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"Simple Power Mode" / some plot power utilities

D

Dane

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98
Powering plots keeps being a huge buggy issue, requiring a ton of manual diagnosis and external mod tools like the one Kinggath recommends "RK's Power Grid Tools". The current mindset is to detach power poles from plots, which I suppose might make more sense from a technical standpoint, but the current user experience when you have some power object that is broken is a gigantic tedious process of carefully scrapping poles, navigating menus and creating new ones, wiring them, etc. It would be great if the vanilla power system was more robust but I feel like everyone, from Kinggath and whoever else is involved with documenting and responding to bugs and coding fixes, down to all the users that continually have to work around power problems, is just doing huge amounts of terribly unfun work.

I suggest a top-down tool or setting that simply powers plots within settlement boundaries without relying on poles and wiring at all, or perhaps a greatly simplified power broadcaster object that doesn't need a lot of careful plugging of bits together. Diagnosing a bad power object in a large and developed settlement isn't fun or engaging gameplay, it would be nice to have an option to just sidestep the whole thing if desired. I know this is at least partly already implemented in that interior plots don't require wiring and there's the vanilla broadcast power connectors, and there's at least one SS2 expansion mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/49055) that adds broadcast power plots. Please consider this option, I think a lot of people would use it and it would likely cut down on bug reports and the pressure to fix this sort of problem.

Related to diagnosing and fixing power problems, a top-down "Scrap all power connectors, poles and wires" tool would be welcome, for when you need to redo power for a whole settlement. Preferably with an option to scrap and remake power poles for all plots that normally have them. Redoing power poles by hand is a fairly huge unpleasant process of navigating menus for each plot, it's the kind of task that really should be automated.

Thanks!
 
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The way I understand it, the only "safe" way to remove powered objects is the scrap option in workshop mode. This is hard coded into the engine. Mod authors do not have access to this system via script. This is the reason there are no automated tools. (or really any tools) There is no easy way to do it outside of either reverse engineering the game engine or possibly by creating a F4SE plugin. Both options require skills and knowledge far beyond most mod authors. Also Kinggath would not want to make F4SE a requirement as SS2 would no longer be able to run on xBox.

A better way would be to get rid of the vanilla power resource and replace it with something custom. A new system that would work similar to food and water. If settlement production - consumption > 0 - the plot(s) is considered powered. If there is nothing connecting to the power grid, there is nothing to remove and have a chance to get corrupted. This would be a LOT of work and I would guess it has a very low chance to be implemented.

Hopefully I have stated facts and not nonsense. Going by memory here...
 
The simplest solution that I can think of would be to just make the Municipal Power Pylon be a 'radiant' 'broadcaster' with a radius large enough to cover all the vanilla settlements. Mods have added power poles that can hit that range, so it's doable that way around.
But yeah, any attempt to solve the "Power Grid Corruption" issue via scripting is doomed to fail, since that's what causes it in the first place - unless someone manages to find a workaround that some of the best minds in game-modding haven't yet spotted.
 
There is a tool that fixes the bug with programmatic scrapping a power item, according to Kinggath, that's what I mentioned in the first post. It seems reasonable to put those together, all constructed scrap power stuff and then run the bug fix. It doesn't prevent the bug but it does detect and repair it, going by what Kinggath talks about starting at 8:40
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On the page for that R2K's Tools, they explicitly say kinggath helped with making it. But as msalaba said, Simsettlements very deliberately does NOT have F4SE as a hard requirement (specifically because then the mod would never be playable on Xbox), and those R2K Tools DO require that. I'm sure if there was another way, someone would've found it by now.
 
yaugieLC said:
The simplest solution that I can think of would be to just make the Municipal Power Pylon be a 'radiant' 'broadcaster' with a radius large enough to cover all the vanilla settlements. Mods have added power poles that can hit that range, so it's doable that way around.
But yeah, any attempt to solve the "Power Grid Corruption" issue via scripting is doomed to fail, since that's what causes it in the first place - unless someone manages to find a workaround that some of the best minds in game-modding haven't yet spotted.
Click to expand...
That sounds awesome. I wish someone would do that.
 
seems like a really simple compromise is to add a version of the SS2 Municipal Grid Pylon/Switchbox, the power item you need to build 1 of anyway. Just make a version of that that broadcasts power using the existing broadcast power mechanic and make the area large enough for the settlement. I went ahead and asked the modder that makes Whisper's Power Plots (includes various "Tesla" power broadcast plots) to consider adding such an item.
www.nexusmods.com

Mod unavailable

This mod is not currently available
www.nexusmods.com www.nexusmods.com
 
If my understanding of how things work is correct, it wouldn't be an even remotely difficult task to do that; if nobody else has done it within the next 12 hours, I'll do it myself.
 
Nice, I'm going to give this a try, thanks for making that!
e: I have this lingering evil in my power grid at Starlight and this will be the first place I test it at
 
Do let me know if there's any problems; I only gave a brief test run to make sure I'd copied the relevant data onto the new objects, hasn't been used in a 'proper' game.
 
Appears to work exactly as I was hoping, here's what I did:
  • Installed mod, loaded game, went to Starlight (I have something like 40 plots, mix of interior and exterior)
  • Manually scrapped every power item, whether it came with vanilla or SS2, all wires, connectors, poles including external plot poles, and the SS2 municipal power pole
  • Constructed your Municipal Power 10x pole; at first it wasn't providing power
  • Refreshed Plot on the two basic power plots, power grid lit up
  • Save/Exit, restart game
and everything is now powered and working OK so far, RK Power Grid Tool shows 47 objects connected (about what I expect, I have like 1 or 2 hanging lights somewhere)

NO WIRES, NO POLES! I was really hoping it worked this way, and it does - when external plots have no pole, they will still accept broadcast power just as internal plots do. This will save so much pain trying to fix a bugged power grid. Thanks!
 
You can save yourself some hassle by going into the SS2 settings and turn off Auto Place Power Poles <- not 100% on the actual setting name... :scratchhead
 
Thanks, I had missed that option. Seems stable so far and it's good to have a workaround for the recurring problem I've had with certain poles just refusing to be powered. I actually enjoy running power the vanilla way but I also enjoy it when stuff works and the game doesn't crash, I think that mod by YaugieLC will end up being super popular.
 
Radiant power is something that should just be and no more spaghetti that doesn't work or breaks the grid half the time. I have come to find its wires that go bad in grids 90% of the time.
 
yaugieLC said:
There, it's done.

www.nexusmods.com

Mod unavailable

This mod is not currently available
www.nexusmods.com www.nexusmods.com
Click to expand...
Totally not lore unfriendly at all either cause you know it was proven to work a long time ago,

Wireless power​

Further information: Wireless power transfer § Tesla

Tesla sitting in front of a spiral coil used in his wireless power experiments at his East Houston St. laboratory
From the 1890s through 1906, Tesla spent a great deal of his time and fortune on a series of projects trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires. It was an expansion of his idea of using coils to transmit power that he had been demonstrating in wireless lighting. He saw this as not only a way to transmit large amounts of power around the world but also, as he had pointed out in his earlier lectures, a way to transmit worldwide communications.

At the time Tesla was formulating his ideas, there was no feasible way to wirelessly transmit communication signals over long distances, let alone large amounts of power. Tesla had studied radio waves early on, and came to the conclusion that part of the existing study on them, by Hertz, was incorrect.[140][141][142] Also, this new form of radiation was widely considered at the time to be a short-distance phenomenon that seemed to die out in less than a mile.[143] Tesla noted that, even if theories on radio waves were true, they were totally worthless for his intended purposes since this form of "invisible light" would diminish over a distance just like any other radiation and would travel in straight lines right out into space, becoming "hopelessly lost".[144]

By the mid-1890s, Tesla was working on the idea that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the Earth or the atmosphere, and began working on experiments to test this idea including setting up a large resonance transformer magnifying transmitter in his East Houston Street lab.[145][146][147] Seeming to borrow from a common idea at the time that the Earth's atmosphere was conductive,[148][149] he proposed a system composed of balloons suspending, transmitting, and receiving, electrodes in the air above 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in altitude, where he thought the lower pressure would allow him to send high voltages (millions of volts) long distances.
 
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