Brownout icon / Low power icon / Low power warning

[DaveMcW]

improved subject title 2021-04-15 — ssilk

Currently if a machine has no power, it gets a blinking red triangle.

I propose to show this triangle every time a machine has less than 100% electric demand satisfaction. But instead of blinking constantly, it turns off for a percentage of the time equal to electric demand satisfaction.

So at 0% power, it blinks on for 0.5 seconds and off for 0.5 seconds.

At 50% power, it blinks on for 0.5 seconds and off for 1.5 seconds.

At 90% power, it blinks on for 0.5 second and off for 9.5 seconds.

[MF-]

Would you stand still and count the blinks instead of fixing the cause?
also: During a brownout lamps start flickering and inserters do briefly blink I think..
... well... at least used to.

[DaveMcW]

Would you stand still and count the blinks instead of fixing the cause?

Of course not. But I want an extremely obvious alert, not tiny inserter or lamp changes.

[ssilk]

It is not always clear, that you don't have enough power. The mines go slower, the inserters, everything, but it is a long time, so that you might think: "Oh I need more mines..."
That happened to me a lot, before I saw the not so obvios signs of power short.

In other words: yes I would like to have something, which shows a player obviously, that he has too less power. But I let the "how" open.

[The Phoenixian]

So to liven things up and provide an alternate option, here's a thought in that vein: how well do you think an alert of the same style as building damage/destruction, turrets targeting enemies, and insufficient construction robots/supplies, would work? Say if it occured each time any given network's demand exceeded its total production and showed up on the map over the solar panels and steam plants in said network.

[sillyfly]

Bump.

I think this is could be an important addition to the game.

[Koub]

Hi,

Added this topic to the notifications collection : viewtopic.php?f=80&t=16566

[deepdriller]

We have a warning for a device not connected to anything that produces power, and another one for a device receiving no power at all. Why not one for insufficient power?

electricity-icon-yellow.png (3.12 KiB) Viewed 10637 times

I didn't quite get the color right, but you get the idea.

[steinio]

+1

[Tekky]

We have a warning for a device not connected to anything that produces power, and another one for a device receiving no power at all. Why not one for insufficient power?

I'm not sure if I want all my entities in my base to have a flashing icon, just because my base is powered 95% instead of 100%. Therefore, I like it the way it currently is.

According to Factorio Friday Facts #175, it will be possible in 0.15 to create your own alerts using circuit networks. By connecting a battery accumulator to the circuit network, you can trigger a warning when the battery gets low. However, it would be nice to also be able to read the power usage percentage by the circuit network (i.e. that the base is 50% powered). Currently, the circuit network is only able to tell that the battery is empty, but not whether the base is 90% powered or only 5% powered.

[ssilk]

Q: How do you define "insufficient power"?
Explain this with a network that is distrubuted over 3 subnetworks (containing steam, solar and accumulator in different amounts) and switches the non-important parts of your factory on/off depending on current power state.

A: There is no way to define that from the sight of the game, only from the sight of the player. And the player will be enabled to measure the current power-state with circuit network and create alarms depending on what the player has defined as "warning". The alarm-device for example will come in 0.15.

[jackd23]

I'm not sure how it'd work with an accumulator, because I didn't have the tech in my current save, didn't have access to my other ones, and had a 6 days internet outage. So I came up with this one, which requires the loaders mod, and Bob's Inserters or 5Dim's (which is what I'm using here) inserters that work on 90 ° angles, but with a different item count should work on regular inserters as well.

The idea behind it is, the loaders don't require electricity, while the inserters do. So if there is more than 1 of an item in the metal chest, it activates the speaker, because the inserters slow down on a brownout. Which has turned out to be early enough, to signal me a brownout. Because the inserter can't keep up taking items out of the chest, while the loaders chug in items at full speed regardless.

I'm not sure how this would work in vanilla though. Probably accumulators? An X to 1, where X > 1, inserter setup might also work? Idk why we can't just read out the power satisfaction percentage on the circuit network :P

[Engimage]

Accumulators are not reliable to detect this as in a solar setup they are naturally used in the night.

The way to define "Low power" is a gauge we see in every entity about electricity level. If one gets below 100% we can see low power in effect. However there is no way to detect this using circuit network.
I do agree on making this visually destinctable (other than slowing machine working speed animation) however making this a blinking icon is too much.

[moxian]

Just plug a spare accumulator anywhere, and see if it has a flashihg red "no power sign" the accumulator is at 0, you have low power, otherwise - you are fine.
Accumulators have the lowest priority in the electric networks, so they will not be charging if something else is not getting full power already.
It works in solar setup as well. Accumulators do discharge at night, but they should not discharge to 0 (if they do - you don't have enough power).

Picture to illustrate. Left to right: enough power, not enough power, no power

[Zavian]

Well I use accumulators for this purpose. Eg at 20% accumulator lvl large section of my factory switch off. At 10% accumulator lvl the old steam power setup will switch on. I sometimes add an alert based on accumulator lvl so that I know when I need to add more solar panels and accumulator. (Yes this setup will alert me before I actually experience a low power situation, but I consider that if my accumulator are getting down to 10% or so, then it's time to add more power production).

[JohnyDL]

The problem is what defines low power for different people means different things.

To some people they might turn off Science or Rockets with power switches and starve sections of their base of power to either stop completely or slow them down so they can focus their resources elsewhere, maybe their defences during attacks. Any solution you can think of will flag these sections with an annoying "low power" warning

The power source not connected electrical grid and device not connected to anything that produces power warnings have clear well defined uses not for some users but for all users. Low power on power consumers doesn't have that.

That said a general Low satisfaction warning like a biter attack warning for the entire map might be useful then it's 1 warning not hundreds, it might select a random power pole in each electrical network and if production is maxed out and satisfaction is less than 100% then tell the player about the whole grid is having a shortage not about individual machines.

[blazespinnaker]

I remember when I first started playing I thought the game had performance issues and put it aside. It wasn't until I complained to my bro that I found out it was likely a lower power issue.

[QGamer]

If there was an option in the settings menu for this...that'd be pretty good. I imagine on larger bases with power issues it might get annoying.

[valneq]

low power reduces speed of machines, thus reducing the production of fuel, so this typically turns into no power very quickly
→ more opportunity to learn about power "the hard way"

[ssilk]

Na, it’s not so easy. It is possible to play very stable and very long in lower power mode without any alarms.

I don’t see the need for that. If someone don’t want to read the new inbuilt wiki or ignores to lock at his power, it’s ok for me to let him/her quit.