Is the lower half connected to the same electrical network?
I would debug by removing all turbines, connect one at a time and seeing where the increase is not 5.8 MW
You can run the coal plants as backup by keeping them behind a circuit network power switch. The logic for when to activate or deactivate it is non-trivial though. (ie I can’t explain it very well :)
Edit: I will add that storage tanks full of steam is a great way to store reserve power. They store the steam at temperature forever. If you need a buffer, just build more tanks connected to the turbines. Then you could run a circuit to the coal plants, to turn them on if the steam level in the nuclear tanks ever goes below a set amount.
I think that’s the 2x1 line. You should be getting up to 160MW.
Well, except that you have 8 heat exchangers, so only 80MW. That’s an easy fix though, and not the problem.
What temperature are the heat pipes? If they’re at or near full temperature, the problem is with the turbine setup, if they’re colder the problem is with the reactors.
So I moved the entire assembly right next to the water, and added two more water pumps to go straight in, and that seems to have fixed it. I’m averaging 63 MW with all other power sources disconnected, and 80 MW peak. Yea!
I was logging in to grab some nuclear screenshots, and saw this under @jpinard’s name on the activity feed.
Is it Factorio if you haven’t been hit by a train? I would argue that it is not.
I have a nuclear setup I really like. It gives up a bit in both fuel efficiency and space efficiency, but it can start with one reactor, it tiles horizontally, and it has demand-based fuel consumption:
Each reactor is at the center of a 5-tile vertical strip, with just the right number of boilers and turbines to extract maximum power from the reactor (assuming adjacency bonuses on both sides).
The inserters are wired so that the reactors never have more than one unit of fuel at a time, and also so that they aren’t refueled until they’ve cooled down a bit, to extract the maximum possible energy. It’s not fully demand-based—the circuits aren’t smart enough to shut down reactors not needed by current power demand—but with enrichment set up, it doesn’t seem worth the time to me to solve that.
I’ve been run over quite a few times now LOL. Thank goodness for quicksave every 5 minutes!
Your nuclear setup? That pic doesn’t include all your turbines does it?
I haven’t done any circuit work yet, but the way I’m handling the odd number of U-235 to U-238 is I have an arm pulling off most (but not all) of the U-238 so approximately the right ratio of U-238 to U-235 ends up at the centrifuge. Low-tech way of handling it :)
Also, I swear the bugs are getting smarter. They’re now hitting lesser defended areas of my base. Just when I think I’ve got perfect coverage, they find a weak point to try and break through.
Yup, there’s a line of turbines about three times as long as the line of heat exchangers off the bottom of the screen.
I have a Kovarex enrichment setup that fills the inner half of a loop of belts with U-238, and puts the generated U-235 on the outer half. The U-235 is split off by using the filter settings on a splitter, and the U-238 gets recycled back into the enrichment plants. Since I don’t bother with depleted uranium ammo for gun turrets, my entire stock of U-238 is sloooowly turning into U-235.
I spent 20 minutes last night just watching my Korvax enrichment processor, waiting for it to produce enough U-235 to start a second enrichment processor. This game has a total Zen quality to it when you have everything working right.
One thing I’m confused on is how to calculate how many basic oil refineries you need. I want to drive 14 plastic chemical plants and one sulfur plant, and based on need - I should have only need 8 basic oil refineries for gas petroleum production. But the last 4 plastic plants still aren’t getting any petroleum gas so they’re not doing anything. Am I missing something?
Also, do you need pumps going intro and out of storage tanks?
I’ve never shied away from mods - sometimes to my own detriment. But I tend to stick with QoL mods where possible. However, reading this actually makes me reconsider that maybe someday I should actually try Space Exploration (despite knowing it will crush me).
Have you forgotten to divide by the amount of time the refining takes?
Basic oil refining is 100 crude => 45 gas over 5 seconds, which is 9 gas / second.
(Advanced oil refining gives 11 gas/second plus other products. I would imagine that by the time you can support more than a few refineries you should be using this.)
Plastic plants use 20 gas / second and sulphur 30 gas / second, so your specified outputs need 310 gas / second which is about 35 basic oil refineries.
I had problems clearing the pipes out quickly enough when I didn’t use pumps. This isn’t a big problem, but you can spot it as a short delay between one cycle finishing and another starting.
The much larger problem I tend to run into is when storage for one of the outputs fills up, blocking the cycle entirely.
I renew my suggestion/challenge to try the full Pyanodon suite for an hour or two.
As I described, you go in the game with a full inventory and yet you can’t research anything (for a long time). Solving this puzzle, about how to progress without research, is a totally different experience.
I’ve tried myself Space Exploration and the beginning of the game is an even slower and linear standard Factorio. It’s interesting, but it’s not the kind of transformative experience I’ve described.
Again, I’m not suggesting to commit to the mod, just try it to see how that kind of puzzle works.
Holy cow, 35?! I guess I’m gong to have to slow down some production and cut my plastic production. And yes, I totally forgot to divide by the amount of time. Thanks so much for solving this mystery for me! Was driving me nuts from all my games as it never worked out.
Initially I had a system to produce solid fuel when this happened via wire. But lately I’m just flushing the tanks periodically (for heavy oil right now).
I want to set this up for my kids to play in multiplayer. Is there a way to seriously reduce (but not eliminate) the risk posed by aggressive fauna in the game? They would like to see it and have to set up to defend against it, but I don’t want it destroying everything they do super quickly.
If you turn off Enemy Expansion, it removes pressure caused by enemies moving closer to you. You’ll still need to deal with attacks, and clearing out bases to expand, but you can be sure that once you scan the surrounding territory and identify nests, you won’t get any nasty surprises of a new nest established near your base.
Thanks! I’m also wondering if they wouldn’t find Satisfactory more engaging since they also enjoy the exploration parts of games and that seems to have more of it.
Satisfactory definitely beats Factorio for exploration. Significantly, I’d say.
Unlike Factorio there are only a finite amount of creatures to fight, and no ‘tower defence’ angle. Though combat itself isn’t that great.
Satisfactory certainly looks way cooler than Factorio and offers much, much more in terms of giving you the materials and abilities to build things that are aesthetically pleasing.
Sort of - I think they’re planning on doing more with some sort of storyline but that’s not quite there yet.
There’s a space elevator that you construct which essentially acts a bit like research labs in Factorio; you feed it materials which ultimately allow you to progress your tech levels. So you get clear goals to achieve through that. Though I don’t think anything ‘ends’ currently once you reach max tech.
Are they really interested in the factory building part? Both Factorio and Satisfactory are fairly advanced when it comes to that portion. Not saying they can’t handle it, just curious if they’d be more interested in a Valheim-like experience over a factory builder if exploration is their goal.
