[1.106] Not sure if bugs or intended (but extremely unintuitive) behavior in Nuclear Reactors

1st Official Post

    Several strange quirks I've noticed that I don't think are intended, but I'm not sure.

    • Reactor Heat Exchangers behave unexpectedly for heat values above 20k (where you used the copper plates to increase the reactor capacity) and will often burn themselves out if placed solo inside a reactor containing that much heat, even if the reactor is off. Example: I place enough copper plates in the reactor to increase its capacity to 40k. I then place several quad-Uranium cells to quickly raise the heat level to about 35k, then turn the reactor off. Then I place a single reactor heat exchanger into the reactor, and after about a minute, the exchanger eats up all the heat and dies, when the expected behavior is to reduce the reactor to ~31k heat and take in ~4k heat.
    • Heating Cells treat Reactor Heat Exchangers and Component Heat Exchangers as though they have a capacity of 10k (so 5-9 Heating Cells will not burn out either component, which have a capacity of only 5k). Using NEI, I was able to determine that these items use 2 damage points per heat point, but are probably using the damage value to determine how much heat it should take.
    • Quad Uranium Cells get used up 4x as fast as regular Uranium cells, and 4x as fast as 4 Uranium Cells arranged in the same pattern.


    This is what I got so far. I was having all these bugs occur before I installed NEI, and afterwards.

    Another thing that is not necessarily wrong but probably could be improved are the cooling cells. Now they are kind of a heat-buffer for reactors - which is ok - but you can either use them all the time or not use them at all.


    Example: I place a coolant cell next to a heat distributor to check whether or not that component will overheat, but it doesn't work because the coolant cell always gets its part of the heat (the heat distributor is not smart in this case). So I place it next to a reactor distributor (that saps heat from the reactor only), but here is the problem: this only works as intended if these components are placed down, right otherwise it gets the heat first and then the heat vents start their working.


    It might be more intuitive if the reactor tick instead works by priority as in:
    1. Uranium cells emit heat
    2. Heat vents try to sap heat from everywhere and use adjacent cooling as much as possible to remove the heat completely.
    3. Remaining heat is distributed evenly to surrounding components.


    This would eliminate the top-down rule and allow coolant cells to act as security buffer in experimental but supposed-to-be-stable setups.

    • Official Post

    to the first point: there is a bug that calculates the max heat of the reactor after the copper plates but does not save it for the next tick. meaning, if you have your heat exchanger before the copper plates (closer to top left corner) they will die cause the reactor tells them "max heat is 10k" (for example)

    Quote from Gorni

    to the first point: there is a bug that calculates the max heat of the reactor after the copper plates but does not save it for the next tick. meaning, if you have your heat exchanger before the copper plates (closer to top left corner) they will die cause the reactor tells them "max heat is 10k" (for example)


    Just tested this.... Wow. Easy to overlook bug, but hopefully very easily fixed.

    Quote from Gorni

    to the first point: there is a bug that calculates the max heat of the reactor after the copper plates but does not save it for the next tick. meaning, if you have your heat exchanger before the copper plates (closer to top left corner) they will die cause the reactor tells them "max heat is 10k" (for example)


    Does this mean that a reactor could blow up at high heat levels even though it has copper plates?
    If current temp is 35k and reactor iterates through components starting in the upper left, the current temp would be 35k before the reactor iterates through the copper plates, so would it blow? Or does the "explode" check only happen at the very end of the iteration?

    Quote from TheBard


    Does this mean that a reactor could blow up at high heat levels even though it has copper plates?
    If current temp is 35k and reactor iterates through components starting in the upper left, the current temp would be 35k before the reactor iterates through the copper plates, so would it blow? Or does the "explode" check only happen at the very end of the iteration?

    Considering I have a breeder I'm keeping maintained at 64k heat, without any noticeable craters appearing, I think it's safe to say they caught that one.