Unfortunately, you can't simply hand-feed 100 coal into all the Spanish thermal plants and then plop down two more to be on the safe side until you've fixed supply...

but sorta you can, that's not the hard part

it's that in Factorio there are no problems with phase synchronization, and the devices, consumers, producers, so the machines don't get damaged from a lot of abrupt starting/stopping.

still, it's strange that operators and grid controllers have to do the restart manually.

The machines might still end up being eaten by giant alien bugs due to the power outage shutting down automated defenses. :)

It's even worse in satisfactory imo, because the game is build around your fabs consuming wildly varying amounts of power throughout their production cycle... And after a power loss, they'll not only need the initial burst (can be handled via batteries) but will also now all be synchronized to have their power spikes at exactly the same moment.

Dyson sphere program is the by far most forgiving in that regard. You can overdraw to something like 200% before it becomes really problematic, and even that quickly resolves itself the moment you get more power online

Also in Satisfactory pumps need power to run, so coal power plants quite realistically won't start without extra power (unless you have a water tower on the input).

Mid-line pumps do, but "offshore pumps" that pull water from lakes don't actually use any electricity. Otherwise, they would have to build a whole new mechanic for how you power your first water pump. Maybe you'd have to make iron buckets and bring 10 buckets of water to your boiler to get it started, then the offshore pump could use the brief moment of electricity to start pumping water continuously. Maybe you'd have to salvage a solar panel off your ship to start the water pump, since you can't build solar panels in early game. Maybe we're assuming that the water is flowing and the water pump has its own built in water wheel power source.

Same thing with all the coal burning... how does that coal get ignited? Do we secretly have an infinite lighter in our pocket? Are we rubbing sticks together but not showing it for the sake of gameplay?

I think you're talking about factorio, right hnuser123456?

In satisfactory, all pumps need water and there is a special kind of power plant that doesn't need pumps/electricity to kickstart the factory. It's special because it needs items the player has to manually gather and only runs "on demand" (shuts off if enough power from regular plants is provided)

Strong recommendation to give it a try if you haven't already. It's very different to factorio, but great in it's own way

Oops, sorry... I played a lot of both around the same time, and got them confused :)

My girlfriend had more fun collecting leaves for the biomass burners and playing the tetris game in the workshop while I built the conveyors and calculated ratios... I let her keep adding leaves even once we were burning coal, but she eventually noticed leaves weren't burning anymore :)

What I think they should have done is have the offshore pump use power but any building adjacent to fluid simply picks it up, no pump needed.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one nodding along with the article going "Yep, I've dealt with this in Factorio" (aside from the frequency stuff which would complicate matters for sure).

In Space Age, more than once I've needed to fly across the solar system to hand-restart a generator when I didn't have my fail-safe setup correctly. Normally I setup a SR latch to fall back to the power generators (whatever type they are) _only_ on a sub-grid when capacity falls below 20% (and alert me) since if you lose power completely, hand-feeding is the only way to fix (unless you have another air-gapped power storage/generation set up). It sucks when you hand-feed and then see all your power generation still struggling because you accidentally left in 1 copper wire to a pole outside your "air-gapped" grid. Having to slowly rebuild on Aquilo solar->nuclear->fusion is tedious, after making that mistake once I make sure I didn't have to travel back again to fix the grid... After the 2nd time it happened I finally fixed it for good.

The real problem is when you have hundreds (or thousands) of fully discharge roboports, which will peg your power satisfaction to zero for quite some time during a black restart.

During that time, you are producing power, but none of the inserters work, none of the miners work, etc. and the distributed nature of the roboports means it isn’t straightforward to simply disconnect them.

I think they went out of their way to make a mess of the power situation. It's a PITA to build in load-shedding, almost as if they were trying to handicap solar. And not all buildings even support being disabled by control. Running my radar only during the day is good enough for keeping an eye on expansion, yet the only way to do that is isolate the radar.