Hello everyone, its Thumper the Rabid Rabbit in this episode of my Rust electricity 101 component guide
We will cover the Root Combiner now that we've covered power sources
You probably want to know how to put them together. The Root combiner is the way to do that
It's a simple component takes five high qual metal
Generally, not a default blueprint on most servers
Usually going to have to find it in crates and sunken chests very similar to where you would find the solar panel
the root combiner is used to combine two power sources together and
output them as a single higher total value of power units
This can be very helpful when you're trying to build a nice big
Circuit for charging batteries or for running a lot of components in your base
The other place it's very helpful is when you need to put together different types of electricity like combining wind and solar
You can also use Root combiners to combine batteries in certain situations
But there's a lot of limitations to that and I'll cover that in my battery segment
The best way I can demonstrate these is just by hooking a bunch of them up so you can see how they work
They have two inputs on the bottom when I combine these two solar panels together
You can see I have 40 units of power instead of the single twenty that comes in from each of these
This is a good demonstration of one of the bugs of the early stage of the root combiner
it says the input here on each from the solar panels is 40 but really it's just 20 from each of these and a total output
Of 40, I'm gonna do the same thing with this pair of solar panels so that I have two pairs to work with
Then the next thing you can do is combine
Root combiners so I can take the output of this root combiner put it on this input
Take the output of this root combiner
Put on this input and now instead of two arrays of 40
we have a combined array of both sets of solar panels coming out at 80 units of power
You can do the same thing with wind power in this case, I'm gonna try two different strategies one is
To take two of these wind turbines
And combine them together with one root combiner
You can see they're slightly different but together
They're putting out 90 units of power total. Whoops. That one's giving 90 and that one ain't moving *laughs*
So good demonstration of why putting these together is a good idea
Another strategy is to just chain devices as you go along so I can take this root combiner
Put it into one side and then I can add in
another wind turbine or solar panel to this circuit and I could keep throwing these down and putting it more power inputs and
attaching them to this chain as I build
I can take this
Power here along with this power here and make it one big set
I just drop in one more root combiner down here and put solar into one side and put my combined wind
into the other side and
It's gonna vary by wind but at the moment we're getting two hundred and forty four units of power output
If I attach it to this
Counter which is in pass-through mode. You can see there's the two hundred and forty-three units is passing through and a light bulb tada
There is one bug here that you do need to be aware of as of the filming of this video
today's January 22nd
2019 there still exists a bug where you cannot combine root combiners if there is any other
component in between the root combiners
so in this example
These root combiners all connects to other root combiners and that's fine
But as soon as you put another component in between such as a switch timer blocker or a display
Which I have on the wall here. They no longer work properly. I'll demonstrate
if I take the power from the wind side over here and
Plug it into this display and I take my solar over here and plug it into this display
You can see I'm getting wind power and solar power from all these combiners together back here. But if I try to combine
These two sources coming out of the counters, you'll notice that this root combiner does not turn on
Its input is zero and it says it's empty
It doesn't believe that this connection exists. In fact, if I right click and hold on this handle here
It doesn't remove the wire because the wire doesn't actually exist and that is the bug
unfortunately, it means you don't have any way of recombining power after any other components and in the case of batteries that's challenging because you
Can't recombine after a blocker. You can only combine live batteries, which has a very limited application
This is a known bug
it has been reported to Facepunch by myself and a number of other people and
Hopefully it's one of those things that they'll be able to address in a future update
But it's important that you know that limitation and know that for now you can only combine root combiners together
But cannot have other components in between
so to recap
Root combiners are typically not a default blueprint it cost around five high quality metal
And you'll find them in crates and sunken chests
They can be combined to each other but they cannot be combined with any other components in between them
because of the existing bug as of January 2019
That should just about cover it for the root combiner
