Electric grids

Electric grids are electric connections within a building, similar to how all parts of a vehicle share battery power.

Features

Currently, only the following furniture interacts with an electric grid:

• Mounted solar panel (like one on top of Evac Center) produces energy
• Mounted battery stores energy. When examining it, you receive information about power in a given battery and in the whole grid.
• Battery charger works like vehicle battery charger/recharging station. Place rechargeable batteries or items containing them into the recharger and power will be drained from mounted batteries to recharge those.
• Ovens work like hotplates, but with charges equal to charges of the grid
• Jumper cable connector connects a vehicle to an electric grid. To use, connect the jumper cable to the vehicle and then to the connector. Once connected, the vehicle and the grid will share power for most purposes, but will usually charge/discharge their own batteries before sending them through the connector
• Electric Kiln
• Food Dehydrator
• Food Processor
• Vaccuum Sealer
• Arc Welder
• Electric Forge
• Electrolysis Kit

Grid size

For purposes of an electric grid, a building is made out of overmap tiles (the tiles you see on the map opened with 'M' key, on local map they are 24x24 tiles). Most city buildings have individual electric grids. For example, a house with a roof and a basement, with a solar panel on the roof, oven on the floor and a battery in the basement, will allow using the oven with the energy from the battery charged by the panel. Overmap tiles without buildings only have grids within their own overmap tile. There is currently no way of connecting grids together, other than by use of two connectors, two jumper cables, and a vehicle.

Modding

To create a furniture that uses the grid to power a fake item, create the fake item with a flag "USES_GRID_POWER" and then set furniture's "crafting_pseudo_item" to that item's ID. For example, the oven item is:

  {
    "id": "fake_oven",
    "copy-from": "fake_item",
    "type": "TOOL",
    "name": { "str": "oven" },
    "sub": "hotplate",
    "max_charges": 1000,
    "flags": [ "USES_GRID_POWER" ]
  }

And the oven furniture uses it as:

    "crafting_pseudo_item": "fake_oven"

Currently, the grid can only power fake items used as a part of a furniture.