Goonhub
(10-27-2022, 06:14 AM)UrsulaMejor Wrote:Quote:Printers now have to restock and this has cut the typical power output over the course of the round by over 10 times. So now the best feeder setup probably requires using them ChemiCompilerGods, no. Just, no.
Automatic feeder setups are laggy as hell and are honestly incredibly inefficient. The time spent setting them up would be better spent doing anything else, like setting up more radiation collectors (be sure to top off the plasma tanks!) or just feeding it 10000 weed leaves and seeds from a borrowed botany plant
Or if you're feeling really adventurous, monkeys and chickens are worth way, way more than thermal paper ever could be.
Not that there's any reason to do any of this; increasing power is boring and doesn't do much for the station
This is just incorrect though? The lag part is accurate (if you mess up the flusher and let items pile up), but the rest is wrong. The benefit of setting up an automatic feeder is that its a passive system. Once you do that, singularity energy is increasing while you do the rest of the setup. So, if you have printers or a chemicompiler or something else that spits out items feeding the singularity, then all the time you spend printing and wiring collectors and cooling and packing plasma in tox lab is not "wasted" time. When you finally set up those collectors, they'll benefit from the singularity energy being higher due to being passively increasing in mass. Making an autofeeder is the most efficient use of time someone looking to boost singularity output can make, since it performs mundane work while you do things that reasonably require human attention.
Growing botany plants for items is an active system, since the plant doesnt do anything helpful unless someone is actively paying attention to it. In theory, having multiple active systems that need maintained would solve the problem of the engine being a mostly one-man job. In practice, in my experience playing mostly CE it is rare to have engineers who are willing to do anything with the engine, even moreso now with the mechanic merge. Thus, multiple active systems just means a lot of work that never gets done, since you can only attend to one at a time. You could make more collectors, but that means you arent supercooling plasma tanks. You could supercool plasma tanks, but that means you arent feeding the singularity. You could feed the singularity, but that means you arent wiring more collectors. Not getting all three done means your output is not going to be a whole ton higher than just filling the normal collectors, making a 13x13 containment, and calling it a day. (And no, nobody from another department wants to spend their shift helping grow your singularity. If they did, they would have picked engineer.)
Also, non player mobs (monkeys, chickens, etc.) are worth 10 items to the singularity. They are in no way even remotely close to approaching viable. That's like, half a printer flush, or one second from a chemicompiler.
And finally on the statement that "increasing power is boring and doesn't do much for the station," I disagree? People including myself play engineer because they like optimizing a system. Thats the whole gameplay loop of engineer. Maybe you prefer making novelties in botany or ranching or the kitchen, fighting other players in a security/antagonists conflict, or doing whatever nerd bullshit science does, but I like that engineering presents a quantifiable system to optimize, and allows for that optimization through constructing things (which is within engineering's domain and makes thematic sense). The concept that the core gameplay objective of engineer is supposed to be boring and pointless seems like a very unhealthy way to go about designing an experience that people voluntarily sign up for.
Specifically about the singularity, in order to fix the "optimal trat" being basically a lag machine, it would make sense to officialize the exploit into an actual feature. So instead of having to exploit things that make items from nothing, have some special item thats sole purpose is making mass for the singularity. Maybe something that takes excess rock, ice, or whatever else it's set to (within reason, so it doesnt become optimal to just grief the miners for all their ore) and makes that into a sort of "mass payload" that shoots into the singularity and has a singularity mass boost based on the amount of material used to make it. For traitor usage, damage this object does to people could directly scale with mass.
This way, it reduces reliance on lag machines and other unstable mechanics for engineering to do its job, and also involves another department in a way that makes sense. Mining and Engineering being under the same command means that cooperation is likely to actually happen. I'll flesh this out in a suggestion forum post if I remember to, but the general idea is to try to make "optimal" strategies for power generation that dont just grief the station (infinite temp TEG, singulo lag machine, everything about hotspots, etc.) without just removing the ability to optimize power output entirely.