Let's talk about the new rechargable UPS system

Game Talk The Bunker
1

So, serious question: what was the intended effect of the new system which removed the rechargeable battery mod in favour of the UPS mod?

Specifically, I’m talking about this change: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/14559

Before it landed, you had the rechargeable battery mod. You installed it in a tool, put the tool in a recharging station, waited for it to recharge and used the tool. Simple, fine, efficent.

Now, the functionality of the rechargeable battery mod has been merged with the UPS mod. If you want rechargable tools you need to: install the UPS mod in a tool, put it in a recharging station, wait for it to load, get an UPS, load the UPS with batteries/plutonium and keep it with you whenever you want to use the tool, no matter how many charges the tool has. However, if tool charges are required in a recipe, you don’t need an UPS…

This change has a few consequences, some of those being:

  • the system is more complicated, as you are required to use an UPS to make use of your tools, it also requires you to keep an UPS at hand whereever you go should you want to use your tools
  • two functionalities have been rolled into one item
  • you can no longer recharge your UPS’, you have to load them with batteries

Especially the last consequence is a huge - and in my opinion overdone - nerf to the whole recharging system, for the following reasons:

  • you WILL need to use batteries to use your tools, thereby making the whole “recharging” system a bit pointless
  • as you can no longer recharge your UPS’, using UPS-powered weapons becomes extremely costly, making them even more useless then before if you don’t have CBM’s
  • the same goes for power armor, of course

Basically, I don’t really see the point of the mentioned change. Can anybody educate me on it?

2

Simply put, it’s broken and no one capable of fixing it seems to care enough to fix it. There was no real discussion of effects on UPS, it got lost in the conversation about storage cell weights and whether or not futuristic content was realistic in cataclysm’s setting. I think the UPS changes should have been in a separate PR to promote discussion on the subject.

3

Well, it seems broken, that’s true, but what was the point of this change to begin with? It’s bascially just the same system as the old, only more buggy/broken and complicated. I could understand when it would have been done to restrict the use of “free energy” a bit, but it seems to do that more by accident than by decision.

4

I think the point was to make them work with vehicle recharging stations?

5

I’m off the update wagon until this gets fixed. This is crap.

6

What you can’t recharge the UPS anymore?

For me the rechargeable battery mod was a great ‘intermediate’ step before finding the UPS CBM.

7

They already worked with recharging stations with the correct mod. They were fine as they were and this change got snuck in under cover of some alterations to storage batteries, like a rider on a bill in congress…

8

Somebody PR something that gives us a rechargeable UPS option - could be a new UPS-specific mod or a new variant of the UPS item itself - and I’ll mergetest it.

9

Luckily enough most tools that you don’t need to hold in your inventory don’t check against the “do you have a UPS with charge in it” to work, so leaving a welder in the recharging station still works. I’m finding that NV is most costly to use, but I still have a ton of batteries in any event, so no great loss there other than my precious battery hoard being not quite as large as it otherwise would be. Haven’t found any energy weapons with the latest, but I probably won’t use them for this character.

As far as the new storage battery system works, I do like that destroyed storage batteries will yield medium storage batteries if you attempt to recover them. It makes every wreck with storage batteries useful to salvage.

10

Wait, what now? You don’t need to have a charged UPS in your inventory! I have several UPS-modded tools, happily recharging in the station, and I can take them out and use them, no problem. No UPS needed!

I have a UPS-modded MP3-player that I’ve been carrying around and using liberally.
I have a UPS-modded food dehydrator that I’ve used to dry a ton of meat.
I have a UPS-modded electric forge that I’ve used a few times.

Well… I don’t actually ever take out the dehydrator or the forge, because the game can utilize nearby tools.

11

Wait, what now? You don’t need to have a charged UPS in your inventory! I have several UPS-modded tools, happily recharging in the station, and I can take them out and use them, no problem. No UPS needed!

I have a UPS-modded MP3-player that I’ve been carrying around and using liberally.
I have a UPS-modded food dehydrator that I’ve used to dry a ton of meat.
I have a UPS-modded electric forge that I’ve used a few times.

Well… I don’t actually ever take out the dehydrator or the forge, because the game can utilize nearby tools.[/quote]

Can’t check this at the moment, but it seems that indeed some tools work without an UPS. But some definitely do, for example I checked it with a UPS-modded light amp googles just before I started this thread. And, as I pointed out, the tools work fine if they are used in a recipe. So if you have a welder nearby and craft something that needs charge from it, there is no problem. But if you use the welder to repair something, it requires a UPS.

Oh, and btw: I’m quite happy to see the changes with the batteries got in. That part of the PR I linked is fine, I was talking specifically about the changes to the rechargeable battery mod.

12

I created a mod but it is slightly too big for the attachment system, so just put this into a mod to restore the rechargeable battery mod:

[{ 
   "type" : "recipe", 
   "result": "rechargeable_battery", 
   "category": "CC_ELECTRONIC", 
   "subcategory": "CSC_ELECTRONIC_PARTS", 
   "skill_used": "fabrication", 
   "skills_required": [ "electronics", 3 ], 
   "difficulty": 5, 
   "time": 15000, 
   "reversible": true, 
   "decomp_learn": 4, 
   "autolearn": false, 
   "book_learn": [[ "manual_electronics", 3 ], [ "textbook_electronics", 3 ]], 
   "qualities" : [ {"id":"SCREW","level":1,"amount":1} ], 
   "tools": [ 
     [ 
       [ "soldering_iron", 5 ], 
       [ "toolset", 5 ] 
     ] 
   ], 
   "components": [ 
     [ [ "scrap", 4 ] ], 
     [ [ "cable", 5 ] ], 
     [ 
       [ "small_storage_battery", 1 ], 
       [ "UPS_off", 1 ] 
     ] 
   ] 
},
{
    "id": "rechargeable_battery",
    "type": "TOOL",
    "symbol": ";",
    "color": "light_green",
    "name": "rechargeable battery mod",
    "description": "A homemade, rechargeable power cell built from salvaged electronics.  With enough electronics skill, you could attach it to an electric-powered device to provide it with energy.  The power cell is not compatible with standard batteries; it must be re-energized via a special recharging station.",
    "price": 2000,
    "material": ["plastic", "aluminum"],
    "weight": 142,
    "volume": 1,
    "bashing": 0,
    "cutting": 0,
    "to_hit": -2,
    "max_charges": 0,
    "initial_charges": 0,
    "charges_per_use": 0,
    "turns_per_charge": 0,
    "ammo": "NULL",
    "revert_to": "null",
    "category" : "spare_parts",
    "use_action": "RECHARGEABLE_BATTERY"
  }]
Wait, what now? You don't need to have a charged UPS in your inventory! I have several UPS-modded tools, happily recharging in the station, and I can take them out and use them, no problem. No UPS needed!
UPS modded items are still subject to all their old restrictions, except now recharging stations will also recharge them.

edit:looking at the new fix, it removes the rechargeable flag, so this won’t work once that goes in.

13
14

What I’d like to see is some way of stopping UPS-modded tools from draining away UPS charges.

With the old system, I could charge up an MP3 player in a recharging station, listen to it until depleted, and then dump it back in the charging station to recharge. With the new system, as soon as I start listening to the MP3 player, it starts vampiring away at my character’s UPS CBM. This makes the recharge feature completely useless when it comes to the MP3 player, since the player will just happily steal the bionic power from my character to stay at 100% charge as soon as any is lost.

15

Ok you can use a Welder UPS powered without an aditional UPS but you can’t turn on an UPS powered flashlight without carrying a charged UPS and to charge the UPS you need batteries.

16

[quote=“D_, post:14, topic:11325”]What I’d like to see is some way of stopping UPS-modded tools from draining away UPS charges.

With the old system, I could charge up an MP3 player in a recharging station, listen to it until depleted, and then dump it back in the charging station to recharge. With the new system, as soon as I start listening to the MP3 player, it starts vampiring away at my character’s UPS CBM. This makes the recharge feature completely useless when it comes to the MP3 player, since the player will just happily steal the bionic power from my character to stay at 100% charge as soon as any is lost.[/quote]
+1

The UPS CBM is detrimental now. What makes it worse is that it’s a passive CBM, meaning it can’t be turned off. Once you install the CBM, all your UPS devices will drain your bionic power instead of the charges within the device, and the only way to stop it is to remove the CBM. (of course in a pinch you could just drop or turn off the device)

Starting to miss the old system…

Unless… now that we have proper firearm magazines, is the idea to implement the magazine system to battery-powered devices, too? I’ve prepared myself that in the future the battery charges can’t be moved around freely. We could have single-use (unloadable/unreloadable) magazines that are named “AAA batteries (100 charges)” and “AA batteries (200 charges)”, for example. Each battery-powered device would then have to be unloaded and reloaded like a firearm. Of course we could also have rechargeable versions of the said batteries. Basically we could then have any number of various existing battery types! And some battery types could be made more common than others. And there would be glorious (in)compatibilities between devices and batteries.

17

One easy option would be to bring back the old activated UPS system but without that stupid passive drain.
Activating UPS to turn it into a passive item that doesn’t do anything to prevent it from being used. Same for the bionic.

Though I don’t really like the idea of UPS+battery merge. The old system was bad because it had both charges and the necessity to hold an UPS, but that was because charge system was inadequate.
UPS system centralizes batteries in an item/bionic, it doesn’t need own storage. Ideally items with UPS mod wouldn’t have their own charge at all and would just drain UPS. Like what power armor does.

18

The UPS is working good in the latest experimental 4321

19

Also, even if the UPS CBM could be turned off, that doesn’t really solve much. With the old system you could run devices off of 1) normal batteries, 2) rechargeable batteries, and 3) your bionic power. And more importantly you could carry and run them at the same time without conflicts.

I think what needs to be done now is:

  • UPS-modded devices need to stop draining carried charged UPS’s (assuming that happens; I haven’t tried)
  • UPS-modded devices need to stop draining bionic power if the UPS CBM is installed
  • Add another battery mod called something like “bionic adapter mod”, which enables devices to run off of bionic power exclusively. It would have a description something like “With this mod you can power devices off of your bionic power. You would have to have a proper related CBM installed first…” or one could even mention directly the name of the CBM in the mod’s description.
  • Finally, rename the UPS CBM to something like “Universal Device Power Interface CBM” with a description something like “With this CBM installed you can run electrical devices off of your bionic power reserves. The device itself must also have the bionic adapter mod installed.”