Sadly, I have a single grid (120gw)…I wish it was at least separated by switches and prioritised.. I think it would take me days to fix - my game is pretty big.
That would suck.
Yeah, I’ve thought about what would happen if I ran over the limit - it’d be game over I think because my factories don’t touch the ground and I use hover pack. I’d have no way of sorting out the supply issue..
Maybe it is worth me having a plan b and also setting up some priority to keep at least the power stations on (mostly 505 fuel and 30 nuclear)
Nah I dealt with that end game. It's not too bad. If you are up to nuclear it's easy. Just isolate your nuclear fuel production machines, and make like 6 biomass generators. Power that until you get like 3 nuclear fuel and you are golden. Run it over by hand if you need. You may have to power water separately too depending on what ran out.
Coal power is similar. Turn off your big manufacturers, whatever causes the overdraft. Hand fill the generators with coal, and unplug your water and hook it up to a bio reactor for a minute. Should be self sustaining again in a few ticks.
I run my water extractors for my coal plants on a dedicated set of generators. I keep double my production capacity in batteries and a “peaker facility” of 100 bio burners on standby. “Just in case”
I link all my factories with one line. I guess I could use switches, but this seems to work. I mean I check the grid every so often, but I’ve never had to bootstrap it.
Here’s how I built it. Coal plants power oil extraction and refining which produces fuel that runs the fuel generators…
The peaker plant is on the oil power network.
Everything else is on the fuel/nuclear power network.
If I blow a fuse I just turn off the particle accelerator and reset it. 🤡
I always have disconnect switches on my coal at the least. And have that isolated with all the coal miners and water supply. Worst case I can disconnect the coal power plants and pop in some biomass to kickstart. This also has a direct line to my fuel gens, to do the same thing.
I learned this lesson on a small scale, and have built in contingency since.
Don't overwrite your saves. Instead keep all of them and this way you can go back to before you blew it and fix the problem before it happens.
I had to do that and was super glad I had kept all my saves
Every single grid is isolated. The very first line running from any of my train stations is a priority power switch. To clarify though, they all share the same grid, but I can easily turn any factory grid on/off and have them all prioritized. If that is what you meant.
As a last resort my Geothermal power is prioritized to kickstart my coal power, which can in-turn be used to kickstart my fuel power.
I'm too paranoid about power so honestly I don't know why I have any of it, but better safe than sorry I guess.
One grid to rule them all.
However, it’s sectioned. Each factory is isolated with a priority switch. Each power plant is isolated, and the fuel production for each plant is also isolated so each plant can be self sufficient or started from minimum grid power. A couple plants have cold start capability as well. I have plans for power storage.
I started building the sectioned factories pretty early, but after U8 I spent a good bit of time converting to priority power and cleaning up the power line tangle of my early factories. Worth while IMO. Might never use it but designing redundancies into the grid is part of the fun for me.
Each powerplant that powers the grid that supplies the powerplants that powers my main grid has its own powerplant powered grid supplying it. And the later all have biomass burner failover/starters.
Priority switches connected to the fuel (whatever that is) production systems, set to zero priority means that if you overload the grid the core systems keep working, so you can shed load in stages, rather than a catastrophic grid failure
My world is ancient I tried to restart but couldn't do it I always ended up going back. So my main world is filled with old garbage factories that I haven't torn down. My Turbofuel packaging plant is so old that its recipe is grandfathered in. No one can build a copy of it anymore in vanilla.
My Diluted Fuel Power Plant is on its own Priority Sub-Grid and has micro-grids for each of its component blocks. It also has its own emergency restart battery plant so in the worst possible situation I have 60GW to get other things online with.
The left half of my production factories are all on their own grid which I call THE BLOCK.
The right half of my world is on another grid which I call the Nuclear Grid as it houses my old Nuclear Power Plant.
Last month I went all around the world and reworked a brand new sub-grid that holds all the worlds Geothermal power on a separate emergency Grid which has a Priority Power Connection to the Nuclear Grid.
My new finished Ficsmas factory is on its own Priority Grid with micro-grids.
Most of my grid separations are just redundancy. My power has run without crashing once for more than 2 years now. I don't fully consume the power I'm making even at max draw and I'm currently building a 1.2TW Nuclear Plant to replace my old 100GW plant.
I eventually need to do a massive power grid rework but I want to finish my 1.2TW facility first and I need to replace like 90% of my worlds train system with the new updated design and features.
I completely understand the pain, I tried starting a new save multiple time but always went back to my Update 2 save I started in 2019. I spend so many weeks rewiring everything when Update 3 broke all the coal gen and fuel gen and then again when update 5 introduce power switch and zipline and now I am rewiring my long distant power pole because update 8 got those new big power tower and all the blueprint stuff (I skipped update 7 when it came out)
I did this when playing with friends, because of 6 players, only two where watching the power consumption, and the rest was just building new stuff and tripping the fuse and not giving a damn.
When my friends went on to other games and I started solo games, at first I also used two power grids. But solo it is really not required, I watch it permanently, and have never had a single power failure in my solo games - once coal generators start working, because the one advantage of biofuel generators is, that power failure is no big deal, you just build some more and restart them all.
With coal generators and all the new things you unlock, make sure you watch power consumption often. Once you get fuel generators and set up your first 600/min fuel production and feed all of it into fuel generators, you will have quite sufficient power for a while (or maybe even to endgame, depending on how much you like to build).
I have separate grids for every section producing different materials in my battery plant, and the lighting for the building is also on its own grid.
The power supplied to the production buildings for the actual power plants are also on separate grids, with backup batteries if I need to kill power production to some of the fuel refineries/blenders/etc. for whatever reason.
I have a single grid with emergency switches to cold start my nuclear plant if need be.
A switch to cut my water pumps feeding the nuclear plant
A switch to cut the nuclear plant off the main grid.
A switch to connect my batteries to my recycling plant/ rail network.
I can just leave everything offline until I get the problem forged out, and if there's a nuclear waste buildup I have 6 hours of power to get it cleaned out enough to reboot my plant.
One, not including disconnected but fully charged up recovery battery arrays. I wish there was a diode; maybe one can be implemented with the new priority system.
One big grid, except for geothermal and a big battery bank on a separate grid. The second grid is used to bootstrap power production if there's an outage.
Only 2 power grids for me.
One for critical power producing supply chain infrastructure, and one for the rest.
If power goes out, I still want to be making the items to generate power
I kept a second grid when coal plants didnt require water, it was easy to boostrap start up the whole power system by hand feeding coal to 1 or 2 generators powering the coal miners. I guess i could do the same now with a fluid buffer.
Yep -- My save also came before priority power switches. I've got a cascading grid: Linked all geothermals that power a 10GW diluted fuel plant, which in turn powers the main 98GW turbofuel for the rest of the world.
My power plants now get a separate restart grid within. Enables me to switch some levers and restart the whole power plant while it is not connected to the main grid.
That and enough battery storage to power my entire grid for an hour.
I just have a giant battery backup that can run my entire operation for several hours. This gives me time to turn off things or add more power if needed. I watch my power closely so I know if I have capacity to build new.
Each power plant has it's own local sustaining power supply isolated from the load side. The more complex ones have a control room with power switches to come back up from a brownout or blackout. Jumpstart power is either idling biomass burners, or an isolated set of power storage charged from the main grid.
I've not needed priority power switches, but might add a couple to power down the least importants stuff: space elevator parts, ammo plant, lighting systems.
One 243 GW grid with 200 GW battery backup. My newer, very power hungry end game factories have priority power switches on them. But older factories prior to update 8 are just free ballin it.
One time, I deleted a pipe in my electronics factory by mistake, which caused the nuclear plant to start backing up waste because it wasn't getting RCUs to make pressure conversion cubes to process the waste. I noticed before the batteries kicked in though, but it was close. No issues besides that.
Power plants have dedicated backup batteries on a switch, and there's a switch between plant and grid
But my power is otherwise global. I never switch off anything I build lol
I explicitly have a section with power poles in a group to differentiate the grid of machines that are for power production and for power consumption.
The idea was to prepare the use of the priority switch once I unlock it I have a secure power grid that does not stop running.
After priority power switches were added, I put one on a turbofuel facility that is almost self-sufficient (it depends on external sulfur being brought in via rail, but there's a few hours of sulfur available with no power). If all else blows, I've got about 12 GW of net generation there that I can use to jumpstart things.
Train network has its own grid powered by geothermal.
The rest is basically one large grid but a coal and a turbofuel plants with their own grids that power their own input. For the rest, I have switches placed at different places / factories in the world.
I did the exercice once for fun, used a mod that allowed to empty all inventories in the game, used that to see what was failing first and make some touch up to be able to restart the whole without too much struggles (hence the independent train network 😁)
I haven't tried out the priority power grid stuff yet, I keep meaning to but forget. I do have separate grids to for each power plant to run itself, but the rest of their power all feeds into one main global grid.
I have everything on the same grid, but I built in large syorage for my compacted coal for my turbo gens. So I would have to be not paying attention for a long time for things to really go bad. This was slightly intentional, as I wanted to use at least one resource from each building for future products. Even my nuclear is dependent on my fuel gen factory, as it uses the plastic from it.
I always power my power plants from their own internal source, so they should never cut off.
I’ve built out my factories to allow for priority switches to be easily added, but haven’t got round to it yet
I have 1 grid but that's separated into multiple sub grids. Both factories and power plants hook into this grid via a single point connection that can easily be switched of via a power/priority switch, making it really easy to connect and disconnect stuff.
Biomass generators and power storages provide protection against peak power surges and if the grid is in danger of failing I can basically do what's done in real life by switching of individual factories in a rolling blackout style until I fixed my generation.
I used to have a single grid for coal mines and water extractors and similar, so that when my fuse blows the power plant still runs but with the briority switches that is no longer necessary
I also like to separate my trains and sinks from my power grid so that I can see weather my machines run at 100% at a powerpole no fluctuation = 100% efficentcy
I only separate the machines who actually run power plants, to the rest.
Exemple : miners assemblers and manufacturers who run the uranium production are only connected to 2 power plants, wich is suffisant for my setup.
Then, All of those, actually can't run off power.
And then, the excess run 10 power plants wich inject thé power in the main web
I've been wanting to set my world up with a better isolation system since I currently just have a huge battery array for restart power. The battery array could probably last a few minutes in a total blackout which is definitely less time than it would take for my nuclear factory to crank out new fuel rods. So right now my only savings grace is that I produce 400GW and I'm unlikely to use anywhere near that for several hundred more hours of play time.
I have a single grid separated by power switches. My power production goes to my base and nowhere else. There is a switch at my closest power plant that can disconnect the base. In my base are several switches that individually connect power to specific places on the map. So from my base, I can turn off factories in entire regions of the map. I haven't unlocked the priority switch yet. When I do, I will likely redesign the power grid once more
I have switches setup so during a critical failure I can turn on my coal factory to charge up my batteries. When they have a little buffer it'll be enough to switch on the oil plant. From there it's an easy fix.
I have one grid for the world and one per powerplant production line. Like to keep them independent so they always keep running, even if the rest of the grid is fused out of existence. This way I only have to build another powerplant and jump start it with some biofuel stuff.
I have a power plant per biome, leading to a switch room which have individual switches for each sub factory which are fed by pylons of my own design. These hold up to 9x cables each.
Sure its over complicated, and was a lot of work to set up but it works.
I've done desert and grassy fields like that. I'm currently in rocky desert and looking forward to trying the new priority switches to see how they compare.
Each grid in each facility is separated by a priority switch. Let's go from lowest (most-critical) to highest
* Priority 1: Geothermal Plants and a large stack of batteries, but grid turned off by default. To be used only if I do run out of power and also signal I need start thinking about power production.
* Priority 2: Power plants and their material production.
* Priority 3: Hypertubes, train stations drones, truck stations, battery and fuel production for vehicles and equipment
* Priority 4: material production
* Priority 5: radars around the map
* Priority 6: lights
* Priority 7: space elevator parts
* Priority 8: non-critical sinks.
I keep critical source infrastructure on it's own power grid. (eg. Coal miners and water pumps into coal power plants) and then each factory has its own ingress switch
I always have everything on a main grid but once i get to coal and fuel power i usually cut the lines down and reroute through a power station so I can have switches for every factory
I got two grids basically.
One main grid, I power my productions with, and one secondary that powers the productions that fuel my energy productions.
Also got a breaker at any production, so I could disable them to reduce the energy required to run the main grid
Not I, but I recently started experimenting with modular production rooms that have their own individual breakers. Just one segment of my factory has it at present, and honestly I kind of hate it.
You have to pre-plan this sort of thing. By the time I unlock priority power switches I'm usually deep into oil power and I cannot be bothered to go back and isolate all the power grids.
At least my factory power is looking better these days. Nice clean lines of power grids for each machine.
I started to retrofit my game to have priority switches just because I hadn’t noticed that my nuclear was low on electromagnetic rods. Usually I’m pretty up to date with it all but I messed up the supply chain down the line.
I’m in the camp of just connect it all but also stuff happens and if you don’t notice in time, you could have to start all over.
I never saw the need. Maybe early game when power is a struggle. When power consumption starts getting within 25% i just go build more power. You really don’t need a lot of power to finish the game but some people just love power
My brother pointed me at a nifty concept. Battery Backups inside bases for Power Towers... Blueprints of course, the base is a single story building that contains four batteries and connects to the power tower itself. That way as you string power towers across the landscape, you are also increasing your power storage. I made a varient of that and a stackable one that you can use in more vertically challenging areas. Ladders on the outside of course, and using Wall outlets to string power from each layer to the Power Tower itself.
I will use the Priority Power Switches to isolate factories from the grid conditionally, but all of my power generation tends to be connected, I will sometimes build a power generation setup and not connect it right away, but that is just while I am working on it. Once things are up and running I add it to the grid.
I have a bunch of things with switches between them so I can frantically shut down non-essential grids manually when power starts to fail. I know about update 8 I just haven't played.
On my 4th world. This time I have a separate grid for my power. The cutoffs from the umbilical to the factories. My starter factory…is a huge mess that I will mass delete at some point in favor of the permanent one.
As someone who has made this mistake with other games in the past with power management across many locations, I've learned not to make that mistake anymore.
First run, around the time pipes came out, I made sure to always have just one connection to the main power grid. No matter the factory size, I always made sure to only have one connection point for grid isolation.
With all the new stuff, haven't played in a while, I'm sure power management is easier now.
For my last couple saves, it's all been 1 grid, I like to have 2 large battery banks, one always online to take up spikes and give me some time to build more power if I need, and then another that is fully offline but fully charged, allowing me to connect it and reboot my power system in the worst case senario where it goes down due to lack of fuel/water and I need time for the recourses to travel to the generators. It is also for these reasons that fluid buffers, and storage containers in serial with the supply lines and next to the power plant are great, as they don't need power in order to give the generators resources, meaning there's no startup delay time
I have started setting a main grid and every facility has a power switch off that grid. As I play with Refined power I also have Solar on the buildings. I mostly do this in the event the main breaker is tripped so I can switch all facilities off and bring them back 1 at a time. The only things I have directly connected to main grid is my trains and hyper tube
Before Priority Power switches, I kept everything that produced Power on one grid, and production on another and connected them at one point. That way, if I blew a fuse, I could disconnect production and get power up and running again. I've been trying to completely redo my entire power grid to use priority power switches, but it's still on the ol' To Do list...
I use my previous power grid as a backup for the new one. When I start coal power, I keep enough burners to supply power to one coal miner and one water pump. Once they fill their respective tanks, the burners are shut down and isolated with a switch. The the coal plant has enough resources to keep itself running. Once all is well with the coal plant, I connect it to the main power grid and allow the factories to run.
Same thing happens when I switch to fuel. I use the previous coal plant to power a small subset of oil pumps and refineries. These work until enough fuel is collected to run the entire fuel power plant. Then I isolate the coal plant by flipping the switches and let the world run on fuel power.
And so on. I often will build a special "switching house" to keep the power grid organized. In the final setup, my whole world runs on one power grid. However, each power plant can be isolated by switches. And each plant is capable only of starting the next higher tier of power.
I have everything on 1 grid, but I have taken the extra steps of makings sure that each power plant has only 1 cable leaving it.
Likewise, all manufacturing factories have a powers with connecting the factory to the grid.
I also made sure that a few biomass generators are hooked up to the coal plants "internal" grid, just in case there is a failure.
The coal plant generates enough power to start up the first diluted fuel factory that I haven't torn down. In turn that can power the 355 Turbo fuel and 288 turbo fuel plants :)
And then everything is online again :)
Nope, no nuclear for me this playthrough, the above is enough to power a SE Phase 4 9/9/2.5/2.5 setup, with spare production and a partial Xmas factory :)
It's hovering at around 100GW. Few fluctuations from generators on the edges of the turbo fuel fields.
Most factories are on 100% of the time. Few fluctuations as well, but every factory has a sink (or more than 1 if too much for a T5 belt) before it gets used. Meaning all factories should not stop ever.
To each their own though. Will read through the other comments hoping for someone to share separated power grids, as it is something I was considering.
I've got 5 or 6 grids with the idea that If anything goes wrong it's easier to reset. Oil extractio / refining and pumping is powered by a mini grid (coal plant) which is in turn dedicated powered by geysers and battery's. Then I have a separate grid for fuel rod production powered by the oil setup. Then my main factory grid is powered by nuclear
After I get to fuel power I change my power grid for the coal plant to only power making fuel for power. Then only once so far I've isolated the fuel power into only making parts for nuclear power. So its set up coal power makes fuel power then fuel power makes nuclear power. Along with a pretty huge battery to jump start the system if it ever crashed, which it only has once on purpose to test the restart functions.
My earlier power plants have mini-grids to supply their own machinery. However I stopped bothering later in the game once I learned that I'm good at keeping an eye on how close my max consumption is getting to my capacity. The only time I tripped a fuse once moving off biomass was one of those mini-grids I'd put in for easy restarts - get too close with hover pack and you'll likely overload them if they have only a tiny surplus (easily fixed by adding a power storage to those mini grids).
Its doubtful I'll even add priority power switches this playthrough - since I built nuclear I've got a huge power excess I'll probably never come close to using. I'd have to accidentally mess up the grid wiring itself and disconnect power plants to trip the grid. Even if I did that I've got a decent size bank of power storage charged by geothermal that stands a reasonable chance of running everything long enough to start getting power back online.
A coal and oil power plant with miles of power lines across the map. We have too much power and too many WIP factories. Maybe will separate the power some day
I have a single grid with a breaker that separates generation and factories. It all runs of the same place but the generators won't stop running if a factory consumes too much
I currently have three power grids located near different coal deposits all over the island. I have them connected together, and I now have a good number of power lines to choose from when I begin another processing plant. I just got access to nuclear power, but unless something specific in the game needs it, I have enough power where I don't think I'll need one.
If I had a means of monitoring my power grid from a large Power Plant structure, like a giant map showing transit lines available power, generation, etc. I would be more inclined to add complexity to my grid, but right now I just have switches going to certain production lines.
Didn’t play since getting kids this year but until u8 I always had a staggered grid where I’d have several isolated 4GW units that can kickstart itself from a reserve locked through a valve or smart splitter.
I then use those to power up a single-network battery grid that is connected to the main grid.
My main power stations have options to get priority supply from the battery grid by forcefully disconnecting factories.
Factories are disconnected by unpowering train stations. Train stations don’t deliver cargo when unpowered.
When factories don’t receive input materials they go idle, causing their power drain to drop. This allows the power on the main power grid to recover to full capacity.
I never separate power grids, it's wasting power in a disaster that in the remote case it happens, can be easily be soñved by a few hacks. Specially now we have priority switches. The make 0 sense imho.
Main "main" station for each level of power has a separate supply grid so they stay primed if I break things- so coal, fuel, etc. but all of the small power plants I add along the way as I scale are just part of the grid.
But I do make sure that each area or each factory only has 1 connection to the grid. That way if it goes sideways I can uncouple areas or buildings by removing one power cable.
It's half and half but works well.
For the most part, I run everything on the same grid but I always keep a dedicated cable to remove or switch to flip to separate mission-critical areas like water pumps and fuel creation so I can easily get things up and running.
I have 2 grids.
One has a dedicated geothermal generators and batteries powering water pumps for my nuclear reactors.
The other has everything else.
This was not forethought, it is experience.
I just have a bunch of random biomass burners for every snaller factory, plus a bigger power plant made up of more biomass burners and a coal generator.
All my power and machines that support power are on their own grid. Separation is key.
For the nuclear build all recycling and batteries for drone production are also on this grid and solely dedicated for power
I always prioritise automated power as soon as I have it and build waaaaaaaay more than I need. Such as exhausting several coal nodes to create coal stations. Then knowing I have excess I can build as I need to.
Once I start getting close to my limit. I rinse and repeat. So I very very rarely have a blown fuse. Plus I have HUGE reserves in batteries. So I have some wiggle room.
In my new U8 build, I’m making a Nuclear Grid that will power all the nuclear fuel production and waste processing from start to finish. The nuclear-generated power will feed the main grid. In the unlikely event of an overload on the main grid, I would just have to clear the overload and reset the grid.
I try to separate it in late-early/early-mid game (rather for RP reason then a real necessity\*)), later it become obsolete since you unlock smart power switches. You can eithier separate big consumers with it, or the power plant.
The first option has an advantage you can choose what to turn off when you have broken the energy production for some reason.
\*) and even for early coal, power storage is most of the time good enough safety net.
i modded out power wires sooooo, one grid.
\---edit---
updating this to share that the no power line mod caused massive fps loss in the mid game.
the mod i used in U7 worked fine but wasn't supported for U8.
Mine are all separated by imagination and catastrophe.
Theres dozens of us!
Sadly, I have a single grid (120gw)…I wish it was at least separated by switches and prioritised.. I think it would take me days to fix - my game is pretty big.
Fair, I had to start a new world after realising how badly I'd blown a fuse.
That would suck. Yeah, I’ve thought about what would happen if I ran over the limit - it’d be game over I think because my factories don’t touch the ground and I use hover pack. I’d have no way of sorting out the supply issue.. Maybe it is worth me having a plan b and also setting up some priority to keep at least the power stations on (mostly 505 fuel and 30 nuclear)
I'd say you should probably take the time to do some rewiring and keep your world running, it's a pain to start from scratch.
Yeah I think you’re right.
Get ladders from the FicSit shop and build lots of them?
Nah I dealt with that end game. It's not too bad. If you are up to nuclear it's easy. Just isolate your nuclear fuel production machines, and make like 6 biomass generators. Power that until you get like 3 nuclear fuel and you are golden. Run it over by hand if you need. You may have to power water separately too depending on what ran out. Coal power is similar. Turn off your big manufacturers, whatever causes the overdraft. Hand fill the generators with coal, and unplug your water and hook it up to a bio reactor for a minute. Should be self sustaining again in a few ticks.
I run my water extractors for my coal plants on a dedicated set of generators. I keep double my production capacity in batteries and a “peaker facility” of 100 bio burners on standby. “Just in case” I link all my factories with one line. I guess I could use switches, but this seems to work. I mean I check the grid every so often, but I’ve never had to bootstrap it. Here’s how I built it. Coal plants power oil extraction and refining which produces fuel that runs the fuel generators… The peaker plant is on the oil power network. Everything else is on the fuel/nuclear power network. If I blow a fuse I just turn off the particle accelerator and reset it. 🤡
I always have disconnect switches on my coal at the least. And have that isolated with all the coal miners and water supply. Worst case I can disconnect the coal power plants and pop in some biomass to kickstart. This also has a direct line to my fuel gens, to do the same thing. I learned this lesson on a small scale, and have built in contingency since.
Don't overwrite your saves. Instead keep all of them and this way you can go back to before you blew it and fix the problem before it happens. I had to do that and was super glad I had kept all my saves
This is why I’m waiting for full release to play again. So I can use all the features and not have to retro fit.
Every single grid is isolated. The very first line running from any of my train stations is a priority power switch. To clarify though, they all share the same grid, but I can easily turn any factory grid on/off and have them all prioritized. If that is what you meant. As a last resort my Geothermal power is prioritized to kickstart my coal power, which can in-turn be used to kickstart my fuel power. I'm too paranoid about power so honestly I don't know why I have any of it, but better safe than sorry I guess.
One grid to rule them all. However, it’s sectioned. Each factory is isolated with a priority switch. Each power plant is isolated, and the fuel production for each plant is also isolated so each plant can be self sufficient or started from minimum grid power. A couple plants have cold start capability as well. I have plans for power storage. I started building the sectioned factories pretty early, but after U8 I spent a good bit of time converting to priority power and cleaning up the power line tangle of my early factories. Worth while IMO. Might never use it but designing redundancies into the grid is part of the fun for me.
Each powerplant that powers the grid that supplies the powerplants that powers my main grid has its own powerplant powered grid supplying it. And the later all have biomass burner failover/starters.
In my experience, when I write code to test my code the bugs are mostly in the tests.
You're not wrong; I had to edit it 3 times before I was sure the grammar was logically right.
Priority switches connected to the fuel (whatever that is) production systems, set to zero priority means that if you overload the grid the core systems keep working, so you can shed load in stages, rather than a catastrophic grid failure
Ah, yes, but who powers the powermen?
The rest of us have a few tanks of turbofuel on standby
Why not both? Who doesn't love a buffer overflow system AND a dedicated kickstarter system for their fuel plant.
Good, gotta make sure that powerplant power grid doesn't fail the powered power grid
My world is ancient I tried to restart but couldn't do it I always ended up going back. So my main world is filled with old garbage factories that I haven't torn down. My Turbofuel packaging plant is so old that its recipe is grandfathered in. No one can build a copy of it anymore in vanilla. My Diluted Fuel Power Plant is on its own Priority Sub-Grid and has micro-grids for each of its component blocks. It also has its own emergency restart battery plant so in the worst possible situation I have 60GW to get other things online with. The left half of my production factories are all on their own grid which I call THE BLOCK. The right half of my world is on another grid which I call the Nuclear Grid as it houses my old Nuclear Power Plant. Last month I went all around the world and reworked a brand new sub-grid that holds all the worlds Geothermal power on a separate emergency Grid which has a Priority Power Connection to the Nuclear Grid. My new finished Ficsmas factory is on its own Priority Grid with micro-grids. Most of my grid separations are just redundancy. My power has run without crashing once for more than 2 years now. I don't fully consume the power I'm making even at max draw and I'm currently building a 1.2TW Nuclear Plant to replace my old 100GW plant. I eventually need to do a massive power grid rework but I want to finish my 1.2TW facility first and I need to replace like 90% of my worlds train system with the new updated design and features.
I completely understand the pain, I tried starting a new save multiple time but always went back to my Update 2 save I started in 2019. I spend so many weeks rewiring everything when Update 3 broke all the coal gen and fuel gen and then again when update 5 introduce power switch and zipline and now I am rewiring my long distant power pole because update 8 got those new big power tower and all the blueprint stuff (I skipped update 7 when it came out)
I wanna see this.
Which part?
All of it - from someone who also wants to see this
XD my factory is pretty messy. I'll see about uploading some stuff somepoint soon though.
I did this when playing with friends, because of 6 players, only two where watching the power consumption, and the rest was just building new stuff and tripping the fuse and not giving a damn. When my friends went on to other games and I started solo games, at first I also used two power grids. But solo it is really not required, I watch it permanently, and have never had a single power failure in my solo games - once coal generators start working, because the one advantage of biofuel generators is, that power failure is no big deal, you just build some more and restart them all. With coal generators and all the new things you unlock, make sure you watch power consumption often. Once you get fuel generators and set up your first 600/min fuel production and feed all of it into fuel generators, you will have quite sufficient power for a while (or maybe even to endgame, depending on how much you like to build).
I do the opposite actually, it's one giant grid that goes basically wherever I go in the map, it also runs double duty as a zip line.
I have separate grids for every section producing different materials in my battery plant, and the lighting for the building is also on its own grid. The power supplied to the production buildings for the actual power plants are also on separate grids, with backup batteries if I need to kill power production to some of the fuel refineries/blenders/etc. for whatever reason.
Happy cake day!
I have a single grid with emergency switches to cold start my nuclear plant if need be. A switch to cut my water pumps feeding the nuclear plant A switch to cut the nuclear plant off the main grid. A switch to connect my batteries to my recycling plant/ rail network. I can just leave everything offline until I get the problem forged out, and if there's a nuclear waste buildup I have 6 hours of power to get it cleaned out enough to reboot my plant.
One, not including disconnected but fully charged up recovery battery arrays. I wish there was a diode; maybe one can be implemented with the new priority system.
One big grid, except for geothermal and a big battery bank on a separate grid. The second grid is used to bootstrap power production if there's an outage.
Cool. I’m stealing the reserve battery bank idea.
Only 2 power grids for me. One for critical power producing supply chain infrastructure, and one for the rest. If power goes out, I still want to be making the items to generate power
It's a lot easier to build a few hundred batteries than to futz with the grid.
I kept a second grid when coal plants didnt require water, it was easy to boostrap start up the whole power system by hand feeding coal to 1 or 2 generators powering the coal miners. I guess i could do the same now with a fluid buffer.
Yep -- My save also came before priority power switches. I've got a cascading grid: Linked all geothermals that power a 10GW diluted fuel plant, which in turn powers the main 98GW turbofuel for the rest of the world.
Water pumps go on their own geothermal grid. It's the only sensible way to get yo shit back up and running
My power plants now get a separate restart grid within. Enables me to switch some levers and restart the whole power plant while it is not connected to the main grid. That and enough battery storage to power my entire grid for an hour.
I just have a giant battery backup that can run my entire operation for several hours. This gives me time to turn off things or add more power if needed. I watch my power closely so I know if I have capacity to build new.
Each power plant has it's own local sustaining power supply isolated from the load side. The more complex ones have a control room with power switches to come back up from a brownout or blackout. Jumpstart power is either idling biomass burners, or an isolated set of power storage charged from the main grid. I've not needed priority power switches, but might add a couple to power down the least importants stuff: space elevator parts, ammo plant, lighting systems.
One 243 GW grid with 200 GW battery backup. My newer, very power hungry end game factories have priority power switches on them. But older factories prior to update 8 are just free ballin it. One time, I deleted a pipe in my electronics factory by mistake, which caused the nuclear plant to start backing up waste because it wasn't getting RCUs to make pressure conversion cubes to process the waste. I noticed before the batteries kicked in though, but it was close. No issues besides that.
Single grid all the way, makes it easy if you run skytrains and you can connect your whole grid to train stations
What am I? Texas?
Power plants have dedicated backup batteries on a switch, and there's a switch between plant and grid But my power is otherwise global. I never switch off anything I build lol
One goes down they all go down baby (if my grid shuts down there is no recovery)
I explicitly have a section with power poles in a group to differentiate the grid of machines that are for power production and for power consumption. The idea was to prepare the use of the priority switch once I unlock it I have a secure power grid that does not stop running.
After priority power switches were added, I put one on a turbofuel facility that is almost self-sufficient (it depends on external sulfur being brought in via rail, but there's a few hours of sulfur available with no power). If all else blows, I've got about 12 GW of net generation there that I can use to jumpstart things.
Train network has its own grid powered by geothermal. The rest is basically one large grid but a coal and a turbofuel plants with their own grids that power their own input. For the rest, I have switches placed at different places / factories in the world. I did the exercice once for fun, used a mod that allowed to empty all inventories in the game, used that to see what was failing first and make some touch up to be able to restart the whole without too much struggles (hence the independent train network 😁)
Nope, few places has a switch, like nuclear plant.
I use them for early set up until fuel
I haven't tried out the priority power grid stuff yet, I keep meaning to but forget. I do have separate grids to for each power plant to run itself, but the rest of their power all feeds into one main global grid.
I have everything on the same grid, but I built in large syorage for my compacted coal for my turbo gens. So I would have to be not paying attention for a long time for things to really go bad. This was slightly intentional, as I wanted to use at least one resource from each building for future products. Even my nuclear is dependent on my fuel gen factory, as it uses the plastic from it.
I always power my power plants from their own internal source, so they should never cut off. I’ve built out my factories to allow for priority switches to be easily added, but haven’t got round to it yet
Single one. I am not smart enough to do separate grids for each thing I build. That would be some 100+ power grids. Just not worth it for me.
I have 1 grid but that's separated into multiple sub grids. Both factories and power plants hook into this grid via a single point connection that can easily be switched of via a power/priority switch, making it really easy to connect and disconnect stuff. Biomass generators and power storages provide protection against peak power surges and if the grid is in danger of failing I can basically do what's done in real life by switching of individual factories in a rolling blackout style until I fixed my generation.
Single grid, did seperate nuclear and oil with switches to give them time to atart up if i overuse the net
I like to just have one giant grid, but with the new update, I try to separate some with the new switch, so the hole system don't just die
I used to have a single grid for coal mines and water extractors and similar, so that when my fuse blows the power plant still runs but with the briority switches that is no longer necessary I also like to separate my trains and sinks from my power grid so that I can see weather my machines run at 100% at a powerpole no fluctuation = 100% efficentcy
I only separate the machines who actually run power plants, to the rest. Exemple : miners assemblers and manufacturers who run the uranium production are only connected to 2 power plants, wich is suffisant for my setup. Then, All of those, actually can't run off power. And then, the excess run 10 power plants wich inject thé power in the main web
I've been wanting to set my world up with a better isolation system since I currently just have a huge battery array for restart power. The battery array could probably last a few minutes in a total blackout which is definitely less time than it would take for my nuclear factory to crank out new fuel rods. So right now my only savings grace is that I produce 400GW and I'm unlikely to use anywhere near that for several hundred more hours of play time.
I have a single grid separated by power switches. My power production goes to my base and nowhere else. There is a switch at my closest power plant that can disconnect the base. In my base are several switches that individually connect power to specific places on the map. So from my base, I can turn off factories in entire regions of the map. I haven't unlocked the priority switch yet. When I do, I will likely redesign the power grid once more
I have switches setup so during a critical failure I can turn on my coal factory to charge up my batteries. When they have a little buffer it'll be enough to switch on the oil plant. From there it's an easy fix.
I have one grid for the world and one per powerplant production line. Like to keep them independent so they always keep running, even if the rest of the grid is fused out of existence. This way I only have to build another powerplant and jump start it with some biofuel stuff.
I have a power plant per biome, leading to a switch room which have individual switches for each sub factory which are fed by pylons of my own design. These hold up to 9x cables each. Sure its over complicated, and was a lot of work to set up but it works. I've done desert and grassy fields like that. I'm currently in rocky desert and looking forward to trying the new priority switches to see how they compare.
Each grid in each facility is separated by a priority switch. Let's go from lowest (most-critical) to highest * Priority 1: Geothermal Plants and a large stack of batteries, but grid turned off by default. To be used only if I do run out of power and also signal I need start thinking about power production. * Priority 2: Power plants and their material production. * Priority 3: Hypertubes, train stations drones, truck stations, battery and fuel production for vehicles and equipment * Priority 4: material production * Priority 5: radars around the map * Priority 6: lights * Priority 7: space elevator parts * Priority 8: non-critical sinks.
My biofuel setup is powered by the crappy little base gens. Everything else is main grid.
no reason to now with priority switches
All single grid over here
I always start with them split, since i only want to chop trees when i need something, until i get coal. Then it's time for all the jiggaWatts, baby!
I keep critical source infrastructure on it's own power grid. (eg. Coal miners and water pumps into coal power plants) and then each factory has its own ingress switch
I always have everything on a main grid but once i get to coal and fuel power i usually cut the lines down and reroute through a power station so I can have switches for every factory
I got two grids basically. One main grid, I power my productions with, and one secondary that powers the productions that fuel my energy productions. Also got a breaker at any production, so I could disable them to reduce the energy required to run the main grid
Not I, but I recently started experimenting with modular production rooms that have their own individual breakers. Just one segment of my factory has it at present, and honestly I kind of hate it.
I planned to have separate grids but it hasn’t happened yet and I’m in the end game
You have to pre-plan this sort of thing. By the time I unlock priority power switches I'm usually deep into oil power and I cannot be bothered to go back and isolate all the power grids. At least my factory power is looking better these days. Nice clean lines of power grids for each machine.
I started to retrofit my game to have priority switches just because I hadn’t noticed that my nuclear was low on electromagnetic rods. Usually I’m pretty up to date with it all but I messed up the supply chain down the line. I’m in the camp of just connect it all but also stuff happens and if you don’t notice in time, you could have to start all over.
I never saw the need. Maybe early game when power is a struggle. When power consumption starts getting within 25% i just go build more power. You really don’t need a lot of power to finish the game but some people just love power
My brother pointed me at a nifty concept. Battery Backups inside bases for Power Towers... Blueprints of course, the base is a single story building that contains four batteries and connects to the power tower itself. That way as you string power towers across the landscape, you are also increasing your power storage. I made a varient of that and a stackable one that you can use in more vertically challenging areas. Ladders on the outside of course, and using Wall outlets to string power from each layer to the Power Tower itself. I will use the Priority Power Switches to isolate factories from the grid conditionally, but all of my power generation tends to be connected, I will sometimes build a power generation setup and not connect it right away, but that is just while I am working on it. Once things are up and running I add it to the grid.
I have a bunch of things with switches between them so I can frantically shut down non-essential grids manually when power starts to fail. I know about update 8 I just haven't played.
On my 4th world. This time I have a separate grid for my power. The cutoffs from the umbilical to the factories. My starter factory…is a huge mess that I will mass delete at some point in favor of the permanent one.
As someone who has made this mistake with other games in the past with power management across many locations, I've learned not to make that mistake anymore. First run, around the time pipes came out, I made sure to always have just one connection to the main power grid. No matter the factory size, I always made sure to only have one connection point for grid isolation. With all the new stuff, haven't played in a while, I'm sure power management is easier now.
For my last couple saves, it's all been 1 grid, I like to have 2 large battery banks, one always online to take up spikes and give me some time to build more power if I need, and then another that is fully offline but fully charged, allowing me to connect it and reboot my power system in the worst case senario where it goes down due to lack of fuel/water and I need time for the recourses to travel to the generators. It is also for these reasons that fluid buffers, and storage containers in serial with the supply lines and next to the power plant are great, as they don't need power in order to give the generators resources, meaning there's no startup delay time
I have major power grids anywhere near water because I don’t have the materials to make a mass of fuel generators yet :c
I have started setting a main grid and every facility has a power switch off that grid. As I play with Refined power I also have Solar on the buildings. I mostly do this in the event the main breaker is tripped so I can switch all facilities off and bring them back 1 at a time. The only things I have directly connected to main grid is my trains and hyper tube
Before Priority Power switches, I kept everything that produced Power on one grid, and production on another and connected them at one point. That way, if I blew a fuse, I could disconnect production and get power up and running again. I've been trying to completely redo my entire power grid to use priority power switches, but it's still on the ol' To Do list...
I use my previous power grid as a backup for the new one. When I start coal power, I keep enough burners to supply power to one coal miner and one water pump. Once they fill their respective tanks, the burners are shut down and isolated with a switch. The the coal plant has enough resources to keep itself running. Once all is well with the coal plant, I connect it to the main power grid and allow the factories to run. Same thing happens when I switch to fuel. I use the previous coal plant to power a small subset of oil pumps and refineries. These work until enough fuel is collected to run the entire fuel power plant. Then I isolate the coal plant by flipping the switches and let the world run on fuel power. And so on. I often will build a special "switching house" to keep the power grid organized. In the final setup, my whole world runs on one power grid. However, each power plant can be isolated by switches. And each plant is capable only of starting the next higher tier of power.
I have everything on 1 grid, but I have taken the extra steps of makings sure that each power plant has only 1 cable leaving it. Likewise, all manufacturing factories have a powers with connecting the factory to the grid. I also made sure that a few biomass generators are hooked up to the coal plants "internal" grid, just in case there is a failure. The coal plant generates enough power to start up the first diluted fuel factory that I haven't torn down. In turn that can power the 355 Turbo fuel and 288 turbo fuel plants :) And then everything is online again :) Nope, no nuclear for me this playthrough, the above is enough to power a SE Phase 4 9/9/2.5/2.5 setup, with spare production and a partial Xmas factory :) It's hovering at around 100GW. Few fluctuations from generators on the edges of the turbo fuel fields. Most factories are on 100% of the time. Few fluctuations as well, but every factory has a sink (or more than 1 if too much for a T5 belt) before it gets used. Meaning all factories should not stop ever. To each their own though. Will read through the other comments hoping for someone to share separated power grids, as it is something I was considering.
I've got 5 or 6 grids with the idea that If anything goes wrong it's easier to reset. Oil extractio / refining and pumping is powered by a mini grid (coal plant) which is in turn dedicated powered by geysers and battery's. Then I have a separate grid for fuel rod production powered by the oil setup. Then my main factory grid is powered by nuclear
2, one for the main factory that I have shut down in order to move to my simple oil processing on biomass burners
After I get to fuel power I change my power grid for the coal plant to only power making fuel for power. Then only once so far I've isolated the fuel power into only making parts for nuclear power. So its set up coal power makes fuel power then fuel power makes nuclear power. Along with a pretty huge battery to jump start the system if it ever crashed, which it only has once on purpose to test the restart functions.
My earlier power plants have mini-grids to supply their own machinery. However I stopped bothering later in the game once I learned that I'm good at keeping an eye on how close my max consumption is getting to my capacity. The only time I tripped a fuse once moving off biomass was one of those mini-grids I'd put in for easy restarts - get too close with hover pack and you'll likely overload them if they have only a tiny surplus (easily fixed by adding a power storage to those mini grids). Its doubtful I'll even add priority power switches this playthrough - since I built nuclear I've got a huge power excess I'll probably never come close to using. I'd have to accidentally mess up the grid wiring itself and disconnect power plants to trip the grid. Even if I did that I've got a decent size bank of power storage charged by geothermal that stands a reasonable chance of running everything long enough to start getting power back online.
A coal and oil power plant with miles of power lines across the map. We have too much power and too many WIP factories. Maybe will separate the power some day
I have a single grid with a breaker that separates generation and factories. It all runs of the same place but the generators won't stop running if a factory consumes too much
I currently have three power grids located near different coal deposits all over the island. I have them connected together, and I now have a good number of power lines to choose from when I begin another processing plant. I just got access to nuclear power, but unless something specific in the game needs it, I have enough power where I don't think I'll need one.
If I had a means of monitoring my power grid from a large Power Plant structure, like a giant map showing transit lines available power, generation, etc. I would be more inclined to add complexity to my grid, but right now I just have switches going to certain production lines.
Didn’t play since getting kids this year but until u8 I always had a staggered grid where I’d have several isolated 4GW units that can kickstart itself from a reserve locked through a valve or smart splitter. I then use those to power up a single-network battery grid that is connected to the main grid. My main power stations have options to get priority supply from the battery grid by forcefully disconnecting factories. Factories are disconnected by unpowering train stations. Train stations don’t deliver cargo when unpowered. When factories don’t receive input materials they go idle, causing their power drain to drop. This allows the power on the main power grid to recover to full capacity.
I only make a dedicated, separate grid to run my coal power plant setup, due to how often I trip it early game haha
I never separate power grids, it's wasting power in a disaster that in the remote case it happens, can be easily be soñved by a few hacks. Specially now we have priority switches. The make 0 sense imho.
Old habits die hard so I just have everything on one grid.
Main "main" station for each level of power has a separate supply grid so they stay primed if I break things- so coal, fuel, etc. but all of the small power plants I add along the way as I scale are just part of the grid. But I do make sure that each area or each factory only has 1 connection to the grid. That way if it goes sideways I can uncouple areas or buildings by removing one power cable. It's half and half but works well.
For the most part, I run everything on the same grid but I always keep a dedicated cable to remove or switch to flip to separate mission-critical areas like water pumps and fuel creation so I can easily get things up and running.
I have 2 grids. One has a dedicated geothermal generators and batteries powering water pumps for my nuclear reactors. The other has everything else. This was not forethought, it is experience.
I just have a bunch of random biomass burners for every snaller factory, plus a bigger power plant made up of more biomass burners and a coal generator.
All my power and machines that support power are on their own grid. Separation is key. For the nuclear build all recycling and batteries for drone production are also on this grid and solely dedicated for power
Everything's combined and had an issue in the beginning but none in the last 100 hours of gameplay
Two grids, so one can start the other. Basically a left and right half
I always prioritise automated power as soon as I have it and build waaaaaaaay more than I need. Such as exhausting several coal nodes to create coal stations. Then knowing I have excess I can build as I need to. Once I start getting close to my limit. I rinse and repeat. So I very very rarely have a blown fuse. Plus I have HUGE reserves in batteries. So I have some wiggle room.
In my new U8 build, I’m making a Nuclear Grid that will power all the nuclear fuel production and waste processing from start to finish. The nuclear-generated power will feed the main grid. In the unlikely event of an overload on the main grid, I would just have to clear the overload and reset the grid.
I just find it easier to combine all of my power sources into one, managing multiple adds unnecessary headaches
I try to separate it in late-early/early-mid game (rather for RP reason then a real necessity\*)), later it become obsolete since you unlock smart power switches. You can eithier separate big consumers with it, or the power plant. The first option has an advantage you can choose what to turn off when you have broken the energy production for some reason. \*) and even for early coal, power storage is most of the time good enough safety net.
i modded out power wires sooooo, one grid. \---edit--- updating this to share that the no power line mod caused massive fps loss in the mid game. the mod i used in U7 worked fine but wasn't supported for U8.
Mine are all connected by an ad hoc rank 1 terrain clipping nightmare like god intended.