Surviving Mars - late game power network bugs (win10)

[DrTopHatt]

Description
late game power network bugs (win10)


Windows


Steam

What is your game version?
227,923

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
so during my current playthrough ive gotten quite far into the game, currently sitting around 5000 colonists though that is after a large amount died due to the issues with power.

im unsure what caused the issues to arise but at some point in the game buildings just decided to become unpowered, at first i thought i didnt have enough power but currently my colony is 22,000 power (out of a required 11,000) mostly from fusion reactors working at all shifts. later after somehow fixing one of my domes not having power, i disconnected an unused power cable, which caused the dome to loose power again, and replacing it didnt fix the power issue.

to prove even further that it was an issue with the game and not me i disconnected one of my groups of mines and gave them a large amount of sterling generators, far more than needed, and yet only half of the mines function despite being all connected (just like with the domes and other buildings, the non-functional buildings consider themselves to be apart of a separate power 'network' (this setup is shown in attachments)

Can you replicate the issue?
issue can be found and replicated all over this save, however spending another 40 hours to reach this point of the game on another save isnt something i really want to do

Attachments

 

[Avder]

Registered on this forum specifically to report this very problem, so I'll add my details to this:

Windows version: Windows 7
Steam

Game version: 228,003

The power network in my colony despite being fully connected has decided to splice itself into multiple fragments.

No idea if it will help, but what I was doing at the time was this: I had just finished researching Core Metals and was in the process of setting up an aggressive set of metal extractors near my big solar farm in Sector B2. Specifically, that unbuilt power cable connecting to the westmost of the two unbuilt metal extractors. I had just salvaged a large solar panel right there and then after clearing it and ordering the new line most of that solar farm decided it was part of a different power grid than my central one. This has left 11 domes of mine unpowered, I have tried deleting and rebuilding other lengths of cable to see if that would rejoin the grid. I've tried shutting the entire grid down, artificial sun and all and then restarting it. I've tried letting the game run on max speed and all I got were 500 colonist deaths.

My game had developed a few other glitches by this time as well, namely the meteor not disappearing after it impacted a long time ago(Sector F3), and the outline of a basic dome nearby it that has yellow under its border as if I were trying to place something on top of it (Sector G3).

Here are a few screenshots and my savefile from right after I noticed something was wrong. You'll notice the screenshots of the solar panels demonstrate that they think they're on 3 different networks despite being adjacent and on the same length of cable. One of them is on the main grid, another one thinks its on a grid by itself, and another one thinks its on a grid with most of the other panels in that farm with the power plug icon.

This bug has basically wrecked my progress on my colony. Just as I was approaching sustainability too.

Please fix this bug so I can get back to building it.

 

[Adison]

Question: Are you guys overwriting your saves?

 

[Avder]

Depends on how much has changed in my colony. This save I uploaded however was not an overwrite of an earlier save.

 

[DrTopHatt]

i dont overwrite my saves at all

 

[Ridesdragons]

I'm getting a similar issue as well, but it's toggled by deleting a wire after building some excavators (from the more endless resource buildings mod).

if you build a small string of wires, and then delete some part of it, does the wire remain, albeit fragmented, or does the whole string delete at once? mine's fragmenting, and that causes all the wires in the save to break

 

[DrTopHatt]

yeah if i delete wires (or even pipes now) they fragment into little bits and sometimes causes buildings on the other side of the map to loose power (even if the wire was connected to nothing important)

 

[Ridesdragons]

you happen to be running any mods btw?

and did you build an excavator? if so, where did you build it? my series of excavators I build were all up against mountains to save as much space as possible (only the center and back end need to be on flat ground, the rest can literally be a mountain and it'll work), and the issue didn't occur until after I built those, so that may have caused the issue

EDIT: did some further tests on my save:

1. placed excavators along cliffside, cables broke after the 3rd/4th one placed

2. spammed buildings everywhere, no issue

3. spammed excavators everywhere but the cliffs, no issue until placing one against the cliff

seems this might be caused by placing buildings in uneven places

EDIT 2: I tried loading up both of your saves to compare, but drtopphat you have the stellaris dome which I don't have (unfortunately) so I can't open your save. adver, on the other hand, I could open without any issues. however, he doesn't have the excavator even unlocked yet. so while it seems that buildings in uneven places contributes to the bug, it doesn't look like it's the only factor.

 

[DrTopHatt]

nope, no mods at all
i did build the excavator wonder, only one cuz im not using mods, and it was on flat ground

 

[Ridesdragons]

do you have a large number of structures up against uneven terrain? you can build a building if the ground is slightly uneven, and it flattens the ground and somewhat flattens hills near it - you can use that trick to make tiles that are originally too uneven to become viable land. in the case of the mod with excavators, they just happen to flatten out a lot of land with a single structure, freeing up tens of tiles instead of only 2-3

 

[DrTopHatt]

im just gunna assume i have a ton of buildings next to uneven ground, but i know for sure that my solar farm is built right next to uneven on a lot of sides, trying to fit more panels in

 

[Ridesdragons]

after practically giving up with the excavators, I continued playing while minding the sides, and still I ended up getting the bug. what's more, it seems to effect my water pumps as well...

*sigh*

EDIT: yea gonna have to say this is a game-killer. I can't redesign an area without completely borking everything. can't even clear up old extractors that have long since ran out to make room for, well, anything. gonna wait until this is fixed before continuing.

 

[Avder]

Yeah a lot of my power cables have been fragmenting on salvage like that.

I just spent an hour demolishing most of the bad runs in my colony and rebuilding them. The new runs seemed to be fine, but not all of them properly connected. Worse, previously good sections of my grid developed the bug.

I'd gut the power system and carve it into local chunks, but as evidenced by DrTopHatt, the bug happens to small disconnected grids as well.

 

[Avder]

So the new patch seems to have allowed for the fixing of my power grid through trial and error. So far nothing that's been properly rejoined to the grid has come unlinked. I just wish the patch would have healed the grid itself so I didn't have to salvage and re-connect everything.

 

[Ridesdragons]

apparently there are issues with running pre-patch saves with the patch

that said, it's good to hear the lines you built after the patch haven't had any severe issues

I'm running a new game right now, I'll let you know if I run into any troubles in regards to this

 

[Avder]

The strategy I developed was to trace my power lines device by device to find where the main grid/broken grid boundary is. After that I would demolish and rebuild the whole line from that point through to the rest of the run.

For example, I'll look at what grid a vaporator is on. Vaporator 1's grid produces 4500, vaporator 2's grid: 4500. Vaporator 3: 115. I'll demolish the line starting from vaporator 2 as the boundary is somewhere between vaporator 2 and 3.