Factorio Forums

Ok, so I was playing this evening. I then remembered that I should probably start building some radars since I was planning on setting up my oil processing and i needed to find a good node. After I had set all the radars up, all electricity shut down. I thought this was reasonable because radars draw quite a lot of power. This made my coal supply to my boilers go away so I ended up cutting all power to get the coal back up and running. After I got a steady flow of coal back, I hooked up the factory again and made more steam engines and boilers. My coal supply was still stalling, therefore I made a new batch of generators and tried the same thing again. All of my steamengines are at max potential production but even though my factory is begging for power the engines refuse to power up and start feeding my machines. Only like 4 engines are working at maybe half their normal capacity. I have tried everything i could come up with but I am not the most experienced player so maybe somebody could help me.

Martin

In your second screenshot the satisfaction bar is full, that means that all power consumers get their demand filled. The production bar is roughly 25 procent that means your power producers are running at a quarter of their maximum performance, remember 70 steam engines * 900 KW = 63 MW at maximum production. In your last screenshot the available performance of the steam engine full so far i dont see any issues with the power production.

There's a fair bit of discussion about this very problem.
Suffice it to say, that you have an abundance of power production. So much so, that you're only consuming about 1/4 of what you can produce.
If you do actually run out of power, the top bar will be yellow or red.

Enable the power grid overlay and check if you did not create two of them.
The fact that most of your base is not showing up on power stats would indicate this.

twepy wrote:In your second screenshot the satisfaction bar is full, that means that all power consumers get their demand filled. The production bar is roughly 25 procent that means your power producers are running at a quarter of their maximum performance, remember 70 steam engines * 900 KW = 63 MW at maximum production. In your last screenshot the available performance of the steam engine full so far i dont see any issues with the power production.

Maybe I took the screenshot at the wrong time, my coal plant doesnt get enough power to keep running at max capacity even though it should. The stats fluxuate a lot and I dont really know what to do with them.

vedrit wrote:There's a fair bit of discussion about this very problem.
Suffice it to say, that you have an abundance of power production. So much so, that you're only consuming about 1/4 of what you can produce.
If you do actually run out of power, the top bar will be yellow or red.

Yeah there is plenty of power, however even though everything needs power they are not recieving it. This means my coal plant shuts down and I have to boot up rhe system manually

If you attach your save, it will be trivial for us to troubleshoot .

Is that 20 boilers and 40 steam engines being feed by a single yellow belt? I had it in my head that 10 and 20 were the most you could have? But maybe I am remembering wrong... could be I just do it that way all the time even though a yellow belt could support more.

Mr. Tact wrote:Is that 20 boilers and 40 steam engines being feed by a single yellow belt? I had it in my head that 10 and 20 were the most you could have? But maybe I am remembering wrong... could be I just do it that way all the time even though a yellow belt could support more.

I may need to get another belt in there yeah.

Two things:

* Click the power pole on your minimap to see your wires. That'll make it easy to find where things aren't hooked up.

* I commonly have power problems when I'm routing coal to boilers, plus to furnaces for iron, copper, etc., and I just don't have enough coal. One thing I've started doing to protect against everything grinding to a halt: Wherever I'm using a splitter on a coal line, I filter it to prefer the boiler side, so that it only feeds the furnace side if there's enough coal in the boilers. It's easy to fix the problem of not enough coal if you still have power, but it can be tough to get running again if you completely run out of power.

Third thing: Update your game, just to make sure you aren't running into some bug

Koub wrote:If you attach your save, it will be trivial for us to troubleshoot .

I will put up a file tomorrow thanks

My quick suggestion for getting things running again is to simply remove all but a few of the Radars. They each consume 300kW when running, which is frankly a lot (furnaces consume 180kW and electric miners only 90kW for comparison). You only need a few Radars to scout their full survey area in an hour or so (like ~6 is literally enough to do that). As for why you're having power problems in the first place. I suspect it's an issue of either not enough Coal mining or too much Coal on 1 yellow belt (remember a full double sided yellow belt can only support 13.(3) items/sec throughput, you'd be surprised how fast you can reach that level for Coal and Iron if you build big early on. To help your setup be able to recover from energy stall (due to Coal starvation), I suggest using Burner inserters for the Boilers instead of any other kind of inserter because the burners will always work at full speed so long as they can get fuel (which they will be able to do if there's anything for them to feed the boilers with).

If you want to be able to plant lots of radars without consuming power, give a look at the "show your creations" forum.

I use a simple one from there that uses solar power an accumulator and a bit of circuit logic to turn it on/off so that it does its job while being 100% independent from the power grid.

My stats, I dont know why all of my other machinery is not showing up.

so your factories wont start, and your powergrid doesnt show the factories as connected.
im pretty sure that those are not seperate issues

Hint, in the map overlay u can turn on electric connections.
Bet u a 1K space science that u wil find a broken of section somewhere

First of all, thank you all for taking time out of your day helping me out. After getting a seperate coal belt for the secondary boiler array and messing around with some things I managed to get everything working. Soon I will get a nuclear plant too.

Have a good day guys

mareke883@gmail.com wrote:First of all, thank you all for taking time out of your day helping me out. After getting a seperate coal belt for the secondary boiler array and messing around with some things I managed to get everything working. Soon I will get a nuclear plant too.

Have a good day guys

Congrats on getting it fixed!

When you do move to a nuclear plant, I suggest keeping your steam plant too. You can set up a basic circuit that will keep your steam plant turned off unless your power grid's levels drop below a certain percentage. That way, if you ever run into a situation where your nuclear plant can't keep up with your production, the steam plant will kick on and give you a little bit of time to get your nuclear issue resolved. Having an underpowered nuclear plant is a pain in the butt.

Ren wrote: You can set up a basic circuit that will keep your steam plant turned off unless your power grid's levels drop below a certain percentage.

Err, what percentage are you talking about reading? An accumulator charge?