20 basic ones for my steel setup.

A long range beacon would be able to reach many more receivers, and recievers would be able to have many more effect sources. If it has 10 times longer range then your machines would easily become so silly fast that 12 rapid/bulk inserers will not be able to keep up. Upgrading from basic beacons to your advanced ones will be way overpowered since their effects stacks without limits. So would you also make advanced beacons not be able to stack their effects? Seems weird with an arbitrary limitit like that to the "advanced" beacon wich the basic beacon doesn't have. And arbitrary limits are not really good game design. The low range of the basic beacons means you are limited by the space around your machines and that is good design because placing entities in good configurations and designing factories is the at core of factorio.

But the stacking of beacon effects isn't all good. It puts a very heavy emphasis on beacon placement and makes other factors maybe disproportionaly small. If the beacon network worked more like power poles where coverage is more important than overkill coverage it might lead to more creative designs possible. At the moment the alternating row of beacons and assemlers with bots is the only design I use. If one beacon had more slots, used more power and didn't stack then beacons might be more interesting to use. Or less? Making them different to the powernetwork in mechanics is good in some ways because it creates some variety. But since beacons uses power (and power poles don't) they would still have meaningful differences since you would try to minimize your beacon usage so they don't eat all your power.

[Engimage]

I can't find a proper usage for beackons in any of my factories due to 2 factors
1. They are too big. 3x3 is an overkil imo and having them 2x2 would fit many more factory designs
2. 750kW is really an overkill especially before you reach endgame

And for me its a really big surprise to find out that beackon effects stack

[hoho]

And for me its a really big surprise to find out that beackon effects stack

That's quite probably one of the biggest reasons for the high energy drain of them. It's possible to drive "empty" oil patches to some rather ludricious output leves with enough beacons and high-end modules. Sure, it'll take a few GWs of power but at that stage, you should have more than enough solar panels anyway.

[bobucles]

You don't need a beacon at ANY point to make a rocket or to beat the game in general. The amount of extraneous setup it takes to get a strong beacon factory going is basically post game content.

[Qon]

I can't find a proper usage for beackons in any of my factories due to 2 factors
1. They are too big. 3x3 is an overkil imo and having them 2x2 would fit many more factory designs
2. 750kW is really an overkill especially before you reach endgame

And for me its a really big surprise to find out that beackon effects stack

No.

• If they were 2x2 they could be double stacked because they would reach through eachother. Without altering range that might a bit OP. If you decreased their range then their enegy compared to their effect would go up.
• They use 480kW last time I checked and that's very little compared to the energy used by the machines in a proper design.

The beacons don't use too much energy. Instead of complaining about their small energy usage, build better. Beacons reduce overall energy used by a lot if used properly.

[/thread]

[siggboy]

I don't think they use too much energy, at least not in proportion to the machines that they boost.

The typical scenario in post-end game is: Prod3 in the machines and Speed3 in the beacons, and then have each beacon cover at least 4 machines (if you create long rows of machines it will be 4 effect receivers for all beacons except those at the edges). This results in each machine consuming several MW, and the beacons about 150 kW per boosted machine.

Looks like a balanced ratio of power usage to me.

The only situation where I do mind the power usage is when the factory is in stand-by mode, that is, not producing rockets since I'm working on improvements or expansion. In these cases I like to turn them off because I don't use Solar and I don't want to slowly burn through my fuel for no reason.

MeduSalem's approach of removing the modules with inserters is actually brilliant, but in 0.13 you would probably use a power switch. In my games I have a global red-wire network (because my train scheduler requires that), so I can use that to send a global "off-switch" quite easily to all the relevant parts of the factory that will then disable the beacons along with the factory parts that it boosts (mind you I like to create distributed factories, not all in one spot).

It's probably easiest to monitor the output buffers of the respective factory, and simply disable everything when they are above threshold. It used to be impossible in 0.12, but now it's super easy. So that effectively solves the idle power problem.

[MeduSalem]

Beacons reduce overall energy used by a lot if used properly.

Compared to which setups?

There are only three possible setups to compare:

• No Modules in machines.
• EM2s in all machines.
• PM3s in all machines + SM3s in Beacons.

Anything else doesn't really make much sense.

If you meant PM3+SM3 in comparison to using PM3s only then you are right and no real need to read further. Energywise PM3 only is worse than Beaconized (an efficient setup using beacons is almost twice as efficient than using PM3s without beacons from my measurements)... which is why I don't even count PM3 without beacons as a "legal" option to play with anymore.

... and on a side note SM3 only can be done way more efficiently by just increasing the number of machines using EM2s instead.


In my experience Beaconized Setups only reduce the footprint by a lot (apart from the free item every now and then). But on the other hand the Beacons and Module effects increase the energy consumption so much that you trade space gain for energy consumption. Basically you only increase the Production/Area ratio on account of additional energy consumption.

I calculated a lot of setups for smart furnaces in accurate detail in an excel sheet also considering edge effects where beacons don't cover 8 furnaces and where a furnace might not be covered by 8 beacons because in reality nothing is infinite... and a setup using PM3s in furnaces and SM3s in beacons can never compete with a setup using EM2 in furnaces only when comparing the energy consumption and as long as both setups have the same overall item throughput.

In my measurements (somewhere from past summer or spring, probably should do a new one eventually) the setup using EM2s only had about 9% (8.9MW) the energy consumption compared to the BEST PM3+SM3 setup (97.3MW) I could come up with back then, while both setups had the same overall item throughput of ~8500 Items/Minute. The area the PM3+SM3 took was about 36% the size of the setup using EM2s only.

In other numbers... I had to use 248 Furnaces for EM2 and only 56 furnaces + 60 beacons for the PM3+SM3 setup. Here is a picture of the Smart Furnace I was calculating:

0.13 - Smart Furnace.jpg (570.07 KiB) Viewed 7627 times

Don't wonder about the damn sub stations... Before 0.13 the inserters for Iron/Copper were seperate and I also incorporated Steel Production. And on top of that I tried some other crazy stuff as well with "Smart Beacons" which is why there was no room for Electric Poles. With 0.13 I had to change some things.

Back to the topic... Sure with EM2s you need an awful lot more machines to get close to the throughput of a well beaconized setup, but the EM2s will still reduce the energy consumption to such a low level that the beaconized setup can't compete with the energy consumption.

So the reduced footprint and the extra items are actually the only benefit of beaconized setups. Otherwise we would have to say energy consumption doesn't matter anyways because it can be produced infinitely... at which point it wouldn't matter anymore if one uses beacons or not and how much their power consumption is.

Getting back to the three setups the ups/downs are:

• No Modules in machines. -> No upsides/downsides, but probably the most efficient if one doesn't want to waste a lot of resources on Modules.
• EM2s in all machines. -> Most energy efficient. Takes same space as having no Modules.
• PM3s in all machines + SM3s in Beacons. -> Most space efficient + Extra items. Takes much more energy than having no Modules.

[siggboy]

[*]EM2s in all machines.

If the machine is a chem plant or assembler 2 then yes, otherwise it's better to use 3x EM1, because that saves modules.

Anything else doesn't really make much sense.

A lot of other setups make sense, for example you can use SM3 + EM3 in any ratio up to the speed that you require.

For an almost perfect 1:1 ratio to craft Green Circuits you need 3xProd + 1xSpeed3 in the EC machine and 2xProd3 + 2xSpeed2 in the Cable machine feeding it (of course you don't need a perfect 1:1 ratio of these assemblers but if that's something you care about then it surely makes sense).

PM3 without beacons is still good because it saves resources (and that also indirectly saves energy). It's just that in such a setup Speed Beacons are basically free, so there's no good reason to skip using them.

If you optimize for energy saving then you use Efficiency Modules only and this entire discussion becomes moot, so I don't understand why you talk about it so much

[MeduSalem]

[*]EM2s in all machines.

If the machine is a chem plant or assembler 2 then yes, otherwise it's better to use 3x EM1, because that saves modules.

Anything else doesn't really make much sense.

A lot of other setups make sense, for example you can use SM3 + EM3 in any ratio up to the speed that you require.

Yeah that's true... I consider those very rare special cases which I don't really encounter that often because I only really use modules on intermediate recipes (which mostly happen to be PM3s and SM3s for the beacons). But you are right to correct me on that one.

For an almost perfect 1:1 ratio to craft Green Circuits you need 3xProd + 1xSpeed3 in the EC machine and 2xProd3 + 2xSpeed2 in the Cable machine feeding it (of course you don't need a perfect 1:1 ratio of these assemblers but if that's something you care about then it surely makes sense).

... Albeit it will sound almost like heresy to all the 3:2 perfect ratio people... I am using 4 Productivity Modules in Both the EC machine and the Cable machine behind it... saves a lot of resources.