Artisan Archive
Thread: Harvester power use problems?
I placed 5 personal harvesters a week ago on Tuesday, one water vapor, two chem and two flora. These are all plain vanilla, unexerimented harvesters. In each harvester 1 put in enough maintenance and power to run for exactly one week (5,040 credits and 4,000 per units). I occationally make mistakes but I generally am pretty good about recordining timing and amounts of my deposits. Also, these were all newly dropped harvesters, so I almost certainly was tracking this properly.
Today I did a harvester run. Heres what I found:
All of the harvesters had about 10 hours of "extra" maintenance left in them. I believe that harvesters don't consume maintenance when the server is off-line so this is expected.
All of the harvesters gathered the expected number, except the water harvester which encountered a resource shift.
The water harvester had over 4 days worth of power left in it. I'm not sure which, but it stopped using power either becuase of a patch bug OR it stopped using power when the resources shifted.
The other four harvesters were all still running, but none of them had any power left. At a minimum there should have been three or four hours of power left. I tried dropping power into one of them, but it ate 1,200 units of power and was still at zero, so I think it must be pretty deep in the hole.
So my question is, WHAT HAPPENED? Especially with my harvesters which ate more power than they should have. Please tell me they didn't mess up the power use formula and reintroduce the bugs they fixed after the last patch.
Power is still being eaten by the harvester at the old rate, but the display in the status is wrong. Stopping and restarting the harvester resets the status window to show the proper amount.
My guess is that in the code, the harvester object doesn't actually store the amount of power it has, it stores the amount it had when it was started and the time it was started. When you check the status, it calculates on the fly how much power it should have. The status window has a doubling somewhere (the reserves drop twice as fast as they should if you don't restart), so when it does it's calculationthe power reserve valueends up negative, which gets displayed as zero.Clicking "Stop Harvester"refreshes those values using the correct power usage formula.
I'll bet there arestill some hacks in the harvester code where the rate is in half-hour increments in one place and hour increments in another, and either a doubling is being done where it is not supposed to, or a halving is not being done where it is supposed to.
nefarious wrote:
I thought this was just me. I put enought power and maintanence in my harvesters to run for 4 days and I just checked them 2 days later and neither of them have any power, yet they are still running. Is there a fix for this, or am I going to have to crank out power to dump 2x worth in to them.
No fix needed to keep them running, it's just a display error in the status window. To get the right display, stop then restart the harv. If it does actually run out of power (you put in 48 hours worth and can't make it back until 50 have gone by), you may need to close and reopen the "Operate Machinary" window to allow you to stop the harv. Once you do that, you'll be able to deposit power and have it show up as a positive number.