Combating solar storms

[wendo]

I'd love some way to combat solar storms, or partially combat them. For example if my base is in a mountain and powered by a geothermal station also in the mountain then that should be protected from the solar storm. Anything outside should still be affected but as long as I have enough power generation inside my base I should be safe.

The same goes for ship reactors, if they were built under a mountain (simply to power a base) or right next to a mountain they should continue to function, since it's designed to fly around in space, where solar radiation is a much bigger problem. In fact assuming wire is considered shielded it wouldn't matter where the reactor was built

[Evul]

Agree! A way to defend against it should be awesome.

[migsidi]

Yeaa, i feel kind of helpless, when theres a solar flare.

[Chibiabos]

Very much so, particularly for hydroponics.  Devilstrand is ungrowable in hydroponics because solar flares happen too frequently for devilstrand to grow to maturity, killing all devilstrand.  The option to grow devilstrand in hydroponics tables is just an evil "haha, all that work and power for nothing!" joke thanks to solar flares. :/

[wendo]

I'd almost add that having batteries in a mountain would/should protect them too, but then it starts negating the efftect completely so maybe just as long as you have a local generator

[BinaryBlackhole]

Magnetic shields to stop the solarstorm that way people won't have to tunnel in mountains and guns can still work.

[Chibiabos]

Maybe batteries should be treated as Uninterruptible Power Supplies, as a defense against Solar Flares, allowing your equipment to still run (but no active power generation ... no charging from wind/solar/geothermal ... so however much of a charge your batts have when it hits, that's all they have to go on, and you might have to shut down some devices to keep the most criticial items powered [heaters? lights? cook stove? production equipment? hydroponics tables?]) until the charge is gone (or the flare has passed).

[Noobshock]

Yeah, solar flares really feel like bullshit, especially when it comes to devilstrand in hydroponics. If that's the only way Ty's found to "balance" it, it's not particularly good. It's a huge time investment, it needs space, power and a significant amount of materials to setup the hydro bins if you want your harvest to be of any relevant size, and then there's this chance that the game basically says "well screw you". Autolose events you can't do anything about just plain suck, especially when they affect big time and resource investments like this. Then again the problem is probably just how frequent they are. Should solar flares really happen more than maybe once or twice a year?

[Chibiabos]

Yeah, solar flares really feel like bullshit, especially when it comes to devilstrand in hydroponics. If that's the only way Ty's found to "balance" it, it's not particularly good. It's a huge time investment, it needs space, power and a significant amount of materials to setup the hydro bins if you want your harvest to be of any relevant size, and then there's this chance that the game basically says "well screw you". Autolose events you can't do anything about just plain suck, especially when they affect big time and resource investments like this. Then again the problem is probably just how frequent they are. Should solar flares really happen more than maybe once or twice a year?

Devilstrand is a new balance problem that came with Alpha 8, which introduced growing seasons (which means Devilstrand can't grow outdoors in Boreal or cooler biomes, maybe even the regular ones with slightly longer growing seasons, not sure, haven't tested)

[Noobshock]

Even if the intent was to make sure it's not grown in hydroponics and this problem is "new" to A8, it's a heavy-handed and inelegant way of effectively forbidding it. Why even have it listed in potential hydroponic crops if the game is designed to make sure it basically won't happen? If it's in the list of crops, I'm going to go ahead and assume that it's reasonably possible to complete a cycle. In practice, it's borderline impossible. This is the kind of design choice that feels like trolling to the player.