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Heat and Overloading

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A pilot can get just a little more from his modules by overloading them, as long as the excess heat doesn't break their equipment. This article explains what heat and overloading are, how to overload your modules and how to deal with the resulting heat.

On this page:

• What are Heat and Overloading?
• How to overload a module
• How to deal with heat
  • Tech Level
  • Repairing the damage
  • Cost of repairs
• Some tips

What are Heat and Overloading?

Normally, your ship's modules operate indefinitely. You don't need to fuel them or maintain them and as long as your ship provides sufficient power and cpu, they work perfectly.

However, if you need just that little bit extra, you can decide to overload a module. By overloading a module, it starts to perform slightly better than it would normally. For example, a MWD will give you an additional 50% speed bonus, or a gun might give you a 15% damage bonus.

As a result, the module will start generating heat that collects on the rack of similar modules: high, medium or low power. You can see the heat mounting in three small dials on the the display right above your capacitor-indicator. Once te rack overheats, the overloaded modules start damaging themselves and the modules around them.

The damage to your modules can only be repaired in a station's repair shop or by bringing Nanite Repair Paste for field repairs.

How to overload a module

Overloading a module is very simple: you click the green overload button on top of the module button on your interface and it starts overloading. Click it again it will no longer overload. Another way to toggle overload is by rightclicking the button and selecting 'toggle overload'.

Note: you can toggle overloading when an active module is running, but it won't toggle until the next cycle starts. Once it starts an overloaded cycle, it will keep overloading the entire cycle. And if it's not overloading at the start of the cycle, it won't overload until the next.

Note: You can't overload every module, but modules that can't be overloaded are affected by the heat of other overloading modules.

How to deal with heat

As a mod is overloading, it needs to get rid of its heat and deals its damage to its rack. The hotter the rack gets, the higher the odds of the module dealing the damage to itself or to its neighboring mods. Every module has 40 hit points (visible in repair shop or when you compare multiple mods from the variant tab on the info screen) and the damage is subtracted from these. Once a module is 100% damaged, it stops functioning and you will need to repair it before it will work again.

The amount of heat damage a module deals is listed in its attributes. It appears that the higher the meta level of an item, the lower the heat damage it deals, even though the overload effect remains the same. So an 'Arbalest' Cruise Launcher doesn't just have better base stats than a regular Cruise Missile Launcher I, it also produces less heat.
Note: damage always occurs on the same rack, so a high power mod will never damage a medium nor vice versa, etc.

Putting a module offline turns it into a heat sink for the neighbouring modules on the same rack (math for these completely unknown). A module that sits next to an offline module appears to be dealing less heat damage, or has a reduced chance of dealing that damage to itself, perhaps because the rack isn't heating up as fast (?). Remember though: turning a module off is free and instant. Turning it back on takes about 6 seconds, requires a nearly full capacitor and takes about 60% of all your cap.

Tech Level

Although modules directly adjacent damage eachother more than modules farther apart, I've seen more than one occassion where damage from a Tech I module seemed directed directly at Tech II items, skipping the Tech I modules inbetween. CCP has stated that overheating is much more likely to affect Tech II items, so apparently when a rack is overheating, all Tech II modules on it have a greatly increased (?) risk of damage.

Once you see your Tech I's smoking your Tech II's, you can really see how Tech III would really benefit from some extra heat resistance. And rumor has it that that is going to be one of the main differences from T2 to T3.

Repairing the damage

Repairing modules can be prohibitively expensive and unlike damage to your ship, you can't repair it by fitting the appropriate modules and just running them for a while. The only way to repair the damage yourself is by buying Nanite Repair Paste, which is costly but has the advantage of being usable when out in space.

Just right click the damaged mod and select repair. Repairs seem to take about 60 seconds per unit of nanite paste consumed and 1 unit of paste appears to repairs about (?) 10 points of damage.

Cost of repairs

The formula for repair costs of damage is actually quite straightforward. 100% damage equals half the base mineral price of a module. The base mineral price is based on the initial price of minerals when EVE was first released, so they're not exactly comparable to market prices now, but you can look up the base price in databases like the showinfo DB on this site.

For example, if a Reactor Control Unit II has 60% damage (16/40 hp left), repairing it would cost 60% of half its base price (base price is 57,568 isk). So, the repairs amount to about (57,658 / 2) * 0.60 = 17297 isk. It seems there's some extra rounding going on, perhaps to the price in thousands, but generally this formula matches very closely.

Some tips

Be careful when you fit your ship. When you decide to overload a module, it's handy to have a module next to it that you don't mind taking a little damage or, better yet, that you can disable so it can act as a heat sink. Don't put two mods you would typically overload at the same time next to each other.

Remember that only the fitting screen shows you how you have everything configured in the ship. Once you undock, you can move the buttons around, but this doesn't change the actual configuration of the modules on your ship. Moving buttons apart doesn't move the modules apart.

Don't overload Tech II modules. And when you overload Tech I modules, make sure they are on a rack with only Tech I modules, because they will smoke your Tech II in no time. The good news is that, since only baseprice is used to determine cost, even repairs of Tech II modules are relatively cheap.

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Current EVE version: 4.10.45943 (Trinity 1.0.1)