"Stationary" vehicles in my base

I get annoyed with not being able to see in my base so i made a vehicle inside to hold headlights to illuminate the area. I made a one frame vehicle i drag around with controls, a medium storage battery, and a headlight. Ive found i can mount one headlight per frame… is that correct?

It works ok and lasts all night but i have to swap the battery out and let it recharge.

My current plan is to bash a hole in the wall to add more frames to go outside for solar panels to recharge the batteries.

Is it possible to install a photosensitive cell to turn the lights on and off when the sun rises?

Im also planning to build a water collection station and a few other “vehicles” that wont be moving anywhere.

Anyone else building weird stuff in a stationary base?

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A photosensitive cell isn’t a thing in game I believe. You’ll have to do all switching manually. Which is very easy if you just add a dashboard in a convenient spot.

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You can only ever mount 1 instance of anything per frame: 1 headlight, 1 engine, 1 water purifier. You can have all of them on a frame but you can’t have 2 water purifiers.

Vehicles as furniture are extremely common. One of the feature requests for 0.E is to abstract those vehicles into the construction menu so you can treat them as furniture.

A photocell sensor isn’t supported in the game. Adding one would require some relatively straightforward C++ code as long as you just wanted it to switch the lights at daylight.

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You can use jumper cables to connect the two “vehicles” through a window and still be able to close it. To make the solar array “vehicle” charge your indoors “vehicle”. No bashing required.

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Personally, I just use hacked turrets as lights for my underground bunker. They have pretty damn good lighting radius, don’t require power (for now, I believe @kevin.granade has mentioned that once power grids are implemented they will need power), and having your base littered with turrets makes life (or undeath) difficult for anything trying to attack you.

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Headlights are a bit power hungry, grab a flashlight for aisle lights, it lights a 4x4 area I think? And costs a lot less power.
A jumper/heavy-duty cable or somesuch is a good idea for hooking up power to outdoor solar panels.

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Ahh, shoot. I was hoping it was there somewhere. Thanks!

Thats good news about the 0.E release! Thank youfor the mounting 1 of things on a frame, I was not aware of that.

I don’t have the ability to hack turrets yet. Yet!

I like lighting up the entire space. I found 2 electric cars, but only one of them was capable of driving, so I took all the panels and batteries from the other.

Oh wow that is cool. I’ll have to give that a shot!

Can you link 3 vehicles with jumper cables or just 2?

Any number, you can just keep adding vehicles (or appliances, once that happens) with new jumper cables.

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Be aware jumper cables cause some efficiency loss in power transfer iirc.

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This is why I think vehicles should be renamed to machines.

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