You're making your way through the ocean from one end to another but have run out of fuel rods and are pinned to the ground. You have an Uranium and Steel block to create a fresh rod to escape the watery fate, but you do not have any backup battery power to allow the Fabricator to power up.

What do you do at this point? Manually generate power with a wind up pack!

Basically, there could be a gadget, being a large box which has a winding wheel. The box can only be held in hand, and cannot be stored in your inventory. It can be placed onto the ground to be ready for use. It can have a 'power out' panel, in which the player can use to connect a wire to a battery by its 'power in' panel. When set up and connected, you can press E on this box in which a interface can pop up showing a wheel and its handle which the player, using their mouse, can spin to cause power to generate.

I do not have a lot of knowledge about this way of generating power, but I am certain it would take a lot more time to make power compared to Nuclear reactor power generation.

Realistically you would never be able to produce enough power that way to run anything remotely approaching a Star Trek-ish fabricator machine.

Modern submarines have backup diesel generators to pick up where the nuclear reactor drops off. They also have multiple-redundant battery systems designed to prevent cascade failures across cells. The former is impossible in Barotrauma because of the need to surface, unless you replace it with some other mcguffin... which should run out as well. As for batteries, that's a design decision by the creator. In both cases you're left where you started: Does it make sense to have an infinitely renewable resource, of any kind? As it is, handheld batteries and oxygen tanks have an infinite lifespan so long as the reactor is powered, meaning the buck stops there. If you provided a renewable power source, you automatically have infinite O2 and batteries.

It's always possible to idiot-proof this game into pointlessness. Don't forget that.

Pinned to the ground with no power can still be fixed in this scenario by wiring a battery/supercapacitor to a junction box, having an engineer on stand-by to fix the box, or doing it fast enough you have the rod before it breaks. The nahaliena has 3 batteries beside the reactor, 2 wire back out into the grid and the third has only power in, probably for this exact scenario.

Theres enough steps right now to keep power from failing altogether.

Keep the reactor dry
Fix any leaks in the reactor room, and drain excess water into your rooms that aren't flooded (provided everybody closed doors behind them)
Fix all breaches fast enough for the pumps to drain on battery power
Use your last battery to fabricate enough rods to heat past the water.


If anything a nuclear reactor should be harder to start, It would be nice if you had to kickstart it to say 500 power from batteries before it could start producing power on its own, and kickstarting through water could also heat the water around it to boiling hot, making it extremely dangerous to do so, instead of just putting 3 inside when it floods.

Just my 2 cents;

This game sits among those games that have a mix of 'vintage' technology and high-tech stuffz, games like..First thing that comes to mind is Aliens: Isolation. Still using rudimentary sonar, yet able to stick some bars into a machine and produce yourself something as complicated as a mechanical harpoon gun, and among that this game doesn't really have an in-depth story or backround (that I know of) beyond 'You're in a nuclear submarine in the oceanic moon around Jupiter, Europa' which really gives no hint as to the time frame or technology beyond space travel, so comparing this game to reality holds no value unless you wish to criticize everything else that contrasts to the real world. (A wind up power generator is more out of the question than a nuclear reactor that doesn't entirely destroy the largest of submarines upon exploding?)

I doubt that many people think, at round start, "Must setup backup power network incase we run out of fuel" as it happens so rarely, yet in most drawn-out games where the first sinkage doesn't end the round immediately it's pretty much inevitable that you'll run out of the (for most subs) initial 5 fuel rods without careful consideration which, as I've said, most people don't consider.

I'm not really sure that having an engineer sit next to a junction winding up a jack-in-the-box is the most enjoyable experience, but I certainly agree with a secondary power source, one that at most would be able to partially power a single engine as to give the impression of "limping back home" and obviously have some sort of serious disadvantage to using. To name a few from the top of my head; It could require high amounts of welding fuel or oxygen, the power could be highly intermittent, maybe have a chance of causing a fire or even explode. Not saying any of these are good ideas, but you get the point: Something that doesn't make the game any easier, but avoids the situation where there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to succeed.