Hey all, Has anyone else noticed this? Basically, the "Power Left" timer on my Base has been WOEFULLY inaccurate of late. I mean, it's tens of hours out. For example, I just left my Base with the Furnace going, which I know uses a LOT of power. However, Power Left was reported as almost 20 hours. I wander away for about ten or fifteen minutes doing stuff and, upon my return, the Base is entirely out of power. Note: Fully topped up with fuel with the Furnace running my BA reports 49:08 hrs of power, yet it appears to burn through this excessively quickly when I'm not around but I leave devices - such as the Furnace - running. This is not linked to Solar as this particular BA is just fuel-powered. Just wondered whether anyone else has experienced this recently?
You probably know that 1 in game hour is 1 real life minute. So if you were away for 10-15 min, it's already 50% / 25% power left. May be you wandered more I have not had any problems with fuel power estimations recently, but I can do the test run. You mentioned that your base does not use solar power, but solar power was something that interested me more. As for findings: if I leave the moon / planet during dusk at the base, capacitors and fuel are sure to be found empty… if I leave the moon / planet during midday, the capacitors keep on charging Feels like when the planet is leaved, there is no day / night change. I also left the furnace that was supposed to use all the capacitor power and 25% of fuel, and my estimation was perfectly correct when I returned. As for your question. Do you wander the planet or somewhere off?
Not true. The power left is displayed in real life time and not game hours. If it says you have, for example, 24 hours of power left (with a constructor running when you checked it) then that means, with that constructor running non stop, you should have 24 real life hours of power remaining. The game is and has been bugged with the background power calculations for years now. This isn't a new thing and it is well documented as happening. The devs have just never been able to fix it in any way.
Solar was never a cause of this issue in the first place. It just happened to be that people saw it happening more often when they used solar so too many people assume that solar is the cause in some way. This bug has predated solar even being added to the game. The bug definitely came first. So yes, to answer your original inquiry, you are not alone in having this happen. Myself and many others have had this bug strike for years now even on structures that have never had solar installed in the first place. I've had it happen in games where I never used a single solar panel or capacitor in any way. I've had structures lose hundreds (multiple) of hours of time remaining in less than a half hour of being away. From the players perspective there is no cause. No steps that I have done similar other times it has happened. It is just a general bugged calculation on the devs part. Honestly, it is about time the devs either go through the associated code line to line until they find the cause once and for all, or rewrite the associated code from scratch until it is resolved. This bug is too major of a bug for it to have persisted for long as it has and just keep getting marked as "unable to reproduce". It needs resolved one way or another.
If you stay on a planet. When leaving the planet or system I expect a 6x multiplier for the worst case.
I mentioned I was not using Solar as issues with Solar Power have been around basically forever, and I wanted to be clear it wasn't linked with "daytime" hours left affecting the numbers. Basically, there is no day / night cycle when the playfield isn't loaded and, apparently, whatever state the base was in when you left is what counted. I.e. if I was nighttime when you left the game will calculate the time you're away from your base as nothing but nighttime = zero recharge. I've had fully charged bases be totally depleted on return despite average solar output well exceeding power usage, just because I left at night. Checking in real time the Power Left does indeed appear to be in real Hours and Minutes, not the weird timescale the game uses for Day / Night cycles. So, expecting that to hold true when away from the Base is a reasonable expectation I feel. I don't quite understand how the game gets it quite so wrong, there must be an error in the calculations. As I understand it, there's no background / low priority process keeping track of this stuff. Rather the game saves the Base's state when it's uninstanced as the player leaves the area and the "chunk" is unloaded. Then, upon the player returning, the game does some simple maths to calculate the progress of Production queues, fuel usage, plant growth etc. ALL of these items are basically all over the place. I see plants not growing and production queues not completing reliably when I'm away from the Base. I think these "catch up" calculations need checking / updating. Thought: I do wonder if a genuine low attention-type process would be a better answer than the current broken "catch up" approach. Perhaps just for player assets rather than ALL game POI's. I cannot see this would have a huge processing requirement, if implemented well.
I can tell you it's no fun when you get hit with the compounding part of this bug (or related bugs). Such as you set up a crafting queue and have enough power for a real life week with the constructor running. You then leave for a short 20-30 minute trip, and upon your return you find your structure out of power, nothing from the crafting queue actually crafted, all the resources used as if it did craft everything, and to top it all off everything in your fridge is spoiled and your crops are dead. All of this is impossible to have happened in that amount of time but it happened anyways. Even assuming I somehow screwed up the amount of power in the base (I didn't) plenty of the things in the fridge couldn't have had enough time to spoil. The resources were used without any return of end product and the queue was still where it would have been when the structure unloaded. Now I have had that exact scenario happen. I've read reports of other people having it happen. This is an issue with some background calculation or calculations that affect, well, seemingly everything. Probably the away from structure timer/calculation since that would also mess up the day/night cycle calculation. The bug hits power usage calculations, crop growth, terrain placeable timers, etc, etc, etc. Anything with a timer internal or exposed seems to be a target.
This, honestly, is one of the major reasons I like to play Reforged Eden. They have two mechanics that vastly improve quality-of-life: devices that produce negative power drain, allowing for infinite runtimes without burning fuel; and hydroponics bays that are all two-stage and sprout much more consistently than other crops. The infinite power thing may seem like a cheat, but when you are playing on a server trying to live a nomadic life and can't rely on these buggy offline fuel calculations then it's a godsend. Even so there are some oddities. For example, I have a CV with enough passive power regen that it can run a constructor for free, and I have no trouble queuing up full production and having it run to completion while offline. If I queue up the same job on my BA space station running more than enough active solar, the queue will not produce anything while offline. Very inconsistent.
The calculations have been bugged for a long time now, possibly ever since they were first added (power and crafting etc used to not calculate when not rendered). It's very frustrating if playing on a server because to run your fridge or keep your crops from dying you need easily 3-4x the fuel capacity you think you need. And even when using solar that means you have to wait for a clear day before you log off. It's super tedious for no good reason. For single player it doesn't matter as much since the game doesn't run while you're not in it but for servers they run 24/7.
All this can be mitigated if the base is built in space near some O star. The power supply from solar panels will be enough to keep a teleporter in always ON state without capacitors. And if you add a sensor to switch a teleporter on/off when nearby, the saved power can be used on other stuff like constructors.
Also if you build your base as separate modules you can have a farm module and a fridge module separate from your construction so if for some reason the construction module runs out of power your crops and fridge are safe.
BA compounds mitigate the issue, but they don't solve it. Solar is great in suitable playfields. Doesn't help you much if you're way out in the boonies living off what should be a pretty sweet fusion cell operation. I wonder if the game is getting confused ideas about device states. My first spaghetti-at-the-wall fix would be to stow every manufacturing device on a BA that I don't plan to leaving running while I'm offline. Maybe having fewer devices to misunderstand will result in a less baffling rate of fuel consumption. It can't be that no one else has already thought of and tried this, though.
Bottom line. Base has plenty of fuel. Base "runs out" of fuel anyway when the player is away. While we may be able to mitigate the issue as players, this is a bug that needs fixing. Considering it's likely quite common to want to your Base doing stuff while you're away, be it making stuff, growing stuff or simply stopping stuff spoiling. It's a pain to return to find production queues barely started, plants having not grown and food to have spoilt because the base consumed 10x the amount of fuel it should have, but other tasks have NOT progressed at all.
Some players might. But without access to a Furnace and Deconstructor on a CV, I need to return to base to recycle stuff. Regardless, bug needs fixing.
