Power generation nto enough?

[Kalshion]

Right now I am playing a game that has eight colonists in it, I've built myself into the side of a mountain (as I do all the time) but I've noticed something strange. With eight colonists, I'm sitting on 38 solar panels, 5 Wind Farms, and 4 Geothermal Plants. None of this seems to be remotely enough to keep my batteries full (which seem to only operate at 50% Eff'?) I have 36 batteries thus far, and might add more later on.

So I'm wondering, are the current energy sources just rather inefficient or am I not doing something right with my set up?

[Jaxxa]

Where is all of your power going?

Are you certain that all of your power generators are hooked up?

[Coenmcj]

3600~ per Geothermal, 4 should be more than enough for 8 colonists
Plus the 38 Solars and 5 wind farms. and you should have excess, than what you can store in 36 batteries...

How spread out is your base? It sounds like it may be a touch inefficient with lighting/heating maybe

[Kalshion]

Admittedly I may have to redo my game, I do think I made my base a tad 'too' big for the number of colonists I have; something I've always had a problem with given I can't tell how big some things need to be (like the rooms for my colonists). Anyway, here are two screen shots, errr sorry about the side scrolling into my second monitor =(

http://www.starfleetplatoon.com/~suisfonia/Tempfiles/Rimworld1.png
http://www.starfleetplatoon.com/~suisfonia/Tempfiles/Rimworld2.png

Maybe I'm just making things too big and such? Dunno

[Menuhin]

I can somewhat agree that power generation can become an issue, however I do think it is nice that it poses a small challenge.  One of the larger pet peeves of mine in rimworld is Lights 150 power for a standard lamp seems excessive when. 

But I did a rough count of the standard lamps you have counted 47 which basically consumes 2 geothermals.  You can try and reduce them, by spreading them out further in walkways, and removing them from rooms.

You then have 5 growing lamps 2 of which are outside, because plants have a resting period anyway there is little benefit from using a lamp over the sun.  Another thing which kindof works for powering lamps in greenhouses is making a separate circuit with either 2-3 solar panels per lamp.  Doing that will cause the lamp to turn off at night when the light is not needed saving some of the power from the main grid.

If you can put your auto turrets onto lines with switches, you can turn them on and off when needed which is a huge amount of power to be saved.

Depending on the actual map and how the temperature is, you can cut down on heaters by using vents to warm up the bedrooms, and just make sure the hallway is warm enough.  That may sometimes require raising the temp of the hallway so it will warm the bedrooms enough.  This can also be done the opposite way with cooling, and can be done using a 1 wide vent corridor which normally works out to be more energy efficient.  But somewhat of a hassle to use and requires a little more fore planning.

[Tagasaki]

haha, 150W for a standard lamp is like shoving a spotlight to the eyes.

standard lamps do have a radius of 5-6 tiles iirc to lit up the hall without being in total darkness. so space it out if you can.

[Kalshion]

Huh, never thought of doing any of that Menuhin.

I often have those sun lamps outside because I remember reading - think it was on Reddit - that they allow plants to grow even during the night but I'm guessing that isn't the case if they have a rest period (which would make sense, now that I think about)

Think I'll fire up a new game, and try out some of your suggestions (along with others I've found)

Thank ya Menuhin!

@ Tagasaki

Didn't know they had that kind of range, I thought those lamps only had a 3-4 range.

[Tagasaki]

it actually dims out at those range. hover it around and check it out, it's something i noticed but didn't test it out thoroughly if it debuff the colonists for being in the darkness except well when they're at dark (0%) area.

[Menuhin]

as for lamps they have full lighting 7 tiles away, so you can space them 14-17 tiles apart and still have full lighting in your hallways.  If you want to be really thrifty you can space them a little further, because having small specs of darkness here and there aren't really going to affect a colonist while he is walking in the hallway.

Another thing to note on lighting, is that you can use heaters as lights.  And in certain situations they work really well.  1 square away so a 3x3 box around the heater is full lighting.  This can be useful to light small alcoves, rooms, or for a light next to a workbench.  If you just want light and no heat you can turn the temp down very far so it is in its power conserving mode and only uses 10W it will still produce the light you just can't turn it all the way off.  The main draw back to this is ofc the amount of metal heaters use.