Welcome back to Moose News, I’m currently working hard to get the last things done to make the playtest ready for release. While you wait for that, let me tell you how solar power works in the game.
The main goal of the game is to build a giant solar farm to power your factory (and maybe something else towards the end game). To get the most out of your solar panels there are a few things you need to account for.
Let’s start with the efficiency of the solar panel. The graph below shows the efficiency over a whole day for the Crude solar panel. Higher tech tiers of solar panels may have better efficiency over the day, but they will all have a very low output during the night. This means unless you want your factory to slow down outside of the peak sun hours of the day you need to store power somewhere.
Storing power can be done with the Power storage machines. When there is a surplus of electricity in the power network they will start charging up. Then when the power output from the solar panels is not enough and there is power stored in power storage the power storage will fill in with the needed power. So with enough power storage you can have your factory fully powered throughout the whole night.
Transferring power is done by the building blocks. Simply build your solar panels, power storage and processing machines on a connected grid of building blocks and they will all transfer power as needed between them.
Solar panels need a clear view from above them, if any opaque blocks are above a solar panel it will not output any power. So while all other machines in the factory can be built vertically, solar panels can only be on one layer. So if you want to keep your solar farm part of your factory compact you will need to build a lot of solar panels so you can merge them to get more power per solar panel.