BIE'S "Battery Shrine" Accumulator Management System

(reddit link for full details!)

(cloning chunks of the reddit post)

TL;DR:  A new, more compact, better remote battery manager for your space empire.

So, what does a Battery Shrine do?

Automate a whole lot of battery-supply tasks, that's what.  The Shrine has switches that will:

  • Collect a metered amount of accumulators from the logistics network, unattended.
  • Inject a metered amount of same to the logistics network, also unattended.
  • Do both functions above, but un-metered with attention required.
It also has the ability to automatically inject accumulators into the logistics network if the total supply runs dry for a period of time, and to stop doing that once the supply comes back up.  There's dedicated switches for shuffling this supply around, and the supply is constantly added to via the Shrine's built-in accumulator factory.

With these functions and the new dashboard tools, it's much easier than before to keep an eye on the supply of accumulators and where they are located and in what state.  The Shrine allows you to make use of that information in a neat and controlled way--you don't have to worry about dropping accumulators from inventory, or configuring ILS, or even sticking around to babysit the Shrine's main collect/inject switches while the work is done.

You throw a switch.

Switches?  DSP doesn't have switches...

Too right.  There are a few ways to make a switch, but the one used here has the benefit of easy placement.  These are "blockswitches" as they use blocked splitters with flow settings in order to start and stop items on the belt.  

Like the previous switchers, they're controlled by plunking a Tesla tower down in a marked area.

Tower Placed = ON

No Tower Placed = OFF

What Do You Mean, Unattended? (also, minor rambling history)

Unattended as in you throw the switch and then go do something else.  Come back a few minutes or a few hours later and the function will have been carried out.  You can then switch something else and go back to that other thing.

The Shrine manages the empty-accumulator supply, and that's it.  Full ones?  Handled by the gigacharger, completely automatic and hands-off.

Empties?  Controlled by you.

Let's Talk Practical

Where do you site one of these, for starters?  There are indeed some mechanical considerations about the siting of this print.

Firstly, the Shrine's auto-inject feature.  When the Shrine runs out of incoming charged accumulators for a couple of minutes, a switch is unblocked and the Shrine empties a storage buffer of empty accumulators.  This will kick-start the charge/discharge cycle at the gigacharger if the empire runs low.

This auto-inject feature will inject more batteries per go the further it is away from the empire's gigacharger.  If you're worried about accidentally getting a few gluts in a row or something due to this feature, site it closer.

Second is inject speed.  The closer it is to the gigacharger, the faster the transfer from the Shrine to the gigacharger happens.

Bearing those considerations in mind, I like to place this on my main, centrally-located workshop/mall planet.  One-stop shopping!


How about building it?

Yep, the switches require some "switch media" (science cubes and foundations) to serve as the bits that circulate and make the whole thing work.  Foundation's easy (and comes in big stacks), and by the time you're ready for the Shrine, you should be well into the space-warper era of the game, so the cubes shouldn't be too dear a price.  Cubes were chosen because they're pretty and glowy, and so that there's no doubt whatsoever which switch is on and working, because you'll see cubes flowing.

Each switch has two storage boxes attached.  The innermost one is for cubes, the outermost one needs foundation.  If you're color-blind, pull open the boxes--I assigned slots for each of the items in their respective boxes, so hovering your mouse over those slots will get you a tooltip that says exactly which cube you need.

You'll need:

  • 8x stacks (1600) purple cubes/information matrix
  • 8x stacks (1600) red cubes/energy matrix
  • 16x stacks (3200) green cubes/gravity matrix
  • 16x stacks (3200) yellow cubes/structure matrix
  • 16x stacks (16,000) foundation
Check the color of the cube required for each innermost box.  Dump in half of the total from the above list: 4x stacks in each of the red cube boxes, 8x stacks in each of the green cube boxes, and so on.  Two stacks of foundation in each of the outer boxes.  Just match up the labels (3-segment belts with appropriate icons) and the assigned slots in the box with the listed item.

The foundation will begin to flow immediately.  You should see it go out on one of the belts and then come back to the box just a bit later.  When you plunk down a Tesla Tower in the right spot, cubes should flow out of the first box, block the splitter in the back, and thereby prevent foundation from flowing, turning the switch ON.

Unattended switches (yellow and green) do it a little differently--they use the foundation AND the cubes to control blocked splitters on either side of the Shrine's various storage arrays, so the cubes have to make a long trip, hence needing more of them.  Nevertheless, turning the switch on and off should show complete loops of both items.

Don't fill up the boxes all the way or use the slider to restrict the amount of slots--you want the un-managed buffer space so everything flows properly.  The marked number of slots should be more than enough to make each item flow without any gaps, and not having gaps in the flow is the important bit.


Any other unusual requirements?

The Shrine, just by existing, puts a 40,000-strong dent in your accumulator supply.  That's the two intake ILSes, at max ILS-related research, holding 20K each.  In order to make the Shrine operate just on switches that cannot otherwise be mis-configured, I had to leave the intake ILS in "collect" mode all the time.  That's why the flow from them gets blocked before it goes into any storage, to minimize this number.  (BMS 4 was kinda bad about this!)

The unattended mode was partially done in order to cut down on the number of intake ILSes, and by doing so, cut down the size of the aforementioned "dent".

If you pair the Shrine with PRIME II: Ridiculous Speed (our latest gigacharger/eater-of-L30 Lancers), the "accumulator supply dent" grows to 64,000 accumulators total: 40K for the Shrine and another 24K to account for the 12x output ILS on PRIME II and their minimum-load settings.  (PS, don't mess with those--lowering them ramps up your warp traffic.)

This 64,000-strong dent compares favorably to PRIME II and BMS 4.0, who had a much larger minimum-required of 160,000 accumulators.

But that's it for weirdness.  I thoroughly recommend pre-building the necessary accumulators.   64K accumulators will fit into 22x MKII storage boxes, or two stacks of eight of them and one of six.  Pipe those into a supply ILS after building the Shrine and your gigacharger and it should go smoothly as both prints request them.  Take it a bit to even out but it'll happen.

Speaking of taking a bit...


What's the response time like?  For the switches, a matter of a few seconds; the power turns on, sorters begin putting the switch media onto belts, the switch media flows to the blocking splitters, and then the new state takes effect and the returning switch media makes a loop.

The actual effects on the accumulator supply?  Minutes, at least, often ten or more.  All that "not-actually-invisible-hand" stuff.  Injecting is pretty fast (and so is charging, on our latest PRIME II gigacharger) but the transit time slows it down.

Collecting can be quite a bit slower depending on how much extra supply there is in the logistics network.  This process is also altered by the minimum-load settings of the gigacharger's receiving ILS.  Higher percentage means it takes longer to stabilize, and also that the supply has to be a little bigger.  Adjust carefully and keep notes...and always make sure the gigacharger's minimum receiving load is HIGHER than that of the Shrine.  Otherwise, the Shrine won't take priority and have control.  (PRIME II and the Shrine are pre-configured not to step on each other's toes.)

Above all, patience.


Now, what do the switches actually do?

Green for small changes, yellow for larger ones, red for possible-industrial-accident large, and purple for internal management.  The "auto-inject buffer" is the innermost ring of storage, the one that receives output from the Shrine's accumulator factory, main storage is outside of that.

INTAKE, GREEN:  Collect ~50,000 empty accumulators from the ILS logistics network in unattended mode.  Turning this switch off dumps whatever has been collected into main storage and stops this collector from getting more accumulators.

INTAKE, YELLOW:  Collect ~120,000 empty accumulators from the ILS logistics network in unattended mode.  Turning this switch off dumps whatever has been collected into main storage and stops this collector from getting more accumulators.

INTAKE, RED:  Collect an unmetered amount of empty accumulators from the ILS logistics network and put them directly into main storage, until the switch is turned off again.

INTAKE, PURPLE:  Transfer an unmetered amount of empty accumulators from the auto-inject storage buffer to the main storage, until the switch is turned off again.



OUTPUT, GREEN:  Inject ~50,000 empty accumulators into the ILS logistics network in unattended mode AND stop this injector from collecting more accumulators.    In its default OFF state, this injector automatically collects accumulators from main storage.

OUTPUT, YELLOW:  Inject ~120,000 empty accumulators into the ILS logistics network in unattended mode AND stop this injector from collecting more accumulators.    In its default OFF state, this injector automatically collects accumulators from main storage.

OUTPUT, RED:  Inject an unmetered amount of empty accumulators from the main storage into the ILS logistics network, until the switch is turned off again.

OUTPUT, PURPLE:  Transfer an unmetered amount of empty accumulators from the main storage to the auto-inject storage buffer, until the switch is turned off again.



All eight switches also have belt-symbol labels right below them.  Read in the direction the belt is moving.  The ones with numbers are the unattended switches, the ones without are attention-required.  The "MK3 Assembler + MK1 Storage" label refers to the auto-inject buffer.  MK2 storage for Main Storage.  ILS means "to/from space".  The numbers are the approximate number of accumulators that will be collected/injected.

The two switchers with the ! + vein-empty labels are the RED ones that can spray accumulators into or out of the ILS logistics network without any control.  Careful with those!

INTAKE, YELLOW has priority over INTAKE RED and INTAKE PURPLE.  This was to allow some belting that lets you dump both of the metered collectors into Main Storage at the same time without slowing down either of them.  If you have cause to be using RED/PURPLE on the intake side, you gotta do a little think work, beforehand, that's all.



Show me some example tasks.

If you're using the Shrine and PRIME II together, I highly recommend landing on PRIME II and going to each of the outbound ILS that supply charged accumulators, then adding that ILS to your dashboard.  (popup menu > add this facility to the dashboard) Yep, it's a pain to shuffle down the line and find a clear spot on the dashboard, but it's well worth having a live view of these dozen ILS.  Having it in the dashboard saves a lot of time later.  If you're not using PRIME II, do the same to your own gigacharger's output ILS.

Too many batteries in circulation:  I check the status of the PRIME II ILS that are configured to remote-supply charged accumulators.  Several of them are full.  I wait a few minutes and check again, and the same number are still full.  Probable cause:  too many batteries in the supply.

Collecting ~50K accumulators will empty two of them fully and one partially.  I throw the INTAKE, GREEN switch.  This empties the Shrine's two intake ILS, and in fairly short order, fills the collector.  I turn off the switch, dumping the empties into storage while the two intake ILS fill up again.

Output ILS come down, leaving more room for the active supply to wobble around.

Too few batteries in circulation:   This one's better-checked by checking all of the cluster's ILS that are set to remote-demand full accumulators.  Any of them empty?  If so, check the remote-supply ILS on your gigacharger--if there are no full accumulators there either, inject!  (Start with OUTPUT, GREEN so as not to flood the supply.)

You CAN diagnose too-few by looking at the output ILS on PRIME II as in the previous example, but you'll need to be familiar with how quickly they fill up at normal traffic rates and then compare.  Kinda touchy feely.

Dismantling A Planet:  Let's suppose you've got a planet run off accumulators that, for whatever reason, needs to be demolished.  You'll want to make sure the accumulators get collected instead of being destroyed, to save the investment you've made in them.  The general orders of operations is:

  1. At the Shrine use INTAKE, GREEN to make a hole in the supply.
  2. At the to-be-dismantled planet, stop the factory.
  3. Set the remote-demand charged-accumulator ILS to supply.
  4. Confirm the remote-supply empty-accumulators ILS is indeed supply.
  5. Change the minimum-load for logistics vessels on that ILS to 1%.
  6. Destroy the rest of the place while the ILS is picked clean.
  7. Destroy the ILS and pick up what few accumulators the 1% load settings left behind.
Now the Shrine's holding on to that supply and once you build your next planet, you'll have plenty of fresh empties to put into the network.

What about other features?

AUTO-INJECT:  on the outer ring near the Main Storage Expansion port, next to the two logi-bot boxes.  This uses a couple of splitters and some blocking to keep a big pile of empty accumulators from going into the interstellar pool of accumulators.  It has a pre-configured global alarm that'll pop an accumulator icon on your display if the empties start flowing.  The belt monitor for this is up on a high pedestal so it can be seen from the center of the Shrine.

ICARUS ACCUMULATOR DELIVERY:  If you're going all in on accumulators and using them for Icarus power, the Shrine is already configured for that.  Logi-bots will deliver and pick up accumulators per your logistics settings.

MAIN STORAGE EXPANSION:  The Main Storage Expansion port is just that.  If you need more storage than the built-in ~1.2 million accumulator capacity, you can wire it right in.  Three belts in, three belts out, and it's hooked into the system such that adding this storage is seamless as far as the Shrine's functions go.  Very distinctly labeled on the outer ring.

FACTORY PORT:  There's also a Factory Port, also text-labeled.  This is in case you want to add on more manufacture of accumulators, to speed things up.  The Shrine's built-in accumulator factory is purposefully easy to copy out and paste nearby, and there's nothing stopping you from slapping down two or three of them and wiring them up in series.  (You'll need to patch their power in a few places.)

POWER SUPPLY:  Whether you use sprayed accumulators or not, the Shrine has enough exchangers to power itself, its factory, and to charge up its placed-accumulator power buffer.  MK3 sprayed accumulators will get you more than enough power to run 2-3 extra copies of the accumulator factory with room for power spikes.

SPRAYERS:  All intake gets sprayed with MK3 spray.  If you're using PRIME II, between this and the gigacharger, you'll have sprayed accumulators, no trouble.

MODDABLE:  The collectors and injectors can have their amounts fine-tuned by adding/subtracting storage.  The GREEN can be made a clone of YELLOW for capacity, letting you double-up and shift a quarter-million accumulators at once.  Or take out the storage of YELLOW and route to a larger array outside of the Shrine, much like the Main Storage Expansion port.  Plenty of room after ripping out YELLOW's boxes.

NOTA BENE:  The more power that is in use at the Shrine, the more sensitive it becomes to outages in the charged-accumulator supply.  That is, the auto-injector gets unblocked more quickly than it would with the default configuration.



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