Struggling to find solar cells in alpha 21

[NordHep]

I know solar cells has been limited to traders only. That you can't craft nor loot it, but that they were available prior to Alpha 21 through the traders' secret stash.

 

In alpha 21, that secret stash is gone for better or worse, but the one thing that has been bothering me is how rare solar cells has become now. I've so far found 15 traders on the pregen map I play on, I'm doing the highest Tier quests, get the highest ranked loot, gamestage is pretty high and so is trader stage (I've even invested and maxed barter- and daring adventurer perk)... out of these 15 traders though it seems only one of them will sell one single solar cell of random quality. So every third day when traders restock I have to figure out which one of the 15 traders actually sell the solar cell (if any of them does at all) and hope its decent quality. Most of the time its a lvl. 3 solar cell, did get one lvl 5 though but I feel it has become unbalanced and all too tideous to obtain a solar cell now.

 

Anyone else have this experience?

[Riamus]

3 hours ago, NordHep said:

I know solar cells has been limited to traders only. That you can't craft nor loot it, but that they were available prior to Alpha 21 through the traders' secret stash.

 

In alpha 21, that secret stash is gone for better or worse, but the one thing that has been bothering me is how rare solar cells has become now. I've so far found 15 traders on the pregen map I play on, I'm doing the highest Tier quests, get the highest ranked loot, gamestage is pretty high and so is trader stage (I've even invested and maxed barter- and daring adventurer perk)... out of these 15 traders though it seems only one of them will sell one single solar cell of random quality. So every third day when traders restock I have to figure out which one of the 15 traders actually sell the solar cell (if any of them does at all) and hope its decent quality. Most of the time its a lvl. 3 solar cell, did get one lvl 5 though but I feel it has become unbalanced and all too tideous to obtain a solar cell now.

 

Anyone else have this experience?

I've only found one so far (tier 3) but am only day 28, though I am on 2 hour days.  I'm not sure what game stage they are tied to in order to get more of them to appear or if it's unbalanced due to removing the secret stash and putting them into the normal inventory rotation.  They probably need to be increased. Btw, better barter no longer helps with anything other than buy/sell prices.  DA should help, though.

[Darcphaze]

I'm lootstage 720, level 266 and the only solar panels I've found were from an airdrop of a solar bundle. Grrrr

[NekoPawtato]

I've found in single player there is a situation with trader stock where it doesn't rotate properly so that could be exacerbating the problem. So the trader ends up selling the same items after their stock resets. Like I literally took screenshots of every page and compared after they reset and it seems like sometimes only the dye or quality changes

[Riamus]

An air drop?  I've never seen that happen.  That would be a very nice air drop.  As far as the solar panel, I have found only 3 at traders over multiple trader inventory resets and my Daring Adventurer is maxed.  They definitely need to adjust the chance of these appearing at traders.  A single solar bank with only 3 solar panels is practically useless.  It runs my doors and a small number of lights.  I need to use a generator to cover the rest of my lighting.

[8_Hussars]

On 7/6/2023 at 5:40 AM, NordHep said:

I know solar cells has been limited to traders only. That you can't craft nor loot it, but that they were available prior to Alpha 21 through the traders' secret stash.

I

Anyone else have this experience?

Not that experience exactly; but I knew in a no trader run I would have to mod crafting Solar gear in if I wanted it.

The Modlet worked well.  The book balance was good but the crafting material balance could be upped, IMHO.   

[Ramethzer0]

I can stand up to attest for the scarcity of solar panels.  However, it's been mostly a non-issue since its really easy to mine for shale and process it in large amounts.

That being said, I do hope that there might be more of a use for solar panels in the future.  I never really bothered with them much outside of novelty value in single player mode.   In Co-op, my buddies swear by them, but as stated - fuel has not been an issue.

[Darcphaze]

Ohhh and I have 4 Trader Bobs on my map. For all the good it does me.

[RStarphoenix]

In Alpha 20 I made an absolute monstrosity of a base (something close to a Death Star) and without solar cells it wouldn't have worked out as well as it did (that file made it 591 game days before getting bricked by a combo of updates and file corruption). Had 96 Q6 cells in that file (thank all the bartering perks they would only cost me 25K a pop).

In Alpha 21, I am currently hosting a 4-man file and even with my dedication to maxxing out Better Barter, getting a trader up to Tier 7 and otherwise maxxed out all other possible things I could do, we have found a total of 11 solar cells (4from my Tier 6 Completed reward that gave me a Q4, Q3 and 2 Q1) and the rest I have purchased (6 from Trader Bob and 1 from Trader Joel). Currently NONE of them are higher than Q4. We have yet to find one in THIS file in an air drop (a previous file we found 2 a Q3 and Q5 in separate drops).

They did make them rarer, perhaps a little TOO rare. I feel like we should have a small chance if we max Salvage Operations to get one from wrench/ratchet/impact harvesting a POI solar bank. Then again, if you have a Desert biome you have Oil Shale (and while THAT was reduced in yield pretty significantly it produces so much faster now as a trade of) and that means you can do the Gas Generator -> Battery Bank -> circuit build and kind of recharge the batts on the fly or use them for a backup to the gas when it runs out.

I would rather they made the solar cells stronger or allow us to daisy chain multiple banks together to power things. It doesn't make sense we can't wire together multiple solar banks to combine the output. It would make it more worthwhile to have a wall/roof/field of solar banks w/ Q4 or lower cells that way (trade off being the immense amount of space used to host all the banks w/ lower quality cells).

Without those two options above, then they would have to up the chances of finding solar cells in at least Bob & Joel's inventories (and a smaller chance in Jen, Hugh & Rekt). Even if maybe globally every 3 days on their resets (I'll use my current map as an example here), on a 6x6 map w/ 7 traders (2 copies each of Joel and Jen) we could at least see a guarantee with Bob since he's the technical & engineering trader. Joel being the general store version of the traders could have one appear every other reset maybe? The other 3 traders maybe ever 3-5 resets so at least you have a chance of buying one more.

The way it feels right now nobody is going to really want to bother with solar other than maybe a sense of accomplishment (it's like an unlisted achievement now - found 6 solar cells!)

[8_Hussars]

22 hours ago, RStarphoenix said:

The way it feels right now nobody is going to really want to bother with solar other than maybe a sense of accomplishment (it's like an unlisted achievement now - found 6 solar cells!)

QFT
 

Slightly off Topic.

FWIW, I tend to gravitate towards rebalancing Solar as an early game power source rather than end game.  The solar power output would need to be significantly nerfed vs a dinosaur powered gen set. 

Make solar banks craftable early, and solar cells recoverable from wrenching solar banks at about the same rate as engines and nerf engine recovery a little.  Lock solar cell crafting at the end of Wiring (like the crucible).  

We could even have solar powered cement mixers at half the output rates.