Immersive Solar Arrays

Harvest solar power for the needs of your base. Wire car batteries into a battery bank, put panels on the roof, and run your fridges and freezers off the sun instead of a generator that has to be fed.

This is a fork of RadX5 and Poltergeist's mod, rebuilt for build 42. Support for build 41 has been dropped. Most of the work was not porting features across but fixing ones that had quietly stopped doing anything, because almost nothing that broke in build 42 breaks loudly.

Build 42.20+ | Singleplayer and multiplayer

What it does

• Battery banks - Wire car batteries, build a bank, and it powers everything a generator would, in the same radius, without fuel.

• Solar panels - Flat, wall mounted and floor mounted. Connect them to a bank and they charge it through the day. Cloud, fog, temperature and the length of the day all move the number.

• Status window - The summary tab says whether the panels are keeping up and how long the charge lasts at the current draw. The details tab lists what is actually pulling power.

• Generator backup - A generator plugged in near a bank becomes its backup. Put a failsafe trigger on the generator's square and the bank starts it when the charge runs low, then stops it once it has caught up.

• Loot and world spawns - Panels, batteries, inverters and the skill magazine spawn in the containers you would expect. Pre-placed crates and battery banks appear around the map, and five stash houses hide a solar cache behind an annotated map.

• Sandbox options - Panel efficiency, battery wear, DIY battery capacity, charge frequency, how power draw is calculated, loot rarity per item group, world spawns and stash houses.

What is fixed in this fork

Every one of these was silent. The mod loaded, showed up in the mod list, and did the wrong thing without writing anything to the log.

• Translations - Build 42 reads only Translate/<LANG>/<File>.json. The mod shipped build 41 .txt tables, which are not loaded at all, so every string in it rendered as its own key. Converted across all 27 languages.

• Items - Type = is not parsed in build 42, which left every item with a null item type. Rewritten to ItemType = base:*, with LearnedRecipes in place of TeachedRecipes and namespaced tags.

• Recipes - Tag queries are matched literally, so tags[Screwdriver] matched nothing and every recipe asking for one was impossible to perform. The recipe hooks pointed at a global table build 42 deleted. Both rewritten, hooks against the current OnCreate(craftRecipeData, character) signature.

• Loot tables - A misspelt field name meant a weight went into vanilla item lists with no item name in front of it, shifting every name and weight pair after it. This corrupted the base game's own loot, not just the mod's.

• Stash houses - Errored on load, taking all five with them, and gave their containers coordinates under names the engine does not read.

• Multiplayer - Plugging a generator, flipping the bank switch, connecting a panel and moving a battery all reached into the server system, which does not exist on a multiplayer client. They travel as commands now.

• Smaller things - Three requires pointing at moved or wrongly cased files, an item type in the wrong module, a typo that stopped battery banks spawning in rooms, stash maps drawn without their street names, and several nil dereferences on unloaded squares.

Installing

Copy ImmersiveSolarArrays/Contents/mods/ImmersiveSolarArrays into your Zomboid mods folder. Only run one version of this mod; the mod id is ISA.

Target Square: On Load Commands is needed for the pre-placed crates that spawn around the map. Without it everything else still works, you just do not get those crates. It is safe to add or remove on an existing save. Get it from the Workshop.

Some options need a game reload, and stash houses want a new save to appear properly. Test on a save you are willing to lose before adding it to a long running one.

Checks

pwsh tests/run-checks.ps1

Compiles every Lua file with the Kahlua compiler out of projectzomboid.jar, the same one the game uses, then cross-references the mod against the installed build: translation keys, texture paths, item script fields, recipe inputs and hooks, sandbox options and requires.

Nothing it looks for crashes at load, which is the point. See tests/README.md for what each check exists to catch.

Credits

Original mod by RadX5 and Poltergeist, with thanks to everyone who contributed to it over the years, translators included.

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Original: https://github.com/radx5Blue/ImmersiveSolarArrays