Your comments

I seem to recall I watched it slowly drop from -19.8 or so to -19.9 but I'm not sure. It might also be I watched it drop down from +10-ish and then went to sleep.


I tried to reproduce it but failed. All machines were on 'Not Producing' this time however, so it might be that they only bring power below 0 when they are producing on reserve power before you go to sleep.

Bug seems to be still there. I'm on 0.59.1 and the power went to -19.9%.

A quick google search shows Mars has barely any magnetic field, so a conventional compass would most likely not work. I can however easily imagine a simple setup of 3 or 4 low-power receiver antennae listening to a beacon signal from a waystat (you'd really not want the EVA suit to actively transmit unless absolutely necessary in order to conserve battery power). They could estimate the direction of a waystat based on the phase differences between their received signals. HOWEVER to get any sort of global direction (NESW), you'd need at least two waystats, which if combined with their directions would also give you your position. There'd be always certain errors involved though, so more waystats would be able to more accurately determine your position (from 3 onwards you could use trilateration).


For realism I'd say that you'd need 2 or 3 waystats for both the compass and coordinates to show up. One waystat only should give you the red marker to the waystat itself, but not much more (the first hab is always within range of the first waystat so it'd at least get you home). Same if you'd go outside the range for one or more of the waystats. For 2 waystats you could have an error in your position for example, maybe generate a random number each time you open the datapad and add that to the position or something. From 3 waystats onwards there should realistically not be any additional functionality anymore, except for any error that'd disappear with more waystats.


To offer more incentive to discover waystats, I'd say you could heavily decrease the waystat range (if you get to requiring three waystats in range for determining your position, you could choose the range such that each location falls into exactly three waystat areas - perhaps with a few "dark" zones inbetween the waystats).