Artisan Archive

I've been having brain drain lately, and am really thoroughly confused about power use regarding harvesters.

I wasn't paying super close attention but I was carrying a number of different power source resources around last night and wanted to hit up some of my harvesters [unusuly, since I tend to mine my own I almost always have identical power sources for any one trip]. I was under the impression that the various petro fules and reactive gasses serve as power. I had a major stock of radioactive but had kept some samples I've had laying around and wanted to get rid of them by dumping them into the harvs as power. Their PE attributes were very varied.

It seemed to me that when I restocked a harvester empty of power, that I placed like 1400 units only to have the readout list 45 units present. I waited in case there was some kindof database lag, but that was the result. I also noticed that despite teh fact I had, seperately, more than 9 or 10k of various resources that should act as power, the harv window for power deposit showed I had less. In the course of the evening I did not expend all the power resources I had on me; it seemed the highest stack, the radioactives, went first and the misc fuels did not seem drain at all. I cannot be 100% certain I didn't lose any of the misc stacks because, sicne they were mere scraps, I kept no real accounting of them. But that is how it seemed.

Can someone explain the setup to me? I have been doing this for a while but the weirdness only really caught my eye last night.

Thanks.

There may be multiple issues going on here, but I can tell you for certain that reactive gas, solid petrol fuel, and liguid petroleum CANNOT be used in harvesters or factories as power sources. (Yes, I know, they're listed on the bazaar under energy,along with wind, solar, and radioactive, but you're harvester and/or factory will NOT accept these as power.

When you do have multiple choices for powerin your inventory, I haven't yet figuered out how the code decides which one to use first, then second, etc., or how to influence the choice. Perhaps if you tucked away everything into a nested container except for the one you want to be used first, it would help. I don't know, I've never tried it.

Faellyn, thanks SO much.. that definitely helps me with a number of things here.

I still cannot figure out that 1400 - becomes -45 power drop. That one definitely happened as read, and is what got me on this train of confusion. And it was radioactive, fer heavens sake; notlike thePE would be low. And NO bad PE in the game would translate 1400 to 45 like that. Gah!

The "reserves show zero, deposit X power, reserves show Y" problem was a pleasant gift provided with the last patch. The status window is doing something wrong with the power reserve calculation, completely separate from the harvester running, which sometimes makes the status window think you have negative power in the reserves. Or have much less power than what you should have.

To clear up the display, stop and restart the harvester.