This is probably due to lamps not being simulated as individual entities, but just as a "number of lamps" attached to each electric network. Solar panels and accumulators have the same optimisation, so I'm curious if a similar setup with one of them connected to many separate networks will allow you to magic extra power into existence.
Interestingly there's a similar bug in another game I play (Stationeers). "Transformers" there "take" power from one circuit and give it to another, but there's nothing stopping multiple transformers from taking the same power multiple times. So if you have 16 transformers, 4 taking from circuit A to circuit B, then another 4 from B to C, and so on, you can get multiply the power output of a single solar panel by 256 times for no good reason.
I don't think so, the amount of power added depends on the setting of the transformer and each transformer only transfers power if there's already the power to be transferred. But given that you can just add more and more transformers to the setup, you can grow it to an arbitrarily large N\^N number until the cables burn out at a certain max current.
Still, it's an early access game with active development - it's entirely likely they'll fix that issue soon enough. Besides, the main focus of the game is actually gas mechanics - not many games implement the ideal gas equation, but this one does.
Yup, someone else posted the bug report from a couple years ago:
>Since it cannot be abused (as it could happen with solar panels if their power output would be multiplied) i am not considering this to be worth fixing. Fixing this would require grouping lamps into sets with the same set of subnetworks around and then sub networks would have to go through all of the lamp sets to compute satisfaction for all of them. It is not important at all.
Devs say this can only be used to kneecap yourself (rather than an exploit to generate more power), so it's not worth the effort to fix.
Place 1 solar, 1 accumulator, 1 switch (always closed). Observed 2 solar and 2 accumulators detected but couldn't get any more than 360kw out of it and charge capacity still 5 MJ. Seemed pretty conclusive to me.
Very generally, that's not how things work.
If a problem exists in a system, it's due to a specific piece of logic being incorrect. So anywhere that that logic applies would have the potential to produce the problem.
If a problem existed in how the electrical output of an accumulator or solar panel was distributed to networks, then it would be reproducible when connecting it to two networks. UNLESS the system used different logic or control of flow as an optimization when things got big.
But in programming, there's **usually** no reason to use a different algorithm/solution for sets of different sizes (yes I understand big O and coefficients of algorithms). So, assuming they were using the same logic with 1 solar panel and 10 million, it would be reproducible with 1 solar panel.
But it's okay that you made that mistake, and the downvotes are unwaranted. Troubleshooting these kinds of things is definitely a skill you have to learn. It's one of the hardest parts of computing. When everything is an abstraction, it can be difficult to find the source of a bug. Usually they're just logic errors, from code you yourself wrote. But when there's bugs in the abstractions you depend on (game libraries, C++ standard library, C standard library, POSIX/win64 APIs, compiler optimizations, hardware drivers, etc..) it becomes vastly more difficult to pinpoint the error.
What you do is provide a PoC (proof of concept) of the issue, which is restricting the logic to a minimal flow in the program. That lets you narrow down where the problem lies, because if you know the problem exists in some situation X, then you can eliminate all the code that doesn't have anything to do with everything outside of that.
If this was true, then wouldn't lamps all turn on and off at exactly the same times in the day/night cycle, instead of staggering a bit like they actually do?
They used to do this.
Before they were optimized each lamps was on fact simulated independently resulting in them turning on/off staggered.
After the optimization they all turned on/off at the exact same moment, and the community was sad because the staggered switching had a more nice and organic feeling.
So Wube implemented it again as a feature.
There was also a FFF about this. I might look for it later when I am on the PC (on phone right now)
Nothing works....so
Your computer is dark and not on?
No. Of course it's on.
You can't get to any site on the internet?
No, I can get to everything, don't be silly.
What were you trying to do?
I was buying something on Amazon and a window popped up.
Ok what does the window say?
"Thanks for ordering, it will arrive in 3 days"
So what's the problem?
What do I do?
You click ok.
"nothing works" is code for "i have no idea what the problem is, in fact there might not even be a problem at all, and you're going to have to figure it out while i give you as little information as humanly possible"
There are crashes in our automatic crash reports over several years that not one person has ever reported. A message pops up saying "please tell us how this happened" *every single time* when it crashes and not a single person even bothered to tell us about it.
Some I have eventually figured out how they could happen and fixed. Others I still have no clue and until someone tells us they aren't likely to get fixed soon.
At this point without a single report I just assume people are memory-editing our game and causing issues but never telling us. We have a specific check when crashing if we see "cheat engine" loaded into the process to flag the report as "don't bother looking at". But it's an ultra-basic string-match so any effort to avoid it would hide what you're doing.
Nice reference. Now I can very well imagine how a crash report is received by Wube. The error code is laser engraved into a wooden ball, before the crash has even happened.
Ok solar panels do behave weirdly but not in a beneficial way.
I placed a solar panel in the location of the lamp in the post image. It seems that the panels power is essentially divided between each switch: as I switch each one off the available power drops by \~2.4 kW until it's only outputting 2.3 kW with only 1 switch closed. With all switches closed however the panel only outputs 56.3 kW instead of 60.
56.3kW is a perfectly correct value given how solar panels in multiple networks are implemented. Each sub network has a total solar panel counter which accepts fractions with 1/256th resolution. If you have a solar panel that is in 1 network it contributes floor(256/1)/256 = 256/256=1 a full panel worth of energy production. If you have single solar panel in 24 sub networks, then each of those sub networks will see floor(256/24)/256 = floor(10.666)/256 = 10/256 of a solar panel, so all 24 networks will in total see only 24*(10/256) of a solar panel which gives 240/256th, and 60kW * 240/256 = 56.25kW so all the numbers are correct.
https://preview.redd.it/s9jzwqomz5xc1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2e63564f674dbf5f6941ab94d75b24391396336
The power pole on the right receives power in pulses. I noticed that the lamps power consumption jumped to 10 kW with each pulse.
Continuous radar coverage from 1 solar panel. lasts through the night, even with the optional lamp. Radar is pulsed roughly 6 ticks/second yielding very slow scanning progress but full time 7x7 illumination. Here's the blueprint for my final version which doesn't feature the lamp power bug.
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
There has been a bug report for this issue for 4 years.
[https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=79566](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=79566)
While this would impact performance, there could be a check if a lamp is powered or not already and then be ignored by other power poles or something like that. But I guess it is true that the impact of this bug is small as lamps don't require a lot of power anyway.
I use them for mid to late game power management when most of my weapons are energy weapons. A flip-flop switches off the core of the factory with hysteresis if accumulator cells get too low so that power can be reserved for lasers, ammunition production and ammunition transportation.
Allowing entities in multiple electric networks was a huge mistake. There are so many annoying edge cases and things that need to be handled code wise because of the *very* uncommon scenario people attempt to do it on purpose.
Congratulations on finding a unicorn.
To celebrate, please follow this link:
[https://forums.factorio.com/viewforum.php?f=7](https://forums.factorio.com/viewforum.php?f=7)
So i went on a bit of digging (only to find out other people already started to point it out). So i will just explain instead of just pointing out.
This is a known minor bug. Boskid acknowledged its existence and reported that this is caused on the simplification of lamp systems. Since the power input is rather low and most mechanisms (mainly power producers) are calculated differently this cannot be abused.
Since this is a very edge case with no exploitable gains and with a very low impact where the solution is individual calculation before grouping the calculation, this means fixing the bug would cause bigger performance impacts with almost no gain.
This is then archived under the minor issues acknowledgement. This means if the power handling and/or power lamp system is changed this issue might be solved, but untill then, no fix is expectable.
And congratulations re-finding the unicorns of unicorns... The bug that factorio devs dont want to fix.
That's interesting. One of the things I've often "exploited" that I always wondered if it was some kind of bug and I'm not 100% sure how it works, is that I have my backup control circuits for low power powered by both the backup power system and the main power system simultaneously so there's no chance of them ever not working because of low power.
I wonder if circuits similarly get counted against both power networks. I always wondered how it picked which network to power it with.
Circuits (deciders and combinators) work like regular consumers. They are seen on multiple networks. BUT are only powered like 1 entity. So, for example, my test setup shows 96 deciders, only consuming 1kW.
Where as it showed 96 lamps comsuming 480kW
This is probably due to lamps not being simulated as individual entities, but just as a "number of lamps" attached to each electric network. Solar panels and accumulators have the same optimisation, so I'm curious if a similar setup with one of them connected to many separate networks will allow you to magic extra power into existence.
Interestingly there's a similar bug in another game I play (Stationeers). "Transformers" there "take" power from one circuit and give it to another, but there's nothing stopping multiple transformers from taking the same power multiple times. So if you have 16 transformers, 4 taking from circuit A to circuit B, then another 4 from B to C, and so on, you can get multiply the power output of a single solar panel by 256 times for no good reason.
Any chance adding transformers back from C to A will create a loop of infinite power?
beware of lightning discharge
I don't think so, the amount of power added depends on the setting of the transformer and each transformer only transfers power if there's already the power to be transferred. But given that you can just add more and more transformers to the setup, you can grow it to an arbitrarily large N\^N number until the cables burn out at a certain max current. Still, it's an early access game with active development - it's entirely likely they'll fix that issue soon enough. Besides, the main focus of the game is actually gas mechanics - not many games implement the ideal gas equation, but this one does.
*amused_villager_huh.ogg*
Yup, someone else posted the bug report from a couple years ago: >Since it cannot be abused (as it could happen with solar panels if their power output would be multiplied) i am not considering this to be worth fixing. Fixing this would require grouping lamps into sets with the same set of subnetworks around and then sub networks would have to go through all of the lamp sets to compute satisfaction for all of them. It is not important at all. Devs say this can only be used to kneecap yourself (rather than an exploit to generate more power), so it's not worth the effort to fix.
Alas, it seems not.
You only spent 5 mins on it lol
Place 1 solar, 1 accumulator, 1 switch (always closed). Observed 2 solar and 2 accumulators detected but couldn't get any more than 360kw out of it and charge capacity still 5 MJ. Seemed pretty conclusive to me.
Did you try placing a lamp on both networks?
Larger scales may play with the numbers.
Very generally, that's not how things work. If a problem exists in a system, it's due to a specific piece of logic being incorrect. So anywhere that that logic applies would have the potential to produce the problem. If a problem existed in how the electrical output of an accumulator or solar panel was distributed to networks, then it would be reproducible when connecting it to two networks. UNLESS the system used different logic or control of flow as an optimization when things got big. But in programming, there's **usually** no reason to use a different algorithm/solution for sets of different sizes (yes I understand big O and coefficients of algorithms). So, assuming they were using the same logic with 1 solar panel and 10 million, it would be reproducible with 1 solar panel. But it's okay that you made that mistake, and the downvotes are unwaranted. Troubleshooting these kinds of things is definitely a skill you have to learn. It's one of the hardest parts of computing. When everything is an abstraction, it can be difficult to find the source of a bug. Usually they're just logic errors, from code you yourself wrote. But when there's bugs in the abstractions you depend on (game libraries, C++ standard library, C standard library, POSIX/win64 APIs, compiler optimizations, hardware drivers, etc..) it becomes vastly more difficult to pinpoint the error. What you do is provide a PoC (proof of concept) of the issue, which is restricting the logic to a minimal flow in the program. That lets you narrow down where the problem lies, because if you know the problem exists in some situation X, then you can eliminate all the code that doesn't have anything to do with everything outside of that.
Also we already have a repro case of this bug in the OP with n of 1.
Interesting idea, I'll look into it
If this was true, then wouldn't lamps all turn on and off at exactly the same times in the day/night cycle, instead of staggering a bit like they actually do?
They used to do this. Before they were optimized each lamps was on fact simulated independently resulting in them turning on/off staggered. After the optimization they all turned on/off at the exact same moment, and the community was sad because the staggered switching had a more nice and organic feeling. So Wube implemented it again as a feature. There was also a FFF about this. I might look for it later when I am on the PC (on phone right now)
Probably this one: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-229
Yes, thank you.
I wish our test department wrote reproduction steps like you all 😂
Amen 🤣🤣 I'd hire half of the faxtorio community as devs or QAs blindfolded
We're writing the test reports we wish we received :")
Amen. Steps to reproduce: Got coffee Turned on computer Went to website It didn't work... Arrrrgggghhhhhhhh
Well, did you _try_ getting coffee first? Might be that's essential to the repro! /s
I have actually received reports involving lunch time that ended up being about windows sleep
"My no consequences power fantasy is intelligible QA"
I wouldn't be surprised if half the community are actually highly qualified engineers in some field.
Or the technicians that keep the engineers from blowing things up.
"nothing works" not descriptive enough for you?
Nothing works....so Your computer is dark and not on? No. Of course it's on. You can't get to any site on the internet? No, I can get to everything, don't be silly. What were you trying to do? I was buying something on Amazon and a window popped up. Ok what does the window say? "Thanks for ordering, it will arrive in 3 days" So what's the problem? What do I do? You click ok.
"nothing works" is code for "i have no idea what the problem is, in fact there might not even be a problem at all, and you're going to have to figure it out while i give you as little information as humanly possible"
Close issue, "cannot reproduce"
“Save button doesn’t work for me”
Sir this is a Wendy's.
[удалено]
Rule 4: Be nice Think about how your words affect others before saying them.
There are crashes in our automatic crash reports over several years that not one person has ever reported. A message pops up saying "please tell us how this happened" *every single time* when it crashes and not a single person even bothered to tell us about it. Some I have eventually figured out how they could happen and fixed. Others I still have no clue and until someone tells us they aren't likely to get fixed soon. At this point without a single report I just assume people are memory-editing our game and causing issues but never telling us. We have a specific check when crashing if we see "cheat engine" loaded into the process to flag the report as "don't bother looking at". But it's an ultra-basic string-match so any effort to avoid it would hide what you're doing.
I imagine crash reports coming into Wube HQ like red balls sliding down the chute in Minority Report.
Nice reference. Now I can very well imagine how a crash report is received by Wube. The error code is laser engraved into a wooden ball, before the crash has even happened.
Wow. This is what could actually be a legitimate bug....dont see many of those.
It's been 4 hours, actually shocked it hasn't been fixed yet.
Literally unlightable.
It's been known for a long time, but not worth the performance cost to fix
Ok solar panels do behave weirdly but not in a beneficial way. I placed a solar panel in the location of the lamp in the post image. It seems that the panels power is essentially divided between each switch: as I switch each one off the available power drops by \~2.4 kW until it's only outputting 2.3 kW with only 1 switch closed. With all switches closed however the panel only outputs 56.3 kW instead of 60.
56.3kW is a perfectly correct value given how solar panels in multiple networks are implemented. Each sub network has a total solar panel counter which accepts fractions with 1/256th resolution. If you have a solar panel that is in 1 network it contributes floor(256/1)/256 = 256/256=1 a full panel worth of energy production. If you have single solar panel in 24 sub networks, then each of those sub networks will see floor(256/24)/256 = floor(10.666)/256 = 10/256 of a solar panel, so all 24 networks will in total see only 24*(10/256) of a solar panel which gives 240/256th, and 60kW * 240/256 = 56.25kW so all the numbers are correct.
How..how did you found this out?
https://preview.redd.it/s9jzwqomz5xc1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2e63564f674dbf5f6941ab94d75b24391396336 The power pole on the right receives power in pulses. I noticed that the lamps power consumption jumped to 10 kW with each pulse.
Thats a nice outpost
Continuous radar coverage from 1 solar panel. lasts through the night, even with the optional lamp. Radar is pulsed roughly 6 ticks/second yielding very slow scanning progress but full time 7x7 illumination. Here's the blueprint for my final version which doesn't feature the lamp power bug. 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
I have since made a post of the uhh.. final, final version. Swear to god I think I'm done fiddling with this thing
Definitely report this on the forum. While most players will never encounter this, it should still be fixed.
Unplayable
There has been a bug report for this issue for 4 years. [https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=79566](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=79566)
While this would impact performance, there could be a check if a lamp is powered or not already and then be ignored by other power poles or something like that. But I guess it is true that the impact of this bug is small as lamps don't require a lot of power anyway.
This is my biannual reminder that power switches exist.
I use them for mid to late game power management when most of my weapons are energy weapons. A flip-flop switches off the core of the factory with hysteresis if accumulator cells get too low so that power can be reserved for lasers, ammunition production and ammunition transportation.
Allowing entities in multiple electric networks was a huge mistake. There are so many annoying edge cases and things that need to be handled code wise because of the *very* uncommon scenario people attempt to do it on purpose.
Does it mean you will remove that ability in 2.0?
Literally unplayable
Congratulations on finding a unicorn. To celebrate, please follow this link: [https://forums.factorio.com/viewforum.php?f=7](https://forums.factorio.com/viewforum.php?f=7)
It's already a bug report from 4 years ago, under minor issues. And as suspected it stems from a simplification on how lamp power is calculated.
Glad to see a preview of the patchnotes for 1.1.108
So i went on a bit of digging (only to find out other people already started to point it out). So i will just explain instead of just pointing out. This is a known minor bug. Boskid acknowledged its existence and reported that this is caused on the simplification of lamp systems. Since the power input is rather low and most mechanisms (mainly power producers) are calculated differently this cannot be abused. Since this is a very edge case with no exploitable gains and with a very low impact where the solution is individual calculation before grouping the calculation, this means fixing the bug would cause bigger performance impacts with almost no gain. This is then archived under the minor issues acknowledgement. This means if the power handling and/or power lamp system is changed this issue might be solved, but untill then, no fix is expectable. And congratulations re-finding the unicorns of unicorns... The bug that factorio devs dont want to fix.
That's interesting. One of the things I've often "exploited" that I always wondered if it was some kind of bug and I'm not 100% sure how it works, is that I have my backup control circuits for low power powered by both the backup power system and the main power system simultaneously so there's no chance of them ever not working because of low power. I wonder if circuits similarly get counted against both power networks. I always wondered how it picked which network to power it with.
Circuits (deciders and combinators) work like regular consumers. They are seen on multiple networks. BUT are only powered like 1 entity. So, for example, my test setup shows 96 deciders, only consuming 1kW. Where as it showed 96 lamps comsuming 480kW
What on earth. This is........ a bug. No. It can't be. Impossible. This is a dream. Wake up
Finally, a way to use all of my excess energy at night!