Power details

[PFQNiet]

I'm a little bit confused by how power works and am hoping someone can help out!

I first noticed that if I have exactly 20MW of production, and exactly 20MW of consumption, the order of things matters. Specifically, if I had more production and then remove production until I'm down to 20MW, everything works fine, but if I build it up to 20MW then my consumers lack power and the electric network info screen shows "Satisfaction: 20MW / 21.3MW". Where is this extra power demand coming from?

I subsequently found out that my power consumers have a buffer capacity that is slightly higher than their power consumption - specifically, their buffer capacities add up to 21.3MW - it appears to be 1/15th higher than the energy consumption of the machine.

I set input_flow_limit to equal the energy consumption and the machines worked fine, 100% production despite their energy bars not being full. Although, again, if I overbuild power first then the bar does fill and then stays full when I bring production down to equal the demand.

So then I tried setting buffer_capacity to match, only to find that - at least for the assembling-machine I tested with - it doesn't appear to have any effect. Even setting the buffer_capacity to a much higher value, it stayed fixed as if hard-coded to energy_usage*16/15.

My current solution to this is to just rely on the player to build more power rather than juggling with exact values, but especially early-game I'd like things to work well. For example the player has 20MW to play with and machines that draw 4MW, the player should be able to place 5 buildings and right now that only works if you place them in a specific order, which is unintuitive. Can I actually set the buffer_capacity to match what the machine will actually be drawing? Or is that indeed hard-coded and something I should make a modding request for?