Cataclysm-dda: Cell Phone/Reading Light Rebalance Makes Electric Lantern Useless

[Morat2255]

Problem:

Prior to Build 9787, reading lights had a power draw of 6k and a light intensity of 8. This made them basically worthless compared to cell phones and smart phones, and the rebalance was badly needed. However, it now has power draw 1k, light intensity 15, making it a straight upgrade to the Electric Lantern, which has a power draw of 5k for the same intensity of 15.

Electric Lanterns are heavier and bulkier, require a higher Electronics level to craft, are gated by the need for a soldering iron, and have a tool tip claiming it "lasts a long time". In its current state, there's literally no reason for the Electric Lantern to exist as an item in the game.

Solution:

I believe that an Electric Lantern should be a bit weaker and a bit more efficient flashlight. A flashlight gives a light intensity of 300 for 10k power draw, which is a massive, massive jump in intensity from the next most powerful device, and it should be the Electric Lantern's niche to bridge that gap. 100 intensity shouldn't be unreasonable for a one liter sized electric lantern if a flashlight has 300. Then drop the power draw to 3k to give a slightly better ratio of light/power than the flashlight (the flashlight, by the way, much like the Reading Light is both smaller and available at a lower Electronics level than the Electric Lantern, as well as being a somewhat common zombie drop, so there's no excuse for it outclassing the Electric Lantern by such a wide margin).

Alternatives:

Ideally, if there's going to be a rebalance of the lighting device stats, there should be a broader scale rebalance, because they're all over the place. Attention needs to be paid to how everything compares to everything else, because buffing or nerfing 3 items at a time relative to each other, like the phones and reading light, just ends up making them unbalanced with respect to other items like the lantern. But that's a much larger project that would have a much greater effect on overall game balance and would therefore need a lot of time and care. For now, the Electric Lantern is obviously broken and an easy enough fix.

[KorGgenT]

These items should really be balanced relative to their real world analogues, rather than balanced by what it takes to craft them. We could compile a list of the different lights, find out their lumen levels, and translate lumens to light intensity in game.

[Morat2255]

Well, just as an example this collapsible camping lantern claims to put out 30 Lumens for 15 hours or 15 Lumens for 30 hours at the highest and lowest settings, powered by 3 AA. The first result on Google suggests that 15 Lumens is about typical for a mini-maglite, while an LED headlamp might put out 50-100. Those number make me suspect that 1 light level= 1 Lumen was the theory when the original values were put in, so maybe go with that.

If a turn is a second, then an hour is 3600 turns, so 15 hours would be 54,000 turns, and now I think I've figured out why the in game values look so wrong. If you assume you're using a Medium battery with a max charge of 500, then you would need the disproportionate power draw of 5k to empty the battery in something like the right time frame. That's probably where those numbers came from. But a typical Electric Lantern can get that battery life off of 3 AAs, which is also about typical for a flashlight, and should therefore be modeled as a Small battery with a max charge of 100.

So if you just took the existing Electric Lantern and just dropped the power draw from 5k to 1k while switching it from medium batteries to small, that would make it more similar to its real-life counterpart, and leave its battery life the same while getting rid of its outrageous power consumption relative to similarly low-power devices. It would also make it identical to the Reading Light currently, but now that I think of it, I've had a reading light before, and it took watch batteries, not AAs. In fact, most reading lights are rechargeable or powered by button cells, because they're too small for standard batteries, so presumably if reliable and standardized rechargeable watch batteries existed they'd use those. If you switched the Reading Light to use Ultra-Light batteries exclusively, that would again make it more similar to its real-world counterpart and also keep it out of the Electric Lantern niche.

[AlexMooney]

Here are all of the objects with a power_draw and a flag that starts with LIGHT_.

id|power_draw|light|battery
---|---|---|---
cell_phone_flashlight|500|LIGHT_8|light
lightstrip|1000|LIGHT_4|light
reading_light_on|1000|LIGHT_15|light
smart_phone_flashlight|1500|LIGHT_20|UPS
electric_lantern_on|5000|LIGHT_15|medium
l-stick_on|5000|LIGHT_300|medium
flashlight_on|10000|LIGHT_300|light
smart_lamp_on|10000|LIGHT_240|light
survivor_light_on|10000|LIGHT_350|light
wearable_light_on|10000|LIGHT_300|light
heavy_flashlight_on|15000|LIGHT_500|light
miner_hat_on|15000|LIGHT_450|light
shocktonfa_on|15000|LIGHT_450|medium
small_space_heater_on|500000|LIGHT_2|
large_space_heater_on|1000000|LIGHT_2|

Note to self:

jq 'map(select(.flags | arrays | any(test("LIGHT_[0-9]+"))) | select(has("power_draw")) | .id,.power_draw,(.flags | map(select(test("LIGHT_[0-9]+"))) | .[0] ) )' data/json/**/*json | grep -v '^[][]*$' | sed 's/[", ]*//g' | paste -d\| - - -