Power whole buildings - turret001/OffGrid GitHub Wiki
A controller's own reach is 20 tiles around it. Wire up a building and every room on every floor gets power, whenever the system has power.
Wire it up
- Right-click the controller, Off-Grid › Wire up the building. The building it stands in gets power, or, if it stands outside, the nearest building within its 20 tiles: every room and every floor, past the 20 tiles too.
- Off-Grid › Choose buildings... adds other buildings in reach, or takes them away. Each click counts at once; Done closes the window.
- Off-Grid › Unwire the buildings stops powering them. The controller's own 20 tiles stay.
Everything running in a wired building shows on LOADS, and draws on the batteries unless the town grid still runs it.
Choose buildings
| Colour | Means |
|---|---|
| Green | Wired, by this part or another part of the same system |
| Yellow | A click adds it |
| Blue | This part wires it; a click takes it away |
| Red | Out of reach, or another system has it |
Buildings you built count too: a closed room with a roof over at least half of it. An extension built onto a house is its own building, so pick it as well. Grow it later and the new rooms join within half an in-game hour. Wire up the building only picks a building you built when the part stands inside it and no other building is in reach; otherwise add it here.
One part wires up to 8 buildings. Past that you see "This part already wires all it can."; wire the rest from a transformer.
Transformers: take power across town
- Place it, then run a cable to the controller or to another transformer, up to 30 tiles: right-click the transformer, Off-Grid › Run cable from here, then right-click the controller, Off-Grid › Connect Transformer.
- While the system has power it lights everything as far around it as a controller reaches, and it can wire up buildings of its own, with the same menu rows.
- Chain them to take the power across town. At the default 30 tiles the circles overlap, so a street stays lit end to end; with a line length above 40, a chain at full length leaves dark gaps. Each transformer draws 25 W while the system has power, shown as the TRANSFORMERS row on LOADS.
- Wiring from a far transformer: stand within about 70 tiles of the controller and within 20 tiles of the transformer. Further out the game has unloaded the controller, and the transformer answers "Connect this transformer to the controller first." In singleplayer that reaches transformers up to about 90 tiles from the controller; one further out cannot wire buildings. On a server it can, while someone stands near the controller. (70 tiles on a 1920 by 1080 screen; a smaller screen loads less, about 50 at 1366 by 768.)
- Build: Photovoltaic Systems Handbook. Electrical 5, Welding 2. Screwdriver, pliers, welding torch and welder mask; 3 steel sheets, 6 electrical wire, 4 scrap electronics and 6 screws.
- Read the handbook before 2.12? Read it again to learn the transformer. In singleplayer the game only teaches it once its Literature Cooldown has passed: 45 in-game days on the default Apocalypse settings, 30 in Outbreak, 90 in Rising and Extinction (sandbox Literature Cooldown). Reading it again sooner teaches nothing and does not restart the count.
Sandbox › Off-Grid › Transformer line length (8 to 60 tiles, default 30) and Transformer loss (W) (0 to 500, default 25) change both numbers.
See what is on
Off-Grid › Show power coverage outlines the whole system: the controller, every transformer and every wired building. The outline is green while the system supplies power and amber while it has none.
Every light and appliance in reach glows, on every floor:
- Green: draws on your batteries, and counts on LOADS. Fridges always do.
- White: draws nothing: switched off, or the town grid still runs it.
Until the town's power goes off, everything the grid runs glows white. A structure you built, a derelict house and open ground away from buildings are never on the grid: what is switched on there glows green and draws on the batteries from the start. A light left on in a dark room is easy to find, and LIGHTS OFF on the monitor's LOADS page switches them all off at once. Solar lamps and battery radios do not glow: they never draw on the system.
Good to know
- Power spills up to 7 tiles past a wired building's walls. The game powers ground in 8 by 8 tile blocks, so a yard or part of a neighbour's house in the same block gets power too. Anything running there is billed.
- Wiring buildings works from about 20 tiles away, without walking over. On a server, wiring up, choosing and unwiring a part's buildings follow Who may pick up solar parts, like its switch and cables (see Multiplayer).
- With LG Extended Electricity's "Mod sets generator range" on, the game's power range is 1 tile. The controller and each transformer light only the tiles next to them, and Wire up the building only finds a building the part stands in or touches. See Troubleshooting to turn it off.