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Bring electricity back!!


pelusaloca

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Hello ! maybe a couple of engineers can bring the electricity back? we just need a map with a coal power plant and then a mod for use coal into a machine or something to bring electricity back. This will be cool for mp too.

The new mod map called "Kaputt" (WIP) will add a coal power plant soon.

 

PD: i think hydrocraft have some razors maybe is time for the beards to grow? (MOD?)

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https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Generator

 

It's a rather troublesome solution given that the fuel shuts off at the same time the power does and vanilla doesn't offer any way I'm aware of to pump fuel after that point. But you can keep the juice flowing for a least a little bit longer.

 

Being said it would be rather fascinating if the functionality for restoring such landmarks to working order was added to the game, even if it was simply for the benefit of non vanilla maps. However I can't imagine that adding the mechanics/actual presence of a no kidding powerplant is on their short list. 

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Hydrocraft adds a buttload of stuff that I'd really rather have no part of. But they do have solar panels, and I think you should be able to scavenge those in the vanilla game. I think it would be easier to implement, and of course, only electricians would have the inherent capability to install them. Give everything a power usage amount, and have energy accumulators for when the solar panels aren't at full efficiency (night, inclement weather). So your solar field has to be quite sizeable to power all the lights and appliances, as well as fill the accumulators. Factorio is a fantastic game that does this quite elegantly, with a focus on the sheer amount of panels required to power a small factory. 

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I think the ability to wire things and create logic circuits is what sets many games like dwarf fortress, minecraft and factorio well above the rest, in terms of sheer complexity and potential. It adds a new facet to the game which many people would respond positively to, and paves the way for people making crude computers within the game itself.

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18 hours ago, critical jim said:

Hydrocraft adds a buttload of stuff that I'd really rather have no part of. But they do have solar panels, and I think you should be able to scavenge those in the vanilla game.

Seconded. I love HC but if all you want is something approaching renewable fuel (biodiesel, solar panels, etc) you have to deal with an avalanche of other items just to have a chance to find them. I imagine that's frustrating to a lot of people, as is the inability to pump gas after the power is out, which while not a cakewalk for the uninitiated is hardly impossible.

 

As for adding an actual, honest-to-God powerplant...truth be told I can see it being added someday as a long (long, long, long) term goalIt would be a tremendous draw for a survivor community, for people to want to start securing the area and setting up a food supply and working toward the hopeful goal of getting the power back on. That being said it would requires several people with the proper high-level skills to keep it running in any kind of capacity and probably require repairs in the first place.

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The issue of operating and maintaining an actual power plant would be the amount of hands needed to run it. We're talking at least a couple dozen people just to operate it (All of whom would need to have training to operate it) and that's just minimum.

 

You also have the issue of resources, most power plants (With the exception of hydroelectric dams, solar stations, and wind turbines) can only run for a limited amount of time before resource run out. Now, in regards to the more sustainable energy sources, you have to realize the game is set in the early 90's, and as such things such as solar were only beginning to grow in North America, and the wind turbine had only recently in the past few decades began to spring up in certain areas. 

 

That may sound cynical, but I agree that it would be amazing to do something that would provide a sustainable energy source. I'm the kind of person who when NPCs come around, will try to rebuild society with as many NPCs as possible. :#

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Perhaps we couldn't fix the power, but maybe a power plant could have parts that few other places on the map have? A high-level enough electrician could work these parts into a generator and make it more efficient/quieter/etc? A battery to store electricity using human power (i.e; a bicycle)? The last one sounds a bit far-fetched, but the first does not seem unreasonable.

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Why not just create a multi-generator setup, and wire it across multiple houses? This way, you could power the buildings for a smalls survivor group, and it at least feasible after the apocalypse. A power plant requires society to be functioning to keep it fueled and working.

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Solar panels should be present in many houses, we're in the 21st century, for god's sake! :-D

they would be movable objects like furniture, so they can be stolen from other houses and brought to your base.

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On 6/1/2016 at 1:51 PM, nubus said:

Solar panels should be present in many houses, we're in the 21st century, for god's sake! :-D

they would be movable objects like furniture, so they can be stolen from other houses and brought to your base.


This might be so, but I am pretty sure TIS said the game setting is 1990's. Even though solar power IS possible now, in the early 1990's it was neither as abundant or even cost appropriate.

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  • 1 month later...
On 5/25/2016 at 6:43 PM, Strats said:

Perhaps we couldn't fix the power, but maybe a power plant could have parts that few other places on the map have? A high-level enough electrician could work these parts into a generator and make it more efficient/quieter/etc? A battery to store electricity using human power (i.e; a bicycle)? The last one sounds a bit far-fetched, but the first does not seem unreasonable.

The last one is hardly implausible. I clearly remember a documentary where one small island by the UK used old car alternators stuck to small windmills and battery banks from telephone companies for electrical power. 

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On 6/2/2016 at 2:19 PM, Cithanor said:


This might be so, but I am pretty sure TIS said the game setting is 1990's. Even though solar power IS possible now, in the early 1990's it was neither as abundant or even cost appropriate.

It does take place in the 90s, but solar panels were definitely a thing in the 90s. Granted they weren't on every other home or anything like that - but there were solar farms and distribution in the 90s, just not close to as much as there is now.

 

For the sake of gameplay > realism I think there is enough to go off of to say it wouldn't be too outlandish to include solar panels to some degree as a huge late-game project for players. There are also other alternatives to keeping the power on as well.

Edited by Kim Jong Un
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Just a kindly reminder, Gasoline goes bad in 3-6 months. Even if gas becomes pumpable after power shutoff in the best case it'll last twice as long as it'll take to lose electricity.

 

There are fuel stabilizers, but they don't get added to gas station reserves, which means the player would have to pump and then add the stabilizer to the supply they have on hand.

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16 hours ago, Gennadios said:

Just a kindly reminder, Gasoline goes bad in 3-6 months. Even if gas becomes pumpable after power shutoff in the best case it'll last twice as long as it'll take to lose electricity.

 

There are fuel stabilizers, but they don't get added to gas station reserves, which means the player would have to pump and then add the stabilizer to the supply they have on hand.

 

Meh. I mean, I get what you are saying but it's heavily misleading.

 

"Goes bad" is relative, as it's certainly not useless, just not 'optimal' forever. And it doesn't take much to see that - Like starting a car that hasn't run in 3 years (off of the same gas). And that's my small-town Canadian side speaking, given that most of my community could pretty much be summarized as that last sentence repeated over and over. 

 

And I still think that point is very generous considering a quick google or two will lead you into numerous stories of old gasoline (much older than even 3 years!) still doing it's job.

 

I get what you are saying, but in a survival setting it just doesn't apply. Gasoline is burnable as fuel for long enough to not be a dead-set realism issue in most games. Point is, old gas still burns as fuel. The engine will still start and run, just not as well, and not be as efficient.

 

Side-support to prove I actually did a quick google: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/when-old-gas-too-old-use-19021.html

Edited by Kim Jong Un
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Gasoline in a sealed airtight container, such as the underground tanks at a gas station, takes FAR longer than that to go bad, definitely longer than you would need to worry about in the time it would take to use it up.

 

I would love to be able to connect a gennie to the gas station fuel pumps, because with the current situation you need to make the decision to use a generator immediately and spend those first few weeks focused entirely on collecting every drop of gas you can if you want to have electricity for any period of time. 

 

One of my EE classes we built a small electrical generator capable of charging a cell phone (at about an 18mph wind, where we had peak efficiency) from the bendix drives from old car starters (from junkyards), fan blades from old box fans, and a few random parts from dead tvs and chargers. Not something I'm advocating being able to do in PZ, but all things readily available in the early 90s (besides the phone charger, but you wouldnt be using it for that purpose anyways). 

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Buddies of mine and myself were talking about Gasifiers recently. Basically take wood or coal and turn it into synth gas. They were apparently very common in world war two thanks to gasoline shortages and a lot of people ran their cars and powered their homes off of them.

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  • 1 month later...

Hi, I didn't mean to necro this, but does any one knows if there is a bugtracker or any plans from the devs to fix the generator on the gas station thing? (yeah, I know about the mod, but I'd just like to know if there's an official statement about the issue). Last night my friend and I went through a lot of trouble to haul our generator to the SW gas-station on West-Point (we currently live by the docks in the North sector). After two days of an excruciating travel and dozens of zombies killed we just stood still totally incredulous as the generator reached its final drops of gas while the fuel pumps didn't work at all... I turned the genny off before it ran out of fuel so we could turn it back on in case there's any future fix for the issue...

 

We had a big "HELP" written with bodies on the road in the front of our house. After the 'generator in the gas station' incident, we were so jaded we just changed it to "HELL".

 

The generator is a rather demanding and complex asset to obtain and operate in the game, especially if your character isn't a electrician (YES, I dismantled radios all the way to level 3, not sure if Electrician books are implemented yet, didn't found any just yet).

 

 I feel like the lack of a possibility to maintain the genny for more than a couple of weeks after the power runs out just TOO unfair and pretty much ironic, as the only purpose of the generator is to provide power in a barely efficient manner when the power runs out, thus making the generator (as it is in the current build) a rather counter-productive, less than ideal cost-efficient (and mostly idiotic) asset to obtain and tend for in the game. To be quite honest the simple task alone of hauling the generator to the gas station in order to pump fuel is pretty ridiculous by itself, but I'd gladly accept it and do it as it remain true to the realism (electrical powered pumps), although I'd love another options to get fuel from the gas station, something like a siphon pump with a very long adapted silicon hose that would take an hour to fill a gas can

Siphon_Pump_C7C76AFE-CF7B-171D-FF08EDA1A

 

Hell, you know what? Just give me a hose and let me siphon with my mouth oz by oz, I don't care if my character gets nauseated and sick for swallowing gas, just let me keep my damn refrigerator, PLS. lol

 

Anyway, sorry again about necroing this, guys, I just didn't found anything else about this issue and I didn't want to start a new thread.

 

Edited by Lucchesi
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On 28/09/2016 at 0:30 PM, Zargo1z said:

There is a pretty popular mod in the workshop that allows you to hook a generator to the gas pumps and power them up and get gas out of them after the power goes off.  I wouldn't mind having this included into the base game.  IMO

There's some problems with it not being able to track gas quantity in the gas station, which'd need to be fixed, but an official way to get petrol out is on the todolist afaik (could be wrong!)

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Since there are now compost (in IWBUMS), maybe recuperate methane to power a modified generator? It would require engineering skills for it to be anything else then a very dangerous "makeshift methane generator".

 

At the very least, methane could be used to power gas burner to cook and boil water.

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