How to Manage your Power Lines in Oxygen Not Included

Chapters!
0:00 Intro
0:42 Wire Types
3:55 Using Transformers
5:42 Running a Power Test
9:08 Upgrading Transformers and Wire

[MichaelHeil-qzjj]

THANK YOU! This is what has been the bane of my mid-game playthroughs. I haven't even made it to the surface yet, and I have SO many attempts

[faizzack]

60 hours into the game and now i know how to plan my power line. I used to combine all type of wires, no wonder it was always overloaded hahaha. Thank you for the video!

[TwistedAGZE]

The nice thing about the 50kw wire is you can make it out of Lead, which on some maps is easy to get, and doesn't have a ton of other uses other than wiring. Keeps you gold/copper/aluminum/iron ore for refining to make better metal for better equipment.

[TSVThomml]

When you mix two types of wires and the load is above the maximum of your weakest link, the whole wire string behaves like the weakest one.
Means, not only the weak wire gets damaged, also the the strong one breaks on random places.

[DawnTreader]

Heavi-Watt Conductive Wire might be a good option if you have an abundance of refined metal, but is struggling to get more metal ore. Replace all your heavy-wire with conductive heavy-wire to get back tons of metal ore.

[barbararowley]

The crunchiness and (semi) accuracy (don’t try to directly harness the energy of an erupting volcano IRL) of ONI are a big part of why I love it. It helps that I’m a resource management goblin of course, but the decent physics makes it one of my all time favourite games.

[Cerafem]

One of the easier ways to run into still overloading when using transformers is if you have a battery on the output of the transformer, where it will attempt to supply the full wattage requested and overload a wire. Which is also how I temporarily supply more aggressive processing that also gates later materials and construction, like the first metal refinery needing over 1kw, I'll put it somewhere I can supply it with coolant for a while, run a normal wire to a transformer, use the 2kw wires to connect that to a battery and the machine and you can at least process in short bursts.

[joshuaphillips]

Finally! A straight forward explination. Thank you!

[drbutler]

Wow! I have never used anything but the small wire... when I read 1000 W I thought I needed more Power Generators. Thank you!!! Makes so much more sense now.

[RoozleDoozle-]

If you run into issues with the large power transformer letting enough power through to still break your conductive wires, what you can do is just run 2 small power transformers on the same line and then that will directly match the 2KW instead of the 4KW the large power transformer lets through

[DarknessLPs]

I'm not sure i understand why the 4k transformer even exists. connecting 2 1k transformers together (input + input on the same wire, output+output on the same wire) gives you a 2k output which is the maximum for a conductive wire and you're never running any thing greater than conductive wire to any non-power generation appliance. Am I not understanding something? I just don't see the use case for the 4k at all.

[kaiser]

This is a god send I was starting to think my save was cooked

[issyk]

thank you thank you thank you I cant tell you how much I appreciate your time into this video this is ABSOLUTELY game changing for me!

[nicolasfelipe]

very well explained video, thanks, the wire thing was destroying all my colonies.

[takeachance]

Just what I needed. I have an electrical nightmare right now in my basement trying to figure it out.

[LightHawKnight]

Isnt it bad to use large power transformers? Usually dont people recommend to use two small ones instead to get 2k power so you only get brownouts instead of potential wire damage since large power transformers output 4k power, twice as much as what conductive wire can handle?

[DiathenEridani]

A good advantage of the heavy watt conductive wire is the decor penalty. Make it out of refined gold and its easy to overcome compared to the og heavy.

[quazzarr]

@8:04 ish... the reason theyre not breaking is they dont really break if theyre hooked up to a transformer. since the transformer only sends out 1kw there is no overload, but if you had 5 gas pumps hooked up to a simple wire connected to 2 coal generators with no transformer they will break since the line will be able to attempt to draw up to 1.6kw of power. you can have 5 gas pumps hooked up to 2 coal gens on all simple wire if the two coal gens simple wire goes into a transformer then into another simple wire. the 5th pump with have brownouts but the wire wont break since it literally cannot overload becasue the transformer limits the flow to 1kw.
In practise: things like item sweepers (i think thats the name) could theoretically all be on the same 1kw simple wire and still function pretty normally if there isnt a huge load of items they need to pick up since they only use power when they need to pick up an item. the 5th 6th 7th etc sweeper would have brownouts at first but once the first 4 were done picking up their items, the sweepers further down the line would then activate and eventually all items would be picked up. so long as that whole line is coming out of a transformer. an example would be critter farms. say you had 10 hatch farms each with a sweeper to pick up coal eggs and meat, thats 10 sweepers with a load of... i wanna say 240x10 but it might be 120x10, either way its 2400 or 1200, but for this we'll say its 2400 which is way more than a 1000 watt wire can hold. only some of them will ever able to be on at the same time, but once they pick up what they need to they dont draw power so the ones the browned out would kick on when the first ones are done. within much the same amount of time all rooms would get cleaned.
@9:28 a large transformer was connected to a simple wire with more than 1kw load. the transformer outputs 4kws so thats why the line turned red. eventuallly it would break, but will never break with a simple transformer since again it limits the flow to 1kw

[frabac]

If you are looking for a regular wire to briak under load (not mix) try putting a bridge on the line. The bridge is the weak point

[Ricky.art]

Heavi-Watt Conductive Wire has a much shorter negative decor buff, only 4 tiles vs 6, and you tend to run low on raw ore as you progress in the late game. A few teamed meal volcanoes will give you more refined metal than you need. I normally start replacing my 25kw around cycle 500 or so.