Turbines stop accepting steam until rebuilt

Pilchard123 · Post by **Pilchard123** » Sat Oct 03, 2026 2:27 pm

What did you do? / What happened?

Earlier in the save, I built a turbine array as in the screenshot below. It worked fine for some time (I don't know when it stopped working, unfortunately, but I didn't notice it being a problem until just now because my Nauvis factory was quiet while I was off-planet) but then started producing less power than expected. On inspection, some of the turbines appear not to be accepting steam, despite it being high-temperature steam and having worked perfectly well when it was first built. In the screenshot below, some of the now-functioning turbines (the ones on the left, just to the north of the steam pipe; and the ones in the centre, also just to the north of the steam pipe) have already been removed and replaced during my investigation.

: turbines not accepting steam; 10-03-2026, 15-10-32.png (3.61 MiB) Viewed 186 times

Non-functioning turbines that are removed and replaced connect as expected. However, pass-through turbines on the same line do not reconnect until they are in turn removed and replaced. For example, removing and replacing the red turbine below will fix the problem with only the red turbine. The green turbine will remain non-functioning until the green turbine is removed and replaced.

: detail of turbines; 10-03-2026, 15-12-02.png (310.57 KiB) Viewed 186 times

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!

All the turbines should be accepting steam and producing power.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?

It is persistent across save/load cycles, but I have not attempted to reproduce it in a fresh save because I do not know when or how it first happened.

Removing and replacing the affected turbines fixes the problem for the turbines that are replaced.

Removing all the non-Wube mods does not have any effect.

Pilchard123 · Post by **Pilchard123** » Sat Oct 03, 2026 2:41 pm

I rebuilt the entire block with bots (not from the spidertron), and now a different set of turbines is disconnected. It appears that non-functioning turbines can allow steam to pass through. The lower-centre section has a functioning turbine, then two non-functioning, another functioning, and then one non-functioning. The upper-left section has four non-functioning turbines followed by a functioning turbine. An updated save file is attached for comparison.

: 10-03-2026, 15-37-30.png (3.85 MiB) Viewed 173 times

EvilPLa · Post by **EvilPLa** » Sat Oct 03, 2026 3:03 pm

The top half of the boilers have no water, so you might just not have enough steam to feed all the turbines

Pilchard123 · Post by **Pilchard123** » Sat Oct 03, 2026 4:07 pm

Ah yes, that's probably part of the problem - the upper heat exchangers do indeed have no water (luckily I've not actually need the full output of this plant yet), so the turbines couldn't be running at full capacity (well, 91.6% capacity - 48 exchangers make less steam than 90 turbines can use). But I don't think that explains why some aren't running at any speed. I would have expected them to all be running, but at some lower rate, and I wasn't using the full nominal output of the turbines anyway.

Also at load time, the steam pipes are nearly empty - which would make sense if there wasn't enough being produced - but about a minute or so after loading the turbines all start working and rebalance, and the steam pipes start to fill up. The ones that are working on load were pegged at 100% (because the power draw was too high with some not working), but slow down as the others (which never reach 100%) come online. I'd expect that if I'd just built the newly-working turbines, but not from just sitting there looking at it.

Here's a video.

Pilchard123 · Post by **Pilchard123** » Sat Oct 03, 2026 4:13 pm

Ooh, I found an autosave from before it started happening too.

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