u/JayBlunt23

Up front: this is not a rant. I have over 3k hours in this game so I can hardly say anything negative. I just want to know what your ingame explanations might be and how you handle this in RP runs.

I always wondered what the idea behind the really weird energy production and consumption values is. Generators in the game are almost ridiculously inefficient. A chemfuel powered generator, maybe the best equivalent to a real life diesel generator, generates just 1kW. That's... nothing. A real life diesel generator half the size makes like up to what, 200kW? For mod users, thats the same the VE nuclear reactor makes. (EDIT: 1/10 of what the reactor makes! :o) Other generators are in the same league, like 3.6kW from a geothermal generator? That would not even be worth the dig.
And all this while on the other hand, consuming electric stuff consumes about the same or even more than real life stuff. 330W for a flatscreen TV is a lot. 30W for a standing lamp and 2,9kW for a "sun lamp" are more like pre-LED values.

For gameplay, all of this makes sense and it feels really balanced, so I get why Tynan chose these values.

But in RP scenarios, this makes it really wonky. My little colony with just under 50 people in 19 households runs currently on about 80kW. No outragerous numbers in real life, but in Rimworld these guys are powering their little 18000m² community with four nuclear reactors (yeah modded content, I know. Just imagine 80 chemfuel generators). While in real life a single diesel generator on maybe 2m² could power this little village for years to come.

I struggle a bit to play stories around this problem. I could tell myself something like "energy production is far less effictient on this planet for some reason", but idk. I feels like an RP appropriate building for that much generators or reactors would use up a quarter of the map.

So have you ever thought about these things in RP runs? How did you handle it, what was your head canon and what sort of generators and buildings did you build?