Factorio Forums

Before 0.15.14, beacons would consume power only if they had modules installed. As of 0.15.15 (probably happened in 0.15.14 but was at work when both versions were released so just went straight to 0.15.15), my empty beacons are now consuming power. Their animation is also running all of the time, again, something that never happened before with empty beacons.

I don't mind too much as they would all be consuming power eventually. But when building large sections of my base, I place the beacons down and don't install modules until they're ready to go so they don't waste power.

Beacons were changed to always run in 0.15.14.

Rseding91 wrote:Beacons were changed to always run in 0.15.14.

Then perhaps changing your wording in the changelog would be suitable. It simply says "optimised beacons". Not "made beacons always run so as to use less resources".

xBlizzDevious wrote:

Rseding91 wrote:Beacons were changed to always run in 0.15.14.

Then perhaps changing your wording in the changelog would be suitable. It simply says "optimised beacons". Not "made beacons always run so as to use less resources".

Always-running was just one part of the optimization. Listing every tiny part of each change would make the changelog a few pages every bug fix release and wouldn't be useful to the majority of people reading it.

Well it used to be super convenient that a beacon with modules would not consume power if the factories nearby were idle (if the bonus was not being used by anything nearby). Looks like we lost that feature. Is this on purpose too?

teenkertoy wrote:Well it used to be super convenient that a beacon with modules would not consume power if the factories nearby were idle (if the bonus was not being used by anything nearby). Looks like we lost that feature. Is this on purpose too?

It never worked that way.

But the ability to remove modules from a beacon (say with inserters) to reduce power consumption IS a feature that has been lost now. An alternative could be to finally allow connecting beacons to the circuit network.