What's the most efficient way to travel with your lamp lit?
In Sunless Sea, you'll travel to exotic places in a steamboat, meet new and exciting denizens, and then die in some gristly manner or another. I'm curious about the "travel" part: you can go fast or slow, and I'd like to know which method is more efficient (in money-per-distance terms) when you have your lamp on. (If you leave the lamp off, you pick up Terror, and then your crew eventually goes mad and/or mutinies. I'm trying to avoid that particular death at the moment.)
There are two things that make this more complicated, and might make fast travel more efficient than slow travel, even if the engine power itself is less efficient:
- Your lamp burns fuel
- Your crew eat supplies (I've never managed to upgrade the tramp steamer, so I never have more than 10 crew)
So: which speed burns more money per kilometer? By how much?
(I'm aware that Sunless Sea is currently in Early Access, and the devs might well tweak the fuel-consumption formula later.)
Best Answer
If you're on the starting boat, the lamp is your biggest fuel consumer. It consumes 1% per second. All lamps, all boats.
Engine power, on the other hand is somewhere between 0.05% and 0.1% of engine power per second. So with 800 starting, it's between 0.4% and 0.8%.
The lamp at 1% is obviously considerably more.
If you have 3500 engine power (and no fuel efficiency) the lamp is less impactful, but your fuel is a mess anyway at that point.
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Answer 2
I don't have stats for you but based on my play to date...
- The lamp uses a considerable amount of fuel
- Early on, when fuel is scarce and you return to London often, running without the lamp can let you explore more, get more reports, make more money, etc.
- There are lots of ways to reduce terror but many of them are expensive/unreliable except in London.
- Later on, going back to London frequently interrupts trade routes/other activities. By this point, you've got enough money that it's more beneficial to stay out longer and waste a little fuel.
To give you an example... At the moment, I've got a 3-stop trading route that nets me ~2k/circuit. Every time I have to head back to London, I waste approx 1.5 circuits in time/fuel/sipplies. As such, a few hundred on fuel is easily worth the investment. I run lights all the time except when dodging enemies.
Answer 3
While I'm not too sure of the exact details, from experience it seems as though moving at slow speed will conserve more fuel over long distance in comparison to high speed. However, you will end up having to feed your crew more. Fortunately you can harvest the bats between London and Venderblight for supplies, and butcher the small (comparatively) crabs to empty your hunger bar.
Unfortunately this is mainly conjecture and is not backed up by testing, but certainly seems to be the case from experience.
Answer 4
You can get lot of terror while moving between lamps/islands on the low speed. And it's very hard to reduce this terror later. So I always travel on high speed.
About lamp - you get no terror at all when you travel near the coast with your lamp on. You can travel this way to Mount Palmerston or Port Cornelian almost without getting teror.
If your goal is in open sea - that's your deside, to use your lamp or not
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