Hello everyone
It's Thumper the Rabid Rabbit and welcome to the first installment of my new Rust Electricity 101 series; the component guide
Of course
If you're going to make a component guide you have to start with the most basic of components and today that is the wire tool
Who doesn't love the wire tool? You can't really do anything with the Rust electricity without it
So it should be your best friend
The wire tool is a default blueprint that you should have available to you on almost every server
Right from the start and it typically will cost you around five high quality metal to craft
Get used to having a lot of high qual around because you
Need it for just about everything electrical in rust right now
There's two things that the wire tool is most useful for number one is
Revealing and connecting handles on components you can see as I mouse over these components little white boxes appear
Those are the handles to which you can connect wires. This switch has an input and an output
this OR switch has two inputs and an output and
slightly more complicated example here the counter has an input and output and three handles on the side for
incrementing
decrementing and clearing the counter in
Addition you'll notice that these
Handles also have little lightning bolt icons that say what they're connected to and how much power is either coming in or going out
I'd use caution when you're looking at that number because it isn't necessarily accurate all the time
Sometimes it shows combined values and not necessarily what is actually coming into any one
Handle or going out of any one handle. So kind of take that with a grain of salt right now still early-game for these components
You use the wire tool to connect things together by simply left clicking on a handle
And then left clicking on another handle you want to connect it to you are limited to connecting things that are appropriate for example
Connecting two input together will not work because there's really no point connecting two inputs and that would be dumb. So don't do that
You can use the right-click held down on a handle to clear a connection so left left
hold down right clears the connection
Also, when I started a connection that I don't want to have anymore right clicking gets rid of that wire I was starting to draw
In addition to showing you the handles and the input/output information or power unit information
The Wire tool will also show you the charge remaining or charge left timers on the batteries
Here's a default small battery and large battery
each with their 2 minutes 0 second timers remaining
You'll notice if I switch to a hammer, all I can do is pick these up
It doesn't really show me any information about the time and also the hammer doesn't show me any handles on any of these components
So the wire tool is very necessary for that information
When you're connecting things with the wire tool
You'll see that two numbers appear. The top number is the maximum length that you can extend this segment of wire
You can
staple it or click along the wall and the floor to connect it to points and
You'll see that the lower number decreases every time I do this
That lower number represents the maximum number of times you can attach the wire to a wall, floor, ceiling or other surface
You start with
The ability to connect it 16 times and go up to 30 meters
This doesn't mean that your maximum
Electrical connection can only be 30 meters
It just means you can only go 30 meters between components once you connect to another component
You can start another wire and another 30 meters
That can come in handy when you're building large bases and need to run wire a lot of different places over great lengths
You'll also notice that as I turn away from a solid surface, the line does turn red and say no surface. This means I'm not
Pointing to a surface that's within my sphere of influence here for connecting things
so make sure you're close enough to connect things and make sure they're within your distance and number of
Segments that you can attach to a surface
I'm going to show you a quick example
Of how to connect a number of components here for a basic solar powered light just so you can get an idea how this works
And see how the output of the solar panel is 20 units. It's empty connected to nothing
I can staple it either directly from the floor to the switch in which case it'll hang in the air
It is not a physics rendered object so you can walk right through these wires if you want to connect them directly between components
without connecting them to any surfaces
You're certainly welcome to do that connecting them to surfaces is purely an aesthetic thing at this point
That's not to say in the future. They may not make these cables actually get in your way and block things
I'm going to connect it to this switch. I'm gonna run it through an AND switch just for fun
And then I'm gonna run it up here onto the ceiling to this light where I want to show you a quick tip
That's a little bit of a bug it may catch you in certain circumstances
When I'm close to this light you can see it's pretty easy for me to drag the wire over and the power in
Handle lights up and I can connect to it
But if I move a little distance away here, you'll notice that I can still see the power IN handle up here
But every time I try to mouse over it it disappears
You'll run into this on occasion when you're at a distance or an angle, that is just not quite right
You can fix this obviously by getting a little closer in this case or in some cases
You may not be able to get closer
So you may need to jump or Crouch to be able to reach that handle and connect to it
So if you're having trouble reaching a handle that you can kind of see but can't really
Get to it to mouse over and click on before it disappears on you
Try jumping or crouching to get the proper angle or distance from that handle to connect to it
That should just about cover the basics of the wire tool again. You can
left-click to connect things right-click to cancel connections or clear connections from
Existing handles that are connected together and you can use it to show you information about the input and output
Handle and the available charge time that's left on batteries
