Power Tutorial | Oxygen Not Included

Watts? Joules? We explore power and power grids in detail.

EDIT: If you add a battery or any type of switch between the manual generators and the flipped transformer, the system works as intended.

End Screen music: When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Cooper Cannell

[someheree]

Try adding a normal battery beside the manual generator to the design at 16:28 . It shouldn't be holding any power at any point of time so no leakage

[kyl]

This video explains 4 years of my electrical engineering course

[Barnaclebeard]

CONDUCTIVE WIRE ISN'T UGLY?! Oh my god. Oh my GOD. I needed this information YEARS ago.

[kckillakrack]

Master electrician here.. this game does a very good job with the mechanics being very lifelike. Let me make this ez for people, power = energy/time watts is the energy and joules is a measure of time 1 watt = 1 joule a second. Hope that helps people out. Don't be confused joule is just a measurement of energy in time if that makes sense.

[FriendlyKitten]

I got to say, trying to find a good ONI tutorial that explains things has been hard.
Props for making it interesting and also *explaining* in detail. I struggle a lot with absorbing information, but your explanations has helped a lot more than most tutorial videos has managed.
Will check out more of the videos, as I has a sneaky feeling, you are the best tutorial for me :3

Hæppy Nyew Years!

[utterscribe]

Ok that power spine looks massively helpful, thank you

[inspiredjoke]

I have about 100 hours in ony and watched so many tutorial video's on it to get me past the mid game.

Just started a new colony and wanted to refresh my knowledge. Stumbled upon this video and so glad I did. Fuck me. Condensed clear info is appreciated! Thank u and keep it up!

[commonsense-oggz]

the last part isn't just for decor, but for metal cost. in some cases, such as oceania, the asteroid is mostly tide pool, making metals a limited resource.

[riomouris]

Extremely useful, I'll implement a 'power spine' into my base, I had heard about heavy watt, but the system kept coming up with power loop errors and all my wires were red

[JossOwX]

This is actually brilliant, im having so much trouble with my power because i didn't even know wires can overload, now i will be using that spine design in all of my bases

[legendaryavocadogod]

It’s crazy your videos are so friendly and informative I watch them despite not owning the game

[TheMule]

This a nice video.
Some missing things tho:
- you showed how power generated by the steam turbine varies, you didn't show the same for solar panels, so people may get the impression it's fixed at 380W. Things are much more complicated than that with solar panel, I think it deserve mentioning;
- "efficiency" is a bad term to describe the power generated by a steam turbine in the 140-200°C range. The efficiency is the same, you loose efficiency above 200°C, when you start wasting heat if you don't close some intake.
- heavy conductive wires are made of refined metals, so their decor penalty is variable; using the right material, e.g. gold, is worth mentioning.

The issue you're seeing with manual generators is due to the fact there's no battery connected. They probably sense the internal battery of the transformer. Try and add a battery on the generator side and see if that changes the behaviour.

The real problem with feeding power to the backbone via transformers is that the wire doesn't draw from them all at the same time, there's a priority of sort based on when the transformer was build.


Now the sore thumb.

Unfortunately, if you're venturing into explaining the difference between Watts and Joules, you need to get it right. There's no such a thing as "watts per second" as you state @15:23. At least, not in that context. That's definitely wrong. We don't mean Watts per second. We really mean Watts. Watts are already Joules per second, sort of. Real world Watts are a unit of power, which it is energy over time as in Joules over seconds but with a infinitely small time interval. ONI is a simulation game, which operates with discrete time ("ticks"). So there's not such a thing as power in ONI (despite them calling something "power"). There's only average energy over time, with time intervals limited by ticks.

But for sake of simplicity, they call it power and use Watts, and I'm ok with that. That's not really the point here.

Point is, even in ONI, Watts are Joules per second.

As "power" variations happen across ticks, there's no Watts per second; that would be a measure of how fast a transformer adapts when the load changes, but again in ONI it happens in zero time in between ticks. The same if generators stopped slowly you could measure how fast they stop producing energy. E.g. from 800W a hydrogen generator could do one tick at 600W, one at 400W, one at 200W, then reach zero. That could be -1000W/s. Instead they just complete the animation and go from 800W to zero across one tick.

In ONI Watts per second is always infinite.

A light in ONI consumes 10J/s, or if ticks are 1/5 of second, 2J per tick. So the game describes it as a 10W light. It's either 10 Watts or 10J/s. Not W/s.

[tuhinnag]

yes we need updated guides on deserve more views...all the best

[AllCatastrophe_GameOn]

Am not done with your video yet only am at 6:53 but so far I wanna say THANKS for making this I always start new worlds when my builds get too big and air/power/water etc get complicated because for me it's SO confusing and overwhelming. I been playing like that for YEARS and really just wanna dive deep into the game without cheating so I can really take it all in and get good at it. So TY for explaining this hope the video goes through all the issues I am having so I can redo all my electrical they is overloading and just having so many issues! Hope you also have videos for airflow/ gas/ and liquids too!

[ronhuettner]

Well done. Now I have to stop being lazy about my grid and follow your advice.

[InchonDM]

Setting the battery control to 100% can also, depending on how much load is on your line and how close it is to your overall generation rate, cause the problem of the battery never properly filling up and thus never sending that red signal. Setting it to 95 guarantees that that won't happen, preventing some pretty serious power loss.

Also, the unspoken other reason to minimize your Heavi-Watt Wire usage is because that stuff is EXTREMELY expensive. At 100 units per tile for both the original model made of ore, and the Conductive model made of refined metal, any length of Heavi-Watt is a significant metal investment. There can be points late in a colony's life where that doesn't matter, because you've gotten access to bottomless sources of metal, but it's gonna matter for a long time in the getting there.

[TheMrBlackbeard]

new player here, this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks. new sub.

[kks_grandma]

Very educational and it also introduced me to another of your series. Thank you!

[SkaiCloud]

Awesome! I learn to use 2 small transformer and fed by heavy conductive wire to a conductive wire for an even 2000 max potential load. Less heat vs the large transformer.

[justpoppynfamily.]

this guys great he explains things so damn well if i was just born didnt know jack about nothing id walk out this video knowing everything about power