Power Up / Power Down

The power cursor can be used to power down certain buildings, thereby removing them from your power grid. This state is a toggle; clicking the power cursor on a building that is powered down will power it back up. Powering up or down requires a short amount of time.

As with all special cursors, to cancel a power cursor, right-click or select a different mode.

Buildings that are powered down do not consume power, but cannot perform any function. They cannot build units or contribute to the construction done by other structures. Offline buildings do not count toward the prerequisites for construction of other units and buildings. Put simply, an offline building effectively does not exist except visually.

There is one exception to this: your Freighters can return water to an offline Water Launch Pad, but you cannot sell the water contained at that facility if its power is off.

You cannot power down buildings that provide more power than they consume, such as the Power Generator itself, since there would be no point in doing so.

If you power down your primary facility, you cannot create units by using the global Build Menu even if you have other copies of that same building, because the primary facility is not available to train them. In this situation you need to select a different building and specifically train the units from that structure. Therefore, if you are going to power down your primary facility, it’s a good idea to set another structure as the primary facility instead.