3. Yall should drop energy before you walk on swamps

Yall should drop energy before you walk on swamps


  • If you drop energy and move in one tick, and then pick up the energy from where you just were in the next tick you can move on swamps every 2 ticks instead of every 5 ticks.

    You can see it in action here: https://screeps.com/a/#!/room/E8S1


  • I am pretty sure it's not intended and will be fixed soon


  • @dt7 I don't think it's a bug. A creep with 0 weight can move for free on swamps, that's a core part of the movement mechanics. drop and move are in separate command pipelines as per: Simultaneous execution of creep actions. Put two-and-two together and you get this trick. It's the same idea as the move+transfer trick-- which the Screeps team already mentioned in the latest Game situation review, so we know that's legit. Even if they made it so you can't drop and move on the same turn you could still move every 3 ticks on swamps which is faster than 5 ticks per tile by default. The only way to "fix" it would be to change the range of pickup() to be 0 instead of 1, and that seems a little overkill.

    You still move half as fast on swamps even with this optimization, so terrain remains a factor when it comes to your energy logistics.


  • This is actually not a bug, so this behaviour is intended at the moment, though we still tend to view it as a mechanics flaw. A patch will be soon uploaded to the Public Test Realm where we plan to test the usage of fatigue in methods transferEnergy and pickup. As a result, any remote energy transfer methods will have the same speed.


  • Is the public test area the simulation room?

    Thanks for the tip The_General. I have to say, this had quite a few side effects, but that is part of the fun right.


  • Aww dang, 1 fatigue per 25 energy would certainly fix it as well. I stand corrected!


  • Anton, now that I'm thinking about it I think the fatigue change with transferEnergy() may have unintended side effects. Imagine I have a link and storage next to each other, with a creep sitting there whose role is to just take energy out of the link and put it into storage. Right now I can just have a creep with 1 MOVE and several CARRY parts to transfer the energy. If I want to transfer energy from link -> creep -> storage I would need to have equal MOVE and CARRY parts.

    I know other users do something similar, check AzuraStar in W5N7. He has a chain of CCCCCM creeps from his miner + link to storage. I remember in the EP there was a player (I think maybe dt7?) who would build a maze of extensions and fill the maze with CCCCM creeps and they would transfer the energy deep into the extension maze to fill it up. In those cases we'd have to add MOVE parts even though the creep never actually moves, which seems a little counterintuitive. I guess the creep is MOVEing energy so it kind of make sense. Anyway, just food for thought.

    The cost of the parts isn't too bad, but right now I'm noticing that my biggest bottleneck isn't actually getting the energy, it's building the creeps. My spawns are running non-stop to create enough courier creeps, so any time I need to spend more time spawning I get grumpy. That's actually why I turned off my Source Keeper code, it was just too many parts to make sense without several RCL8 rooms.