Rimworld Explained - Electricity management

hi again this video is designed to help with managing electricity in room world if you start with the crash standard scenario you'll have access to electricity right away but with the tribal start you'll have to research it first basic power generation is fairly easy and each type has its advantages and disadvantages some of the buildings mentioned require researching before you can construct them if you're in a tower with plenty of wood it could make sense to use a wood-fired generator this provides constant power output but the disadvantage is that it needs refueling with wood every few days I believe it also creates some heat once you've built it you can click on the power conduit tool to place wiring wires can be built inside wolves which is easily sensible as wires reduce the beauty of a floor tile an easy way to modify wiring or check your circuits is to select an existing piece of wiring and press the O key which is for creating a copy of pretty much anything in room world why is cannot be placed in a rough rock walls unless you smooth over them first if you change your base design it's often worth removing redundant wiring for the beauty reason I just mentioned you can create connections to anything that uses power by building wires to them but bear in mind wires don't connect to each other diagonally why is effectively have an area of effect so they don't actually have to touch the thing that they're supplying power to as you can see here the lamp has a connection going to the wire that you've built there's a limit to how far a wire will provide power but it's fairly generous and useful for things like powering several turrets in a small area the generator says in the lower-left how many watts it's producing the number after a grid access is how many watts are being produced across the entire grid in excess of how many are being used the second number is how many watts being stored in your batteries so basically your backup power bear in mind that these numbers will fluctuate has things like heaters and coolers use varying amounts of power you could also see how many days of fuel are left below many electrical structures can be turned on and off too to save on a fuel or power Sun lamps which require a huge amount of power will automatically turn on and off as plants don't grow at night as a general rule structures which supply power neither touch in connection with a wire and structures which use power do not batteries can be used once researched and are useful for renewable energy sources like solar and wind turbines the idea is that power isn't a constant supply like solar for example fills up the batteries which then power your base during the night if you have any spare you can have as many as you like and even move them around but note that they'll discharge a small amount of power over time if left is connected the yellow bar on them represents how full of power they are solar power is fairly self-explanatory the panel's generate power during sunlight hours they're fairly cheap to make but take up a fair bit of space the yellow bar on these shows how much power is being generated out of the maximum their power generation is affected by which season you're in and also by the Eclipse event wind turbines are a pretty decent source of power that require a large open space the wind speed is fairly random in rimworld but each tile does have an elevation level which possibly affects how when did the tile is an average but I'm not positive about that if it's really windy they can create almost as much as the geothermal power plant the drawback is obviously that it's not always windy and also that you need to make sure nothing is blocking the area around the turbines the sink leads chopping down all the trees and being careful what you build near it you can't have things like wolves or roofs in the way or it'll say blocked in the lower-left trees will grow back over time so sometimes I build a simple flaw around the wind turbines area just so nothing can grow here solar panels can actually be built in this area and won't affect the turbine at all water bills can be researched and used if you have a river on your tile they have to be constructed along flowing water so they won't do anything if placed in the ocean or near lakes they create a fair amount of unconditional power so they're very reliable you have to be careful to make sure the area that they cover doesn't overlap with another water mill otherwise they don't generate as much power there are waterproof power conduits designed to help you take your power network across a river which can be placed in shallow water only I'll turn Tuffy you can just place a bridge in a wire across there's also chem fuel power generators which use a very small amount of chem fuel to provide a decent supply of power they're very efficient if you have chem fuel available to you one of the best ways of generating a lot of power is the geothermal power plant it's a little bit of the research tree and can only be placed on geothermal vents which is usually a fair few of around the map it's a big building and takes a fair few resources so protect it remember that geothermal vents create Heat even after you've constructed the power plant so if you enclose it it'll get hot this can be used to heat your base if you're clever about it they create a very impressive 3,600 watts of power lastly there's a rack quest reward item called a vana metric power supply which is a standalone device which creates a constant 1,000 watts of power forever and it can be moved around like a battery which is very useful for things like deep drilling away from your base or powering turrets when wiring look for weak spots for example perhaps most of your base is powered by geothermal power plant it may be worth building multiple connections to your base in case a piece of wire gets destroyed by something you wouldn't want your entire turret defense system unpowered because of a single stray grenade if something does lose power it'll flash like this perhaps you're simply not generating enough power for everything in which case you'll be able to see down in the bottom left maybe it's lost connection to a wire but there's another wire in range in this case just click reconnect and it'll try and find another wire to connect to you lastly you can build switches to these work as you'd imagine you could insert colonists to toggle them on and off and anything beyond them won't get power there's an event in the game which happens at random where your electronics will short-circuit and you'll lose all your backup power often resulting in an explosion a big deterrent to having huge battery banks this can also be caused by having a few specific electronic devices outside in the rain so things like batteries you may want to roof over if they're going to be outside most things that you would imagine should be able to exist in the rain can like solar panels so don't worry if you want to protect your battery banks from this event you could let them fill up and then disconnect them using a switch if the event happens you'll lose all your power but the batteries will be safe so you can toggle the switch back on again and use their backup power if you need it switches are also useful for conserving power so perhaps you have a huge line of terrorists outside your base they didn't really need to be turned on all the time when there's enemies coming so you could set them up with a handy switch to do this much quicker than one at a time this is also a good way to turn them off quickly if you don't want them being attacked by Manhunter packs one more thing the MPs are primarily designed to counter mechanoids in REM world but they'll also affect your electronics so be careful if you're using them because friendly fire will disable your turrets temporarily don't forget though you can also use them against enemy electronics I think that's everything I hope this video has been of some use thank you for watching bye for now

Channel: Alasdair

Views: 53,548

Keywords: Rimworld, Tutorial, Alasdair, Twitch, informative, learning, gameplay, let's play, lets play, strategy, simulation

Id: VYVXsS-haTg

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018