PC Correct me if I'm wrong, you can't make a solar panel or the components?

ElCabong

ElCabong

Well-known member
I live without electricity because of a pet peeve. I don't like generators. They make noise and they make fumes. Now this is kind of irrational because this is a game and you can't smell or hear it but I imagine it.

For the first time I looted a solar package from an airdrop. Now that I can get into because it doesn't make any noise and it doesn't make any fumes and I can make a battery bank and had lots of batteries.

So now my base is fully lit. It did take a little trial and error on my part. 

But as I understand it, I can't make solar panels. You have to find them on the traider or loot them.

 
There is a "Solar Bank Bundle" quest reward as well, which appears to be an item you can break apart into a solar bank, a few panels, a wire tool, and a relay. It looks to be the reward for completing the Tier 5 quest chain.

We always put our generators well under ground and then hold our breath when we have to go down there to refuel.

 
speaking of solar panels, I understand that they increased the price of  almost everything the trader sells by 50%

In alpha 19 you could get 6 quality 6 Solar cells and the solar bank for around 97,000 dukes with 

Cigar+max better barter+ Magnum with Magnumenforcer 4+Sugar butts+ Grandpas Awesome sauce+ Pumpkin cheescake

In alpha 20 the full solar setup now cost 145,500 dukes


this is WITH  Maximum investment in to the barter reduction system.

Solar cells were already the most expensive thing in the game, did they really ALSO need to be increased by 50% price that all the other trader items got?

seems like a kick in a teeth to solar panels, but at the same time  using 7.5 stacks of dukes as oppose to 5 to get full quality 6 solar isn't that much of an issue when you are  in the late game and swimming in a quarter million dukes

If solar panels stay the same price, It won't really bother me to much, but I also think this is one of the only things that should not have been made more expensive than it already was.

I wonder how much more appealing solar power would be to players if the price was reduced while still being the most expensive item

 
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Rotor said:
Do lights increase the heat map or only torches, campfires and forges?
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Supposedly Electric lighting doesn't produce "heat"  because they supposedly don't flicker the way a fire/flame does,  to catch the eyes of Zoms.  How this explanation works when even enclosed or underground  rooms with torches,  adds to the "heat map"  is something of a mystery.

 
PoppaSmirk said:
Supposedly Electric lighting doesn't produce "heat"  because they supposedly don't flicker the way a fire/flame does,  to catch the eyes of Zoms.  How this explanation works when even enclosed or underground  rooms with torches,  adds to the "heat map"  is something of a mystery.
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Because flames produce heat, electric lights don't

 
*smiles*   go to your nearest light fixture,  reach out and touch the bulb.  Come back and tell me if you got "frostbite"  ( wait,  don't do that,  I might wind up liable for some lawsuit chicanery  --- lol )   My point is,  lights Do produce heat,  Fluorescent Iighting is minimal enough to be relatively cool to the touch,  however the most common lighting item is 'basic light bulb" and that rascal will get hot.   I've also never been able to "warm My hands over a candle at a distance of more than 6-8 inches", and I certainly don't sense a change in ambient temperature if I light several candles in My bedroom for some.... mood lighting  for a date.  So,  a zombie detecting a few candles in an enclosed room,  from 25-50 feet away or MORE seems very ...mysterious to Me

 
Lol. My pipes froze up  many years ago in a very very cold Oklahoma winter. I turned on a naked light bulb used when working on the car and placed it so it was directly touching the pipes. 

Water was flowing within 15 minutes. Incandescent light bulbs get very hot. That's how an easy bake oven worked back in the day.

I don't think LED lights get that hot.

 
I don't know if electric lights count for "heat level". Which is a misnomer anyway, it isn't about heat at all but an internal counter for when the next goth girl will come over and ask for a package of sugar (Wait, did you kill her before she had a chance to talk ?)

😁

... But I know that electric light counts for stealth.

 
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PoppaSmirk said:
*smiles*   go to your nearest light fixture,  reach out and touch the bulb.  Come back and tell me if you got "frostbite"  ( wait,  don't do that,  I might wind up liable for some lawsuit chicanery  --- lol )   My point is,  lights Do produce heat,  Fluorescent Iighting is minimal enough to be relatively cool to the touch,  however the most common lighting item is 'basic light bulb" and that rascal will get hot.   I've also never been able to "warm My hands over a candle at a distance of more than 6-8 inches", and I certainly don't sense a change in ambient temperature if I light several candles in My bedroom for some.... mood lighting  for a date.  So,  a zombie detecting a few candles in an enclosed room,  from 25-50 feet away or MORE seems very ...mysterious to Me
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I'm just quoting the wiki here  😁

 
meganoth said:
I don't know if electric lights count for "heat level".
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They don't, or at least there's nothing in the XML for heatmap, unlike the fire and workbench blocks. Relative strength of heatmap effect (for player-placed objects only):

Forge = 6

Campfire = 5

Chem Station = 5

Workbench = 2

Cement Mixer = 2

Torch = 1

Burning Barrel = 1

Candle = 0.5

The light blocks are classified as "Light" instead of "TorchHeatMap" and have none of the above. Interestingly, generators don't have any heat map parameters either. I thought they did contribute to heat, but...no evidence of it. I'm going to go test it anyhow, because the generator block does have its own class ("Generator") and maybe there is some hard-coded heatmap stuff for blocks with that class. Dunno why they wouldn't put it into the XML like they did for the torches and whatnot though.

meganoth said:
Which is a misnomer anyway, it isn't about heat at all but an internal counter for when the next goth girl will come over and ask for a package of sugar
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Exactly. We tend to take these abstractions and get hung up on the literal meaning of the word, or its IRL usages, and forget that the game is trying to simplify things like "how much of a disturbance are you making" down to something which can be calculated efficiently at run-time for all currently loaded chunks. And they call it "heat" because lots of games call it that, but it doesn't mean (only) literal heat.

Boidster said:
I'm going to go test it anyhow, because the generator block does have its own class ("Generator") and maybe there is some hard-coded heatmap stuff for blocks with that class.
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And I'm back. Zero heatmap effect from running generators. The only things which added to the heatmap was opening and closing the generator interface. Seems odd. I'd think that adding heatmap effects to generators would add some incentive to the late-game acquisition of solar panels. Especially if they were to add Demolishers into screamer hordes the goth girl's baking club.

 
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Boidster said:
I'd think that adding heatmap effects to generators would add some incentive to the late-game acquisition of solar panels. Especially if they were to add Demolishers into scout hordes.
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The stated intention of the Devs was to encourage use of electricity by making it produce no heat compared to torched and candles. So adding heat to the gennie wouldn't make a lot of sense.

 
Yeah, okay, but it is a little inconsistent and IMO there is room there to balance it out so that replacing all your torches with lights is still a net positive WRT the heatmap, but also that generators aren't heatmap-invisible. We only ever played around with solar as a novelty since with generators and daylight sensors we could basically electrify two bases and only occasionally need to bother with refueling. If those generators were contributing to occasional attacks on us from screamers - less frequent than with 50 torches of course! - we'd have more incentive to finally replace the noisy generators with quiet solar.

I'm sure it's moddable if I want it that way in my own game, so no big deal. I just wish solar was more of a desirable tech upgrade rather than a money sink later in the game. Maybe they have something else planned there.

 
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Literally everything in the world that uses or creates energy (aka electricity) generates heat, no exceptions. The amount of heat is based on how much energy used / created. So yes, all LEDs create some heat, including the most efficient ones of today.

 
Fox said:
Literally everything in the world that uses or creates energy (aka electricity) generates heat, no exceptions. The amount of heat is based on how much energy used / created. So yes, all LEDs create some heat, including the most efficient ones of today.
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A peltier used to charge a battery. Thermal energy -> electrical energy -> Chemical potential energy. Net endothermic reaction.

Sorry, had to be a smarta*** :)

 
Pernicious said:
A peltier used to charge a battery. Thermal energy -> electrical energy -> Chemical potential energy. Net endothermic reaction.

Sorry, had to be a smarta*** :)
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Using heat to generate energy is still heat. Also worth mentioning, stored energy is different and irrelevant to the point I was making. Even batteries idling generate no heat.

 
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Endothermic by definition means heat is destroyed- the opposite of generated. But as I said, I was just being a smartarse, picking on your semantics. I think everyone is aware that the use of energy usually generates waste heat. 

 
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