[Mod rerquest] Diodes for directing electircity

[Shabazza]

Implementing diodes has been suggested more than one time but sadly they never found their way into the game.
This is thing that lets current only flow in one direction. From higher potential to lower potential. Or to translate it to Rimworld:
A thing that lets electricity flow from a grid section with more available free power (= not stored power, but excess power) than another section.

So I'd like to have a mod that adds such a diode, either as a piece of special wire that can be build the same way (in walls ect.)
or a special dedicated diode block.

This would be awesome as we then could priorize certain power grid parts over others. For example making life support grids like heaters/coolers
the last ones to fail upon power shortage, without
having to setup completely separate grids that cannot support each other during normal operation without manual intervention.
(like charging batteries when there is a surplus of power somwhere while not discharging them in case of a shortage from lower-prio grid parts)

[Alistaire]

Your suggested setup of tiered power shortage still requires one to build completely separate grids for each tier.

If your main power is the highest tier (first to go) it won't reach any of the lower tiers and all of them require their own power or otherwise they wouldn't be able to support themselves during a power shortage.

[Shabazza]

It doesn't.
Example with diodes:

Code Select Expand


PWR Gens -> generic consumer
         -> batteries tier 1 -> diode -> more important consumer
                                      -> batteries tier 2 -> diode -> critical important consumers
                                                                   -> batteries tier 3


EDIT:
So in this case if the main power generators fail, the two tiers of batteries that come first will still feed energy to the critical grid part until they die.
And tier 3 will never supply energy back to the less important systems, keeping it's own availability up to the very end or till the problem is fixed.
You could even imagine multiple of such tiered "trees" and limit failures of more generic sections to their direct sub-sections while not sacrificing supplemental effects during normal operation.
A beautiful cascaded energy network.

[Alistaire]

How is that a better idea than building all batteries at the critical important consumers. In your oddly specific situation where you're somehow
invaded by an enemy that somehow focusses on your power network (which no enemy in the game does to begin with) you would have more
energy to support your temperature regulation for a longer period of time. Under no circumstances do you need workbenches to fix your power
generators but under all circumstances do you need temperature regulation to fix your power generators. If your autodoors power down it's an
inconvenience in terms of time which does not at all weight up against the time you would gain placing all batteries at your temperature regulation.

[Shabazza]

Without a diode, it doesn't matter where I build my batteries. They are hooked up to the whole net
and will be used by every consumer in the net. That's not what I want.
I want to charge / supply critical components by a part or the whole net while not carrying the burden of the whole net in case the power supply
is disrupted partially.

I guess we can do this even differently, without a diode:
Having a "Priority" (high, medium, low) for each block that consumes power, we could define which of them should be kept alive in case of power shortage and which to deactivate to save the remaining power to the more important parts.
It's a similar approach, but setup at each consumer individually instead of dividing the net.
This would probably be much easier to setup, because you then don't need to build a specific net topology.
Now that I meditated over it, this second approach seems even more appealing than the one with the diode...
And is probably also easier to implement.