Suggestion: Make Electric Jackhammer take Storage Batteries not UPS

Game Talk The Garage
1

I understand the UPS system is being removed / changed / something, and the ‘as is’ situation in experimental for Electric Jackhammer is pretty silly.

A UPS or Advanced UPS can have 2500 charges, the Electric Jackhammer can have max 7000 and requires 3500 for its standard use. That means if you want to use the UPS feature in the field you have to carry two UPS with you to get one extra use of the jackhammer!

Instead I suggest that the jackhammer could take Medium Storage Battery (also 7000) or Storage Battery (for longer lasting mining). I’ve put the following in my game in
\data\json\items\tools.json
and am trying it out.

  {
    "id": "elec_jackhammer",
    "type": "TOOL",
    "name": "electric jackhammer",
    "description": "This is a construction tool for drilling through hard rock or other surfaces.  Load with a storage battery to use.  Use it to blast a hole in adjacent solid terrain.",
    "weight": "40000 g",
    "volume": "5 L",
    "price": 40000,
    "to_hit": -8,
    "bashing": 14,
    "cutting": 6,
    "material": "steel",
    "symbol": ";",
    "color": "light_gray",
    "ammo": "battery",
    "charges_per_use": 3500,
    "use_action": "JACKHAMMER",
    "flags": [ "STAB", "DIG_TOOL", "POWERED"],
    "magazines": [
      [
        "battery",
        [ "medium_storage_battery", "storage_battery" ]
      ]
    ],
    "magazine_well": 0
  },

P.S. Yes I know I could/should make a pull request but I used up all my brain cells getting this far.

P.P.S. I have no idea what ‘magazine_well’ does.

2

Can’t you use the conversion mod item to allow it to use car batteries and the like?

3
  1. Car batteries are too small.
  2. Maybe, I’m not sure, but I think this would make sense as a general change.

I will go check, anyway.

Update: No. You can’t use a “battery compartment mod” or other battery mod on the electric jackhammer (UPS). It has the NO_UNLOAD flag which I think blocks it. You get the error message

4

T’was talkin’ ‘bout the ol’ base electric jackhammer.

I remember there being one which is the one that runs off of batteries and can take battery conversion mods, but I looked around and it would seem that they have removed it a while ago. It seems people were exploiting the large capacity of vehicle batteries too much, that or they’ve taken it out until the system has been revised. Don’t really know much about what’s going on there.

You could use gasoline ones instead, a bit more bang for buck IMO, even if gasoline is a finite resource. Not that it matters much, one gas station will fund your mining ventures handily.

5

Sounds like you modded your jackhammer in the past? If the mod can’t be removed normally, try using a gunsmith repair kit. That tool can break down tools that have “permanent” mods attached, though I think there’s a chance the mod will be destroyed in the process. (It’s been quite a while since I did it)

6

No. All Electric Jackhammers are UPS jackhammers. That’s the way it came. I don’t know if there’s any way to turn an Electric Jackhammer into one powered by gasoline, but I don’t really want to do that anyway.

7

Huh, I could have sworn they took batteries (and mods) at some point, must be brain problems! :dizzy_face:

8

MutaMan sai that there used to be one like that, but it’s gone now.

9

They did. My current character had one that I had added a battery conversion mod to and attached a car battery. It worked great until I updated the game a while back and the electric jackhammer had been changed to be UPS. After that it was completely useless. The car battery held 2500 charges and the jackhammer wouldn’t even start with less than 3500 charges. I could not detach the battery mod or remove the car battery. I ended up throwing the whole thing in a pond and debugging in a gasoline powered jackhammer.

10

I’m not sure exactly what happened, I wasn’t around for it, but from what I’ve read at some point there was a blast of enthusiasm for UPS but battery changes made the rationale weaker and now it’s either being reworked or removed completely.

Can you use battery mods on the UPS to give them bigger capacity? 2500 is useless for jackhammer and more would be nicer for lots of stuff. It would also be cool if you could put your (now) massive UPS on a foldable frame and caster wheels and use it from an adjacent tile. Transform and drag it up/down stairs as needed.

11

Build 9704:

Okay, you can still use the battery compartment mod on both the UPS and the elec jack but only while both of them are completely empty of charge. Only problem is that you’re much worse off for it or merely wasted a mod, due to the jackhammer being incapable of being loaded with a battery even after you’ve installed a mod into it, and because the UPS on its own has the potential of a far greater capacity than if you used vehicle batteries.

The UPS on its own can take a heavy plutonium battery, which boosts its charge up to 10000 and allows you to use the jackhammer for a total of 4 times with a full jackhammer, but the battery cannot be recharged so why even bother wasting it on a tool that requires 3500 to start up, while the best normal rechargeable battery gives you charges of 2500(on par with a care battery, which in turn is higher than a small storage battery which maxes out at 500). It takes 5 plutonium cells to get the advanced ups up to 2500 charge, but even with a full jackhammer and full advanced ups you will not get more than 2 uses out of your jackhammer, unless you carry two, which boosts your uses to a wopping 3 uses, and if you really want the ladies to swoon all over your jackhammer you can carry 3 advanced UPSs to get 4 uses out of your electric jackhammer. Even if you somewhow managed to stuff both the jackhammer and the normal ups with a heavy plutonium battery(impossible currently) you’ll only get about 5 uses out of your jackhammer.

On the other side of the coin we have a normal, run-of-the-mill gasoline jackhammer that only requires 10 charges of 400 to be activated, for the absolute value-for-money max uses of 40 per full jackhammer. You could drill the entire night with that. I don’t think I need to tell anyone that the gasoline jackhammer is a far better choice, considering that gasoline is not nearly as hard to come by as a UPS, a recharging station, or even a freaking undamaged solar panel.

12

So, what you’re saying is that the Gasoline Jackhammer is OP and should be nerfed? :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the tip about making sure the electric jackhammer has no charges before using battery compartment mod on it.

13

I’m saying that both jackhammers need a slight change if any of the devs are reading this and the reason for the amounts they use haven’t been calculated for realism or anything.

My suggestions?

  1. Make jackhammer use 40 gasoline per use, for 10 uses per full jack.
  2. Make the electric jackhammer use 700 per use, for, again, 10 uses per full jack.

These are both trivial changes via JSON, but unless it goes to base you’re going to have to make this change with every update.

14

I don’t think that’s unreasonable, gasoline has a very high energy density that puts most batteries to shame.
The advantage for electric here is that once you’re set up to recharge batteries via wind/solar, your jackhammer charges become free.

15

The electric jackhammer uses the same amount of power that a real electric jackhammer would.
Electric jackhammers in real life are things you plug into a wall, they don’t use batteries.

16

As ‘plug into the wall’ presumably real jack hammers don’t come with an internal charge capacity of 7000 kJ. Right now CDDA jack hammers don’t have a ‘battery’, but do hold about three times the charge of a car battery. That’s just weird.

So the current system basically has a ‘hidden’ medium storage battery inside the electric jackhammer (ups) that doesn’t weigh anything.

I haven’t checked if the external UPS can use a battery compartment mod. If it can’t, then not only is there no wall to plug your electric jackhammer into, we have no alternative electric power source that can be used instead.

Looking at the math, 7000 kJ would keep the first electric jackhammer I found with google going for a bit under an hour. That seems reasonable, but whoops - looking further at the current system just opens up a new can of worms. Doing the ‘mine downstairs’ construction takes eight hours and just 30 charge units - electric or gasoline. Mining stairs downstairs must be at least the same amount of effort as mining one tile horizontally, but one takes over 100 times less charge than the other.

The first gasoline powered jack hammer I found on google has 1.2L fuel tank, which is reported to be good for two hours. Not a huge difference after all.

17

I think the solution to your problem here is to make it so you use a jumper cable to attach the jackhammer to a cable to use it.

Doing the ‘mine downstairs’ construction takes eight hours and just 30 charge units - electric or gasoline.

That’s a bug, pelase report it.
And if you think these numbers are incorrect, please make a PR to correct them.

18

What’s on the other end of the cable? Because this sounds pretty much like what I suggested earlier.

If 30 charge units was corrected to 40,000 charge units (which is my first approximation of a ‘realistic’ number) then nobody would ever be able to mine a tile or mine stairs down without a medium or large storage battery in a UPS with a battery compartment mod. (Or frequently switching out batteries in the external UPS). Which is actually probably quite realistic, but people would have to change the way they do things.

I haven’t looked into how much 400 units of gasoline is in litres in CDDA. But, again, I doubt it would last eight hours of use. (Actually not all those eight hours would be jackhammering, there’s shovelling and carpentry as well. So call it six hours). You’d need to take a full plastic jerrycan with you and top up three or four times I guess.

Anyway, I’m sorry but the pull request system is just too complicated for me to mess with. I have health issues that make it difficult to concentrate for long enough to get stuff like that done.

19

Whoops, I meant attached to a car.

20

Attached to a car is fine, but unless you have a reallly long cable the application is limited. I still haven’t checked if the external UPS can take the battery compartment mod, or if a large storage battery on a foldable frame can be ‘folded’. I swear I will get around to it. But if they do then a ‘car’ you can \ along the floor down stairs and 'G’rab and pull along corridors is the way to go.