Factorio Forums

Hello,
I am not really sure if that's a bug or not but today I tested something very interesting using a creative mod then using just 1 solar panel, 1 constant combinator and lots lots of lamps connected and I wanted to see how many lamps can be turned on while the power satisfaction is low.
Surprising I had more than 3k of lamps using just 1 solar panel and they keep working during the day. It's not even dim the light on the low satisfaction and basically this means that a single solar panel can charge infinitelly lamps during the day?

https://imgur.com/a/O2pkfRW

EDIT: Another issue I just found out is that when I walk around that amount of lamps I have a huge performance impact, from constant 60fps to ~17fps on my high-end specs laptop.

FPS/UPS = 17/60

If I turn off the light by changing the signal value, everything works better again with 60/60 FPS/UPS

Interesting find.

The power seems limited, but to what exact value, I'm not sure. I think when I had many fewer lamps, the light lasted longer, but it was also difficult to judge because my UPS was dropping over time.

Anyway, attached is a save for you devs to play with. ~512k lamps on one solar panel.

The fancy, progressive lamp turn-on (yes, we like it) certainly does take a toll on UPS. As shown in this save, run game speed at 100 and see it run fast, then the lamps begin to turn on and UPS plummets.

Nothing other than the tweaked sandbox scenario to create a character and not give items. Otherwise, it's vanilla and I used console commands to make it a little less painful to setup.

Power usage:
https://imgur.com/a/5aB7olM

The light they generate depends on how much power they have, so while the sprite changes to "on", they don't generate any useful light, making this not a bug.

The UPS drop is acceptable at this scale.
The FPS drop is also acceptable because each lamp generates a rather large light it has do draw to the light layer, leading to tremendous overdraw. It could be optimized but this is not a common enough case to be worth it. Changing "Light render scale" to 0.25 will improve your FPS significantly with a barely noticeable visual degradation.