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How long do these dust storms last anyway? I've got one where I'm like on day five. I thought TLD was bad with it's sometimes 20 hr blizzards, lol. The hab I'm in is now unable to generate much power during the day so I was forced to leave in the storm while I still had some battery power left. I started heading towards a weather station where I thought I was walking in an south east direction towards another hab where the dust storm had cleared from around there. Thankfully the storm was not in the south since I ended up getting discombobulated and was walking due south, close to getting into radiation. My nav came back up just in time for me to find this out. I was way off course. If I had hit radiation in the dust storm it would have confused me even more, lol. Anyway, safe and sound in the other hab. No dust storm here but is still raging where I was. It's zero visibility everywhere around there for at least 800K in every direction.
Answer
In my experience so far, storms last for about 3-5 sols (depending on size and speed), the worst part with the severely reduced power production being maybe 2-3 sols or so of that.
They are perfectly survivable (I had one scenario in which the first one arrived on the morning of sol 1, but surviving that was a close one and probably as much luck with finding enough supplies nearby before it got really bad as "survival skill"), but you may need to prepare for it on the first sign of visibility dropping at any WayStat by starting to build up oxygen and water reserves, possibly rearranging solar panels to supply only the more important systems, and actively managing power use during the worst part by running systems only for as long as absolutely necessary or even spending periods of time having everything turned off.
And if you manage to score an RTG before one hits (not too likely for the first one in the Big Storm scenario, but it actually happened to me on one occasion), things become almost too easy.
But what you did is actually a viable (and possibly more exciting, if also more risky) solution, trying to get out of the storm impact area, possibly to another Hab, or at least a Remote Outpost if you found any, and staying there until the storm passes in the area you normally are.
Yeah, the problem was that I had just found the hab when the storm started cropping up. I ran around doing diagnostics and fixing anything in poor repair and getting the hab up and running, but it didn't have a lot going for it right from the get go. Barely any power or oxygen. By the fourth morning I was getting the power going on and off....sort of blinking, so I left, with it running so it could eventually build resources up. Going off course turned out to be a good thing too when I was trying to find the closest hab with the nav offline, because I found another remote outpost down there, in the furthest south east corner of the map. Excuse me if I don't use correct terms. I'm not as techie as all you guys, lol. The storm is still going over there so it's been a lot longer than five sols. Closer to six, seven or eight now.
The storms all vary slightly in their overall size and speed. So you may have just gotten extra unlucky with a large, slow storm. In the next update there will be consumable backup batteries that you can stockpile similar to oxygen filled canisters that will allow you to recharge your battery while out on an EVA. This could also be used to then transfer back to the habitat battery to keep the habitat going during a storm. Unlike oxygen filled canisters though, I think I may implement a failure rate for the batteries where they have a chance of no longer holding a charge, at which point they would change into "Expired Chemical Batteries" (which are an item that technically already exists in the game). This would require you to craft additional batteries.
That sounds good to me. Tell me....do the 'expired chemical batteries' show up in containers and in inventories as just a blank white square? Because, mine do.
That was introduced by me preparing to make these changes to the battery items without double checking the icons. It will be fixed soon.
That's what I thought. It was no biggie to me. I collect however many I find and store them later. You also can't tell how many of them there are or that you have in storage until you pick them up and get the item counter.
Customer support service by UserEcho
The storms all vary slightly in their overall size and speed. So you may have just gotten extra unlucky with a large, slow storm. In the next update there will be consumable backup batteries that you can stockpile similar to oxygen filled canisters that will allow you to recharge your battery while out on an EVA. This could also be used to then transfer back to the habitat battery to keep the habitat going during a storm. Unlike oxygen filled canisters though, I think I may implement a failure rate for the batteries where they have a chance of no longer holding a charge, at which point they would change into "Expired Chemical Batteries" (which are an item that technically already exists in the game). This would require you to craft additional batteries.