Factorio Forums

There is a gigantic difference between things failing at 80% power satisfaction vs 50% .

>This is similar to the real world. With a blackout/brownout, all kinds of funny stuff will happen with more advanced manufacturing control.

In my expert option, that's 100% nonsense. In the real world, things don't fail like that. When things fail, it's almost always possible to tell. Things don't fail randomly, in a manor that's pretty much impossibly to debug.

In the real world, critical infrastructure gets high priority grid connections that reliably work, while everything else is shut down.

sushi_eater wrote: Tue Feb 03, 2026 2:47 pm In the real world, things don't fail like that. When things fail, it's almost always possible to tell. Things don't fail randomly, in a manor that's pretty much impossibly to debug.

Random and impossible to debug is exactly how logic circuitry fails under low voltage IRL.

Loewchen wrote: Tue Feb 03, 2026 3:07 pm

sushi_eater wrote: Tue Feb 03, 2026 2:47 pm In the real world, things don't fail like that. When things fail, it's almost always possible to tell. Things don't fail randomly, in a manor that's pretty much impossibly to debug.

Random and impossible to debug is exactly how logic circuitry fails under low voltage IRL.

Respectfully, you are not making any sense. Real world control circuits are powered by switched power supplies. As long as there is a tiny fraction of the required power, everything is fine as far as as controls go. In the real world, things would experience catastrophic blackouts, not brownouts with unpredictable behavior.

Can you point to ANY real world example, where low power/voltage for digital controls caused issues?

sushi_eater wrote: Tue Feb 03, 2026 1:39 pm
the dev response was that:

Thanks for the report however this is working as intended. Combinator use the secondary input priority and so other entities get power first before they do.

As far as I’ve ever known, they were not designed to be a critical part of anything.

WTF?????????? How is it acceptable that combinators randomly fail in an unpredictable and pretty much impossible to debug manner? Briefly being low on power doesn't just break any kind of state keeping/counters, it also breaks any combinator setup that properly handles combinator propagation delays. Any non-trivial combinator creation will experience sporadic spurious signals / random failures in low power conditions.

Your attitude is really poor. You should not be yelling "WTF" in a message board about a game. There's no reason to be rude here. Everybody is trying to help you to make your $35 game experience better.

And of course, you didn't bother to point out that the developers, in the next post, did this: "Given how little power a combinator consumes and that there was actually a behavior change around 2.0.65 where combinator's electric buffer was accidentaly reduced from 2x power usage down to 1x power usage, i decided to make combinators have primary power usage and increase their buffer size up to 4x power usage. That means they should be more reliable in the next release. I am not considering this change to be fixing this bug report as i was not investigating any signal losses of combinators."

So, it seems that you're complaining about something that was already changed/fixed, just to complain about something.

I don't get your attitude. The devs claimed that there is no issue. I''m thankful that by some miracle (pretty much including hell freezing over), the devs saw reason and fixed the completely broken behavior.

The thing is the initial dev response was completely unacceptable. Given that kind of dev response, I'll advice anyone to stay clear of Factorio.

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There are literally hundreds of bug reports,where I, as a software engineer would be extremely embarassed because of the jankiness.

IMO, Space Age very, very firmly doesn't make the cut and I wouldn't buy it as stated before. I should simply stay away, which hasn't worked for various reasons,

sushi_eater wrote: Tue Feb 03, 2026 5:30 pm I don't get your attitude. The devs claimed that there is no issue. I''m thankful that by some miracle (pretty much including hell freezing over), the devs saw reason and fixed the completely broken behavior.

The thing is the initial dev response was completely unacceptable. Given that kind of dev response, I'll advice anyone to stay clear of Factorio.

\

There are literally hundreds of bug reports,where I, as a software engineer would be extremely embarassed because of the jankiness.

IMO, Space Age very, very firmly doesn't make the cut and I wouldn't buy it as stated before. I should simply stay away, which hasn't worked for various reasons,

I encourage you to share this thread with a mentor or senior developer.

sushi_eater wrote: Tue Feb 03, 2026 4:18 pm Can you point to ANY real world example, where low power/voltage for digital controls caused issues?

Why don't you google it? There are so many examples, that it is actually considered common knowledge. If you give 380V instead of 220V, you would see almost instant smoke and fire effects. If you give 110V instead of 220V, you would see weird glitches and slow death of electronic. Even relatively simple things like electromotors can be damaged by this. It just not happens immediately and sometimes special effects can only be seen after returning to 220V. Because of later, some people cannot connect cause and effect. Also many devices have power unit, that convert incoming voltage to internal one. In this case power unit takes all damage and degrades quickly(but not die immediately and once again cause and effect become hard to comprehend).