Factorio Forums

A lot of entities seem to make the chunks they are placed in active even if they have no power/fuel (or output for offshore pump), they can't do anything by themselves. Other unpowered entities does not do this, which seems like the reasonable thing to do.

Things that activate a chunk even with no power/fuel: Flamethrower turret, radar, rocket silo, steam turbine, chemical plant, programmable speaker, steam engine, refinery, power switch, heat exchanger, boiler, heat pipe, storage tank, pipe, pipe to ground (even orphaned), pump, decider combinator, pumpjack, offshore pump, electric mining drill, burner mining drill, arithmetic combinator, roboport, and all inserters except burner.

Vehicles without fuel (cars, tanks, locomotives) and single cargo-/fluid wagons also activate chunks.

Things like assemblers and science labs correctly don't activate their chunks so it seems a bit weird that a unpowered radar or rocket silo would. I'd guess this is a pretty minor optimization most of the time but it would be nice for players that use power switches to turn of parts of their bases. Or people like me that used unpowered lamps to measure/mark things

Attached a save, not too useful as it's just different things placed in their own chunk, meh.

That's by design. Those entities can't go inactive.

Especially so when an entity using electric power has no power - there's no trigger that tells the entity it has power now since the 99%+ use-case is they have power making such an event wasteful.

Ah, that makes sense. I though it was weird that the assemblers could do it but I see now that inserting the ingredients needed makes them active. I'm guessing the fluid-boxes create the same kind of reaction.

I'm pretty sure you have more constructive things to do (and if you do then please carry on and have a great day!) but if you have time I'm a bit curious about some of the items that don't really seem to fit that explanation, mostly the burner mining drill, which should be able to use fuel insertion as trigger? I'm guessing there are also some special rules for vehicles as without fuel, or locomotive in the case of cargo wagons, they're basically just chests that don't align with the tile grid?

Anyway, thank you for explaining and your hard work. Have a great day!

aaargha wrote:Ah, that makes sense. I though it was weird that the assemblers could do it but I see now that inserting the ingredients needed makes them active. I'm guessing the fluid-boxes create the same kind of reaction.

I'm pretty sure you have more constructive things to do (and if you do then please carry on and have a great day!) but if you have time I'm a bit curious about some of the items that don't really seem to fit that explanation, mostly the burner mining drill, which should be able to use fuel insertion as trigger? I'm guessing there are also some special rules for vehicles as without fuel, or locomotive in the case of cargo wagons, they're basically just chests that don't align with the tile grid?

Anyway, thank you for explaining and your hard work. Have a great day!

The reason we haven't added that logic for burner mining drills/cars/locomotives is because they're either used infrequently or almost always have fuel making the time investment (and potential bugs) not worth it.