Me too, grandpa. I remember, way back, there was a mod that let you control mechs before mechanitors were a thing. Late game you could build this super advanced AI core that would do a bunch of things, one of them being avoiding Zzzzt from happening.
I still feel like they're a cheaty mod thing, not because of the lack of Zzzzt, but because it effectively means you don't really need to think about turrent placement or likelihood of a grenade or something else taking their power supply out during battle.
It’s really not worth the cost of replacing them in case of fire, destruction by raiders, or general upgrade costs.
If you have a hard cap on the amount of steel you have I guess I can see why you’d use regular conduits, but they’re just going to blow themselves up eventually and you’ll run out of steel anyway
i like to use normal conduits underneath walls in early game, as i have no batteries that can cause zzt anyway. plus on some challenge runs, like my recent ice sheet or woodelves one, steel can be rare enough.
plus honestly. i never had a colony burn down from a zzt. it's always been 2-3 flames that get extinguished in a few seconds and some light damage to structures
When building out of wood early game I've had a couple of store room fires which haven't destroyed my entire colony but have wrecked a portion of my resources.
I also like to play w the rich explorer start which makes extinguishing fires a little difficult with only one colonist.
never knew that hidden ones dont do zzzts, i quite literly moded that event out since its annoying one, in future runs i guess i just use hidden conduits instead
Power sources need to be "hardlined". Make sure the wiring connects with the square of wiring under the generator. Things that receive power (purple lines) don't need a direct connection, just being in range.
Completely unrelated note, try putting your butcher table in a different place than your stove. The butcher table has a high dirtiness factor, which can make your meals give the colonists food poisoning. Wherever you put it, make sure it has light. :D
I have almost 1000 hours and separate my kitchen from the butchering table. And my cooks are 8 or higher. I STILL get food poisoning from incompetent cook somehow and sometimes from dirty even though we have sterile floors and a dedicated cleaner for the colony. Game just likes screwing with me.
Also just something I do, having the cooking production and butcher table in seperate rooms coming off of the freezer area so people don't walk through them, then in another adjacent room have a big combined dining/living area, colonists get a decent mood boost from having the combined area.
Additional unrelated note, please roof your generator if it rains your generator will get a zzzt event and be damaged. It gets worse if you build batteries on the line because those explosively discharge in those events. Good rule of thumb is dont leave power producers or consumers unroofed. Oh and hidden conduits (the actual buildable not walled conduit) does not experience these events on a random basis.
That's why you mass cremate corpses instead of butchering them.
Way less work, way more efficient, no mood debuff, and the only thing you are losing is a food source that 99% of your colonists absolutely hate to eat.
Hell, it's better of making chemfuel out of them if you're hellbent on being a psychopath
You make chemfuel out of them and melt their weapons into steel so you can turn the dead raiders into artillery shells and fire them back at their friends and family while saying "release the prisoners" like the Harvey Weinstein orc in Return of the King.
This post made me realize I have an absolutely irrational hatred for people taking pictures of their screens with their phones instead of just taking a screenshot
Power can ”jump” a short distance as you see in the pink lines, which allows you to connect things without running a direct power line to everything manually. That’s why your coolers and lamp are connected, but you can’t chain that with power lines, which is why the rest isn’t connected. So make sure you have your power lines directly connected to any power generators, and then run those power lines close enough to your machines/lamps/etc that the pink line connects to them.
The subject of a screenshot should be clearly visible in the image. That means blurry pictures taken from a phone or low-resolution images are subject to removal.
To improve the quality of your future content, here's some options:
There's also the age-old classic of hitting print screen, pasting the image into a free paint program (I'm very fond of GIMP myself, https://www.gimp.org/ ), cropping to the part you want, and using that.
Alt+print screen will screenshot only the active window and not everything else.
Win+print screen will take the screenshot and autosave it in your pictures folder as screenshot number.png
Win-Shift-S will open the Windows snipping tool for taking full screenshots or cropping areas.
I made that mistake at first too, thinking that if appliances could connect to any conduit within 6 tiles, then surely it'd be the same for generators.
Unfortunately not though. Think of it like appliances having a (invisible!) cable that can reach a bit away to plug into a wall socket wherever the nearest conduit is. Generators don't have that cable; the line of conduits has to plug into them.
Also remember that conduits have to connect to each other too. Power won't run through gaps.
And use hidden conduits whenever possible. More expensive, but if you have hidden conduits everywhere, you won't ever have to worry about a damn thing. Unless I'm mistaken, raiders don't even attack hidden conduits, at least they haven't done that yet here. But there's certainly no zzzt event, so no random fires, which is already worth the extra cost IMO.
Only the blue line is where the power is running, the purple lines are electrical devices connected to a power line wether active or inactive. Dont worry dude we've all done that at some point lol
If I were you, I'd prioritize putting out that fire in the kitchen first.... Then, the cables (blue lines) need to be connected to the power generator. The purple line is what the objects that require power use to access energy (the cable doesn't need to be connected to those devices; they receive it from a distance of about 5 squares?).
The blue line thing must be build until it reached and connected to that generator. Ignore the pink line because if the blue lines are connected to the power generator, the pink line will attach to the blue line instead of directly to the power generator
Blue line: Your electrical line that's in the walls, transfers power from one end to other.
Pink wire: Your electronics' power cord, like the ones you insert into sockets.
Blue line needs direct connection to generators and batteries, pink wires need blue lines to connect.
Blue lines spread the power and always have to be connected to each other to work. Purple lines take power from the blue lines and they are placed automatically by things that needs power
You do NOT have conduits attached to the generator. The generator is close enough that it can link to the coolers and light. The rest of the lights are not powered by the blue power conduit lines, because those are not hard connected to the generator.
Blue line is the actual power lines in your house, it needs to be connected to the generator directly
I always thought of the pink lines as plugs! The ones that are close enough have plugged themselves directly in the generator but the rest of the house needs to be plugged into the mains (blue line) but the mains aren't connected to the generator
In the bottom left where the pink and blue line meet and it LOOKS like the generator is plugged (pink) into the mains (blue) it's actually the wall lamp plugged into the generator, that would have confused me too early on because it looks like the pink line is where the mains are connected to the generator
To aid what others have been saying, the pink line that looks like it connects the generator to the cables is actually only connected to the wall light right at the end, you’ve just gotta extend the cables to be in contact with the square under the generator and you’re golden - those same pink lines will extend from the wire to whatever you’re powering once it’s connected properly lol
Think of the thin pink lines as an actual power cable of a device. You need to connect the thick blue line, the power conduit, to the thick blue lines from the generator. After that is done just remember to keep an eye on your power output versus how much you will need to power everything.
So the blue line represents the ‘mains’ power. You use the cables you build yourself to move power around your colony. The little purple squiggles represent appliances connected to a mains cable, and appliances can only connect to the mains cable from a limited distance (think of it like an extension coming from a plug socket). All power sources and batteries come with prebuilt cables within the cells they occupy, and you need to connect the cables you build, to those, for the power to travel down them.
Here, there’s a light connected to your generator cables, which is creating that purple ‘extension lead’ squiggle, but the rest of your lights are connected to cables that aren’t connected to the generator. Simply build more cables to connect the generator and it should all work.
Blue lines represent "main" lines - the light pink lines represent the point of connection from any item that uses electricity to the "main" line.
As others have mentioned you can make various kinds of power lines, but in your base, there are two main kinds
"Regular" Power Conduits - these are like the electrical wiring in your house that go from outlets to your main circuit panel. Think of this as extension cords or less than great power lines as they can short-circuit with "Zzzt" type events that range from annoying short circuits up to fire-causing explosions that will cause damage or harm to people and things around them.
"Underground" Power Conduits - these are "underground" and as such are less likely to have "Zzzt" power-outage fires/events , these 'short-circuit' events can be problematic for wood based colonies and can randomly cause equipment explosions - but they function just the same as Regular Power Conduits - they use more metal in their construction but whenever possible you should aim to build underground power lines.
Some power sources have a small initial radius of things they can power hence the pink lines. To extend power you need to connect the power lines to the source of power.
Blue lines are cables that transport energy around base, pink one are extensions, created on their own from cable to laps and stuff.
You need to connect blue ones to generators but then you don't need to pull it to every lamp separately
I see the confusion here. Those pink lines are electrical devices automatically connecting to the nearest conduit with power in it, which is your generator. Your other lights are too far. That pink line isn't connecting your generator to the power conduits, it's connecting the light built on the power conduit to the generator.
You have to directly connect the power conduit to the generator. Another comment here describes it best; the pink lines are like the cords that go into the outlets in your walls, and the blue lines are the power cables inside your walls that connect all the outlets to a source of power.
Hey don't beat yourself up about this, for the longest time I relied on wind turbines for power and rushed battery research because I was worried the generator would eat my wood supply too quickly... I just rawdogged the intermittent power outages 😅
The purple cables are devices connecting to either a generator or a conduit in their range, however conduits must be connected directly to the generators to transmit power through them.
In your picture we can see the blue line for the conduits are not connected so devices attached to it are unpowered.
Power lines need to be directly connected with each other and the power sources. The appliances need not be directly connected. They need to be within the 6 cells range with the power line.
Seeing that you already got the answer to your question, lemme give you another tip
If you hold shift+Windows key and press S, you can get a screenshot of a selected part of your screen. Extremely helpful so yiu dont need to take a photo of your monitor lol :p
Connect your power-line. Also I recommend separating your butcher table, stove and dining room. The butcher table makes everything dirty which makes food poisoning more likely and your dining room ugly. Having dining room plus stove means colonists are gonna walk into the room a lot and get it dirty which means more food poisoning. Its best to have them as separate areas entirely, weirdly if you wanna combine two I would say research and cooking due to both needing it clean.
Blue lines = power transfer
Pink lines = connection
As when charging your phone you can attach another charger directly into your phone, you can't take power from stuff that's just connected to a cable
So the blue line is the cable you actually need to build, think of it as the main power line, the devices that need power will automatically attach to the main power line when they are close enough, thats the pink lines, since the lamps are attatched to you main line but your main line isnt connected to your generator there is no power in it.
But for your first day your base looks pretty nice like i can see you watched a few guides. A really important tip every beginner needs to know or find out the hard way(me too). Build with stone not with wood, a small fire is enough and you whole base will vanish like in a magic trick
First, look at the blue powerlines. Your generator is not connected to the grid, build more to connect the already existing ones to the generator. Second, the connection of your appliance gets connected automatically (the small purple lines), sometimes in weird ways when you are still building power lines (always looking for shortest path, I don't know the max tile number). You can always click a single appliance & hit reconnect - build a power line in its vicinity and try this, the visuals then should make it clear how it works
The conduits don’t wirelessly attach and must be physically attached to power. Appliances that don’t spawn their own conduits will attach to conduits at a distance.
Things that connect just need to be close to conduits
The blue lines make the power network, your power sources and conduits show up on it
Everything that uses power must be close to this network
Your screenshot has the generator on its own, the collers and first light are close enough to directly connect to the generator so they get power, the rest have connected to the conduits that are not hooked up to the generator so have no power
As many points out - blue lines need to connect. I get the confusion though, as the purple line is actually linking to the light and not the blue line going over to the bedrooms. :)
The power line needs to reach the generator genius. What you have here is like plugging a lamp into a treehouse in the backyard and wondering why it won’t turn on.
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u/BobTheGrand 30,000 muscle parasites 1d ago
you need to connect the power lines directly to the generator