Factorio Forums

Summary

Putting Efficiency Modules in machines should also reduce their passive energy drain.

What?

Terms I will use:
Consumption: power consumption when a machine is active (example: Assembling Machine in the process of crafting an Engine Unit)
Drain: power consumption when a machine is idle (example: Assembling Machine can't craft anything because it ran out of Steel Plates)
Currently, Efficiency Modules reduce consumption.

Efficiency Modules should reduce drain in addition to reducing consumption.
Example numbers for the sake of discussion: (consumption is same as base game)
Tier 1: -3.33333% drain, -30% consumption
Tier 2: -10% drain, -40% consumption
Tier 3: -30% drain, -50% consumption

(Note how each tier is significantly better than the one before, to provide an incentive for using higher tiers.)
(Also note how the reduction in drain is smaller than reduction in consumption. That, I think, is extremely important because if energy drain is supposed to be a challenge, these modules shouldn't take away the challenge, only lessen it slightly.)
(The consumption could use some balancing, but that is for another thread.)

Why?

1) Logical Sense: It makes sense that Efficiency Modules should reduce drain like they reduce consumption, just to a lesser extent.

2) More options for modders: The API currently doesn't support modules that reduce drain. If this feature was added, it would allow modders to get more creative with their new modules.

3) More useful: Implementing this feature would give players more of a reason to use Efficiency Modules.

4) The silly reason: If you hover over a module in your inventory, you'll see its effects. The Efficiency Module only has 1 effect, Speed Modules have 2 effects, and Productivity Modules have 3 effects. If this feature was implemented, Efficiency Modules would have 2 effects, and they would look like they were more useful. Might that have some psychological effect on players?

Imho it would be kind of interesting if eff. modules instead had a fixed energy drain reduction that also allowes to completely remove the drain. I.e. a T3 Efficiency module could have -50kW drain.

Reasoning:
Personally i never use efficency modules because speed/prod is far better in most situations and you can just spam more turbines/panels to overproduce. If Eff modules had the ability to reduce drain to 0 they would gain some more edge cases where they'd be useful:

Reduce the base load of mostly inactive outposts (miners on large ore fields are often inactive).
Potentially save UPS on inactive machines (as they have 0 energy consumption).

Also the flat reduction would be a unique mechanic and thus make eff modules more interesting to play/experiement with. Instead of just giving a limited percentaged change like everything else.

I've made the mod High Drain, where drain is 10 time higher than by default (1/30 of main energy usage). It makes fast nothing.

darkfrei wrote:I've made the mod High Drain, where drain is 10 time higher than by default (1/30 of main energy usage). It makes fast nothing.

This might sound dumb coming from someone like me, but, how do you mod the drain to be zero?

bobingabout wrote:

darkfrei wrote:I've made the mod High Drain, where drain is 10 time higher than by default (1/30 of main energy usage). It makes fast nothing.

This might sound dumb coming from someone like me, but, how do you mod the drain to be zero?

I think it must be something like that:

darkfrei wrote:

bobingabout wrote:

darkfrei wrote:I've made the mod High Drain, where drain is 10 time higher than by default (1/30 of main energy usage). It makes fast nothing.

This might sound dumb coming from someone like me, but, how do you mod the drain to be zero?

I think it must be something like that:

Code: Select all

for pror_name, entity in pairs (entity_prototypes) do
  if entity.energy_source and entity.energy_source.drain then
    entity.energy_source.drain = 0
    -- or entity.energy_source.drain = nil
  end
end

I think those that have the drain at 1/30th are those that don't have the tag, so entity.energy_source.drain = 0 might be the correct method? 1/30th could be the default value.

bobingabout wrote:I think those that have the drain at 1/30th are those that don't have the tag, so entity.energy_source.drain = 0 might be the correct method? 1/30th could be the default value.

Looking at the base files there seems to be some special treatment for crafting-machine/furnace types, which get 1/30th drain even if nothing is specified. As opposed to things like the roboport, lamp, (etc?) that do not have drain (specified or actual). Whereas the beacon now shows in the tooltip that is has consumption and drain of 480kW each, but actually only consumes 480kW total oO?.

eradicator wrote:Whereas the beacon now shows in the tooltip that is has consumption and drain of 480kW each, but actually only consumes 480kW total oO?.

480 kW by working or 480 kW by idle. Not the summary.

eradicator wrote:Reasoning:
Reduce the base load of mostly inactive outposts (miners on large ore fields are often inactive).

If I remember correctly, electric mining drills don't have any energy drain at all. At least, it doesn't show up in the tooltip.

QGamer wrote:

eradicator wrote:Reasoning:
Reduce the base load of mostly inactive outposts (miners on large ore fields are often inactive).

If I remember correctly, electric mining drills don't have any energy drain at all. At least, it doesn't show up in the tooltip.

Hrng. I guess i should play more again :P (i.e. you're right.)

+1 as it makes sense and i already stuff efficiency modules into everything.
Combined with keeping the perimeter clean of biters, it really delays evolution a lot. Most often i do not even build walls in front of my loosely-spaced non-feeded machine gun turrets as they rarely see any actual biter attacks anyway.
So making them reduce idle power demand too would be a nice (although little compared to the effect on active power demand) bonus.