Thread by @GeePawHill

Oxygen Not Included: Gonan fire up sandbox mode and play around with battry-switching power distribution in an effort to get more than just theoretical knowledge about it.

The problem: there are economies of scale in power production. We want generator centers, so we can fuel, cool, and control them more efficiently in clumps, instead of slapping generators down any old place. This means we have to store & distribute that power.

Wires have load limits, and if we exceed their load limits, they burn up. We can use heavi-watt wire, then, and run it from our generators to a bunch of transformers, each of which limits the load on the consumer side of their circuit.

But heavi-watt wire is painful. It consumes a lot of resources, creates massive bad decor, and must be connected through levels in ways that take up tiles and space.

And when you use heavi-watt, you have to step it down with transformers, which themselves take up space and materials.

Solution: load is calculated based on power-consumers, like fridges and computers and pumps. But *batteries* are not considered power-consumers. If we had a wire between any number of generators and a battery, it wouldn't matter how much that battery drew, it won't blow a wire.

So. On the consumer side: make battery-pairs with some switches and logic. At any given time, *one* of those batteries is feeding the consumers, and *one* of them is being charged from the spine.

When the consumer battery drains below a certain level, we switch things. Now the charging battery becomes the consumer battery and the consumer battery becomes the charging battery.

And because the spine doing the charging is only ever connected to a charging battery, never directly to a consumer, the load limits don't come into play, and we can make that spine out of *any* wire, not just heavi-watt.

Further, there is no need for a transformer anywhere, seemingly only if our spine is under 20kw, which I'm sure you'll appreciate is one hella lot of power.

So we trade regular wire, power-shutoffs, some automation, and pairs of smart batteries, and get rid of heavi-watt wire and transformers. And we *still* get clumps of generators for our economies of scale.

Aight. Lemme set up some petroleum & petroleum boilers. I'm just going to block out a space and sandbox it all in. This nasty-looking thing is our simulated power-center. It can generate 10kw. It stores its power in that big-assed battery array. One extra battery is for control.

THIS TOOK A LONG TIME. Possibly, cuz I'm a doofus, and didn't fully grasp the "handedness" of the automation wiring.

The crap to the right of the big messy power plant is a "transformer flipper" rig. The two layers above it represent two power consumers. They'd be at different locations. Note: zero heavi-watt wire is used.

There's a pending issue here. A very long-lived bug happens such that a battery flipper -- that's just the two-battery-two-power-shutoff, which is the entire consumer end and part of the producer end -- gets stuck if you load/save while it's switching.

There are fixes, and I need to understand what they're doing. One of them looks really simple, which would be cool.

And I still haven't tested the part of the transformer-flipper that lets me set priorities on the producer clumps so that, say, we always draw solar first, then petroleum, then nat gas, then coal.

I think I'm gonna test that first, then go after the bug-fix part.

This works. The h2 only runs when the overall battery power drops <75 here, otherwise it's just the petroleum.

Now for that bug-fix, which I've read and read and read about, but every blueprint uses different automation, and as is so plainly obvious, I am a bear of very little brain.

I pinged the forums on the bug. Reading the vast amount of stuff around this topic is wildly confusing, so I asked for some help.

The forums responded brilliantly, and now, in spite of myself, I think I understand how to use switching batteries correctly, to avoid heavi-watt entirely. Here's the thread, I'm not gonna walk through this until I use it in real life.

forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/1…