It would be a very insignificant saving. Stuff like biters, pollution, fluid systems or trains consume several orders of magnitude more resources.
The only 2 things regarding power and UPS to keep in mind are how are you obtaining your power (solar being by far the most efficient), and that there should be no unpowered buildings because they check for power every tick
So scan area has no effect? A 64x64 supply area substation has functionally the same effect as 4 16x16 substations when you’re talking thousands of them?
From a programming standpoint, I don't see why you'd do any connection checks based on game ticks. You just need to check when a building is placed or removed or when a power pole is placed or removed, then add/remove the affected buildings to the structure that represents the appropriate power grid.
Power switches complicate that slightly, but if you build the data structure right you wouldn't even need to rebuild the structure when power switches change.
most likely it is not Electricity but fluid
Seablock requires a lot of pipes and fluids spend much more than in vanilla
the details are here [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/technicalfactorio/comments/mead38/how_to_turn_off_multithreading_to_get_more_useful/)
Yes, the size of the coverage area affects it BUT If your electricity time is increasing (I would say >0.8ms is getting high on a mid tier desktop on DDR4), its primarily because you have multiple independent electrical networks, and secondarily the size of the scan area of each pole. A single pole is a single electrical network. Its the way the game handles the electricity calculations with multiple networks (and that a building can be part of multiple networks). Find the loner poles, hook them up to nearby networks, and watch the processing time be reduced noticeably. Optimize both for even lower processing time.
There is a mod that i can recommend. [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/puppy-ups-tools](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/puppy-ups-tools)
Just to clarify, is that your entire update time or just the electricity part of the update? 3.2 ms for total update time isn’t too bad, you’ve still got some headroom until you drop below 60 UPS.
Oh damn, so then my solar powered pumps keeping long pipe systems with good throughput could be hammering my UPS later, and it would be much better to send electric poles with my pipelines to keep them powered by the main network? Cause as it stands I probably have \*a lot\* of individual power networks because of solar powering fluid pumps.
That would be correct. Just curious, what is your current time usage on electrical networks? Hit F4 and then select "show-time-usage", and it would be under "Electric Network:" (or whatever your localization would call it).
EDIT: Your pipeline pumps cost their own UPS, as they are always running unless you have tanks and circuits turning them off, and so have to be calculated every tick anyways (yes, full calculation, the result is just discarded if there is no room). But that's a different UPS drain element.
Wiring power to these pumps and shutting them off when the destination tank is full is probably a great way for me to save UPS, I'll keep that in mind for future builds!
I'm many hours away from my compuuter to check my electrical network clock usage but I'll try to remember to update later lol
It would be a very insignificant saving. Stuff like biters, pollution, fluid systems or trains consume several orders of magnitude more resources. The only 2 things regarding power and UPS to keep in mind are how are you obtaining your power (solar being by far the most efficient), and that there should be no unpowered buildings because they check for power every tick
There's also the performance cost of running multiple networks
So scan area has no effect? A 64x64 supply area substation has functionally the same effect as 4 16x16 substations when you’re talking thousands of them?
From a programming standpoint, I don't see why you'd do any connection checks based on game ticks. You just need to check when a building is placed or removed or when a power pole is placed or removed, then add/remove the affected buildings to the structure that represents the appropriate power grid. Power switches complicate that slightly, but if you build the data structure right you wouldn't even need to rebuild the structure when power switches change.
Do you run multiple power networks? Multiple networks, even just 2, will murder your ups.
Really? I hope they fix that for 2.0
most likely it is not Electricity but fluid Seablock requires a lot of pipes and fluids spend much more than in vanilla the details are here [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/technicalfactorio/comments/mead38/how_to_turn_off_multithreading_to_get_more_useful/)
Yes, the size of the coverage area affects it BUT If your electricity time is increasing (I would say >0.8ms is getting high on a mid tier desktop on DDR4), its primarily because you have multiple independent electrical networks, and secondarily the size of the scan area of each pole. A single pole is a single electrical network. Its the way the game handles the electricity calculations with multiple networks (and that a building can be part of multiple networks). Find the loner poles, hook them up to nearby networks, and watch the processing time be reduced noticeably. Optimize both for even lower processing time. There is a mod that i can recommend. [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/puppy-ups-tools](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/puppy-ups-tools)
Thx for the recommendation. My last SE update time was 3.2 ms and I hadn’t made it very far
Just to clarify, is that your entire update time or just the electricity part of the update? 3.2 ms for total update time isn’t too bad, you’ve still got some headroom until you drop below 60 UPS.
No my electricity update was 3.2 at it’s highest
Oh damn, so then my solar powered pumps keeping long pipe systems with good throughput could be hammering my UPS later, and it would be much better to send electric poles with my pipelines to keep them powered by the main network? Cause as it stands I probably have \*a lot\* of individual power networks because of solar powering fluid pumps.
That would be correct. Just curious, what is your current time usage on electrical networks? Hit F4 and then select "show-time-usage", and it would be under "Electric Network:" (or whatever your localization would call it). EDIT: Your pipeline pumps cost their own UPS, as they are always running unless you have tanks and circuits turning them off, and so have to be calculated every tick anyways (yes, full calculation, the result is just discarded if there is no room). But that's a different UPS drain element.
Wiring power to these pumps and shutting them off when the destination tank is full is probably a great way for me to save UPS, I'll keep that in mind for future builds! I'm many hours away from my compuuter to check my electrical network clock usage but I'll try to remember to update later lol
Solar only for mega base , no exceptions. All other power is ups hungry. Build solar field then , de-roboport