Power Cells

Travel to the DeWhat? Emergency Power Annex and claim your allotment of five Power Cells. You can claim once per Pacific-time day; the allotment resets at local midnight.

The Annex is left over from the years when Holo Hollow was a tourist town. With families and travellers coming out to the projector shows, the Settled Systems Authority required the settlement to keep a public emergency power depot, so anyone stranded out here could keep the essentials running until help arrived.

DeWhat? won that contract and installed the automated Annex. Then the tourism dried up — and the contract didn't. The depot is still public infrastructure, and it still hands out its daily allotment.

Five per person, per day, is about fair access rather than generosity: enough portable power to keep heat, comms or a tool alive in an emergency, and not enough for one person to empty the rack for everybody else.

The free allotment is personal and capped, so it doesn't stock a shop for a whole town. People who have already used today's five, or who need more than five, or who would simply rather not wait for the reset, can buy a cell from Bix Weller instead. He also buys spare cells from anyone who would rather have the Credits.

Load one carried Power Cell into an equipped, empty Salvage Cutter from Inventory or Equipment. This sets the Cutter's charge to ten uses and consumes the cell completely — a Cutter that already has charge can't be topped up early.

While the Cutter has charge, each Mining attempt takes about three seconds instead of six — everything else about Mining (chance of success, what you find, XP) stays the same. Once the charge runs out, Mining automatically goes back to its normal speed.