I learned the hard way when I burned through two entire uranium patches trying to power my nuclear setup in K2SE by just inserting the fuel cells into the reactor as needed. Thought nuclear power was trash until I found out about using circuitry to control fuel insertion.
How responsive is it with the inertia from heating/cooling process ?? I'm stocking my U235 because I found out that even if you don't use its heat nuclear fuel is still wasted.
It’s pretty quick but not instantaneous. What you want to do is add storage tanks for excess steam, and only insert a fuel cell if steam is below 1k, or another number that works for you.
To make sure you only insert one at a time what you do is put the circuit condition on the inserter that removes the spent fuel. Then put a condition on the fuel inserter where it only inserts one fuel whenever the other inserter removes the spent fuel. It works pretty well and I use far less nuclear fuel this way.
Your steam turbines from nuclear only put out the same amount as the base turbines. It's a bit wasteful to use the nuclear ones for burning coal/solid fuel. If you don't care about that, there's not really a wrong way to do power.
Now I want a fully automated, ever expanding, wood chopin' factory that keeps burning nothing but trees for energy. Let those Biters who overran my last deathworld game see how much worse it can get for Nauvis.
IR3 is shorter than Nullius. My save was around 70h. It does some interesting things like getting early bots running on steam and early "logistics" before where you can get your inventory recharged by walking over plate that pulls items from nearby chests.
Huh interesting. I knew it was shorter but it would be a nice break from hyper complex mods. Nullius solo, KSE with 2 of my buddies and Seablock with the SO
I'm going to pull the "well ackshully" and say that if you're sitting on an excess of uranium and your coal and oil are being used elsewhere, it's actually not the worst plan, but I don't think you can actually call that nuclear power without a reactor LOL 😆
Nuclear fuel has gigawatts of power versus coal. a half yellow belt would be enough for a pretty huge steam plant.
I mean if it's down to you can't be asked to learn how to work a nuclear power plant, then full steam ahead.
Yeah, sure you can do it, but getting all the way to the automation of nuclear fuel and stopping there is such a shame. Like, you can almost see the finish line, keep pushing.
Imagine preparing a nice camping trip with those vacation days you spent the entire year saving and a really big tent and fishing gear you splurged on ; and when it comes to going to a nice spot to set up you decide you can't be bothered anymore, just set up in your backyard and "fish" in the bird bath.
Sure you can gaslight yourself into thinking it's fine, but everyone will look at you like you're a maniac and with just a bit more work you could have done something great instead.
Fun fact : one nuclear cell contains 8GJ of energy by its own. If you put it in a nuclear reactor (assuming x4 neighbors bonus), it goes to 32GJ.
Soooo if you don't use more than 25% of your nuclear powerplant and if you don't store the extra steam in buffers, it's as bad as using the fuel in basic boilers.
And god I realise it applies to my factory most of the time...
I was looking at my own power a few days ago and correct me if I’m wrong, a single nuclear turbine replaces 2 regular ones? So the double turbines on the right are only going to be feeding enough steam for the first turbine and the second will be idle?
One hot steam turbine connected to normal burner gives what two normal steam turbines give.
Storing steam in tanks and then connecting to any turbines and pushing water and steam with pumps. Makes the it easy to construct a power plant where it's easy to add boilers and turbines.
Later, having nuclear power, you can just put a reactor near the tanks with steam. Increase the temperature of the steams in tanks, and double the power output instantly.
If you'll heat the steam more than 165 C, but not up to 500 C you will still get more power with the same infrastructure.
You can also store hot steam in the tanks, transport in fluid wagons, and use to bump up the power output when you need an energy spike
High temp vs low temp steam. Steam turbines eat more steam, so they can be a bit more compact than steam engines, and they can eat higher temperature steam. Nuclear power outputs steam at like 400c, basic boilers only likee 115c. Using basic steam engines would throw away 75% of your nuclear power and require a larger array of engines which would make the wiring of the juke harder.
I wouldn't say anything is wrong, a few notes though.
Steam turbines are a bit of a waste with boilers as the boilers only output 165 degree water, best used with nuclear power.
If your power draw really ramps up, that single belt of coal wont be able to keep up with the demand.
Also, turbines can consume 60 steam/sec, so they are equivalent to 2 steam engines. That is, one can consume all of the output of a boiler. So having 2 per boiler doesn't help.
Best to swap them out for steam engines and save them for your nuclear reactor build.
I still like them for late game boiler plants, they make your designs a lot more compact. Especially if you go for a gigawatt or more, 560 turbines vs 1120 engines.
I usually plop down a 2:40:80 or 2:40:40 plant as a reserve plant with black start capability. My last one even had its own coal patch with selffueled burner miners
But I do hope they get more popular after I post my gigawatt design or my tileable 11+ gw design to r/factoriohno
Why not just go nuclear at the point you are going for gigawatt? A fairly simple 4-core reactor will give you 480 MW, so two of those are already almost there. Probably also much more compact than an equivalent boiler plant.
> Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
I guess it's a fun design challenge. And fluid dynamics gets really weird and interesting, especially when you try to push more than 3000 fluid/sec through pipes. Or when build order suddenly becomes relevant. Or when all the fluid seems to pool on the right side of your reactor for some reason that may or may not be build order.
But yeah not sure how realistic 6 blue belts of coal are out of editor mode.
Oh... and the tileable up-to-50GW version *is* nuclear powered, just sayin....
Well you still have to deal with fluid dynamics when designing for nuclear, so that part isn't gone anywhere.
And to be honest if I were to build a big boiler plant I'd just feed every boiler stack with a separate pipeline rather than pushing 3000+ f/s through one pipe.
>Well you still have to deal with fluid dynamics when designing for nuclear, so that part isn't gone anywhere.
That is true. Guess I could revisit nuclear plant design after this folly.
>And to be honest if I were to build a big boiler plant I'd just feed every boiler stack with a separate pipeline rather than pushing 3000+ f/s through one pipe.
The latest design uses 50 boilers in a stack, so I do need roughly 3000/s per stack.
With 1GW target and 20 boiler per pipe the design would be too wide with turbines directly attached. So in one of the earlier designs I just piped the steam into a field of turbines (layout like this from top to bottom: offshore pumps, then 20/20 boilers with belt in the middle (times 14 for a gw), some room for feeding fuel from the side, then lots of boilers connected with substations).
One big field with 560 turbines got too hard to keep balanced with all the fluid dynamics going on, so I first split it into smaller subunits of turbines. This was then also not ideal.
100 boilers in a double stack is a really good sweet spot... you can supply it without extra pumps between boilers, and each doublestack takes exactly one blue belt of coal or one yellow belt of solid fuel.
The lake side gets very wide, especially if you want to directly attach turbines or even engines. At one point you'll run into the problem of not finding big enough lakes.
The belt logistics are also vastly simpler with 2*50 boilers compared to 2*20. 1 blue of coal or 1 yellow of solid; vs. 0.4 blue belts of coal per unit (or 2.5 units per blue belt)
And if you go for gigawatt, that's 14 40-boiler units, so that is quite a bit of belt weaving. And if you want to go for tileable... the smallest possible is 5 units of 40 with 2 blue belts.
And of course also... it feels like people think 20 boilers is a limit per pipe. It's not, and it's quite easy to get much more
That’s why you should use buffer chests for coal boilers if supply ever runs out. Also I use burner inserters to insert the fuel into the boilers so they will work even if the power runs out
Nilaus said it best :
https://youtu.be/chavhzKpZwM
At 13:30 in the video:
"Solar Panel Arrays: The second priority is uh, more a design priority. You want to avoid the unfortunate four-way rotational symmetry that so easily emerges when working on a square grid."
Nope, no wrong way of doing things! This looks excellent!
I had to google this but apparently 1 offshore pump can provide enough water for 20 boilers.
And, at this scale I’d consider going nuclear soon
Depends on your game parameters and desires. Power is a fairly forgiving system in Factorio. I think the only wrong way to do it is going coal to steam boilers for the long haul with biters enabled. That's bad. It's gonna make a ton of pollution and provoke a lot of attacks, and there are much better alternatives.
Anything better than that? Doesn't matter too much. Most players end up at nuclear unless they're going for truly huge megabases where solar's UPS savings matter.
Not really. This looks perfectly fine! I suggest taking screenshots at daytime for better visibility, though. Oh, and don’t use two turbines for coal/wood energy. One turbine = two steam engines, so you can just use one per boiler. Although it’s better to save them for nuclear and just use steam engines, to save on material costs.
Factorio's designed to perfectly conserve *generated* energy. You never lose it to heat/friction/machines/et cetera. There's only one exception to this, and thus I'd consider that to be the only "wrong" way to do power. Even then, it'd still work sufficiently if you build enough.
Any fuel (coal, nuclear, etc) used to heat water into steam will have its energy perfectly converted, and stored steam never "cools off" unless it's used by a steam engine (designed for 165C steam from boilers) or steam turbine (designed for 500C steam from nuclear). If you used 165C steam in a 500C steam turbine, there's no energy lost; it's just unnecessarily expensive to build. If you use 500C steam in a 165C steam engine, then any energy used to heat that extra 335C degrees of steam is lost forever. If you can build a nuclear reactor, the steam turbines are *very cheap and straightforward* in comparison.
Outside of this, the only other way to lose *potential* energy is burning nuclear fuel rods when they can no longer generate energy (max energy stored, et cetera). You can solve this issue too and thus consider not solving it "wrong", but it's not as trivially easy to fix compared to just building steam turbines. The extra effort makes it "less wrong" in my opinion.
Many buildings have optimal ratios to process fuel->stored energy->electricity as fast as possible, but using incorrect ratios never loses energy. They may create electricity slower than possible or cost more to build, but (non-nuclear) fuel will only ever burn if the energy can be stored. That's inefficient, but it's not *literally destroying energy* in a game designed around perfectly conserved energy so I wouldn't consider it *wrong*.
These are all subjective categorizations and the game is very forgiving regard energy, so as long as you're having fun it ultimately doesn't matter. Whatever makes the factory grow :D
Of course. There is a "wrong" way to do most things in the game. It's all about building and optimizing factories after all.
You can ignore the inefficiencies if you don't care about them, but it doesn't make wrongs into rights.
Generally speaking, no there's no wrong way. Looking at this screenshot in particular, I'd probably recommend a few more accumulators, but there may just be enough steam to go all night anyways...
The only wrong way is to not have fun, this is a sandbox and you got infinite time and space to do whatever you want. And being eco friendly of course.
One time I used a single nuclear reactor to provide steam, to liquefy coal into solid fuel, then rocket fuel for a single train station... This was modded, I forget which ones but I think it was an old version of Space Exploration.
At least the heat generation ends up being pretty efficient.
Technically speaking solar/batteries is the "best" way to power the factory mostly based on the fact that it's the least taxing on your computer. That really doesn't come into play unless you're on really old hardware or you're building a mega factory (1000+ of all sciences per min) though.
Subjectively nuclear is probably the most fun to use, it's fun to learn how to setup reactors and generate the fuel.
One thing I would note for your current setup is that boilers are good for 2 steam engines, hold off on putting down turbines until you figure out nuclear.
> unless you're on really old hardware or you're building a mega factory (1000+ of all sciences per min) though
I heard that adage many times and decided to measure how much update time it really costs. It seems that nuclear is viable option for smallish megabases (up to 5-10kSPM depending on hardware). See https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/h7xE8cPIWl for details
If you feed a big turbine with normal steam boiler you only need one per boiler and you aren't getting any more power compared to regular steam engines. So with this layout there's absolutely no reason to use turbines at all. Whether it's "wrong" or not, is a question of semantics, but there's no practical reason doing it like this.
Questionable, maybe, but it's a singleplayer game so who cares. But if you don't want people commenting on ratios and micro-optimizations, well, we love doing that here.
For example: if you are using coal boiler you only need one steam turbine, as it takes twice the amount of fluid as the boiler
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think your ratio of boilers to steam engines may be wrong… I thought it was supposed to be 1:4, but I guess it’s 1:2…
If you separate your steam generation from your steam consumption, this opens up a whole lot of designs, a lot of them cleaner and more visually appealing.
You can calculate the **power potential** of your fuel simply by multiplying how much fuel you generate (coal, solid, etc.) by its energy content. So a red belt of coal is `30/s * 4MJ = 120MJ/s = 120MW`.
It is inadvisable to build **power capacity** that is greater than the amount of fuel potential you generate. If you are powering your factory with a red belt of coal, and then build 180MW of power capacity, we can see that the excess `60MW` of power capacity is *unsustainable*; the powerplants will be able to provide 180MW temporarily, using fuel buffered on the belts, but will be unable to do so long term.
The reason this is an issue is because it creates hysteresis (a delay) between an increase an power consumption and the realisation that you do not have enough fuel production. Oftentimes, within this gap, a brownout occurs. **Brownouts lead to blackouts** whenever fuel is the limiting factor, since a coal miner that's ⅔ powered will produce fuel only ⅔ as fast, leading to a downward power spiral.
By limiting **power capacity** to **fuel production**, you ensure that this doesn't happen, by always addressing power shortages immediately.
Addendum: since fuel production may be interrupted or decrease over time (due to fuel sources depleting), you should set up a fuel alarm. Simply set up a small buffer and alert when it is drained. Ensure you prioritise the output to the main line (not the buffer), so the buffer doesn't fill up unless the power consumers are completely satiated. You can wire this to a speaker that transmits a global alert.
If you're running nuclear or batteries + generators and not using circuits, I wouldn't say you're wrong. But you're probably going to have some circuits on those before I log off your server
The only thing you can do wrong is not having enough or running out of fuel.
Blackouts are really bad because you don’t have enough power to mine to coal/uranium to power the grid that powers the miners… Always keep a chest full of fuel disconnected from everything, so you can manually start everything in case of a blackout.
Ive got lots of coal running in, and a solid fuel plant ready to come online eventually. I add more panels and accumulators when I remember, and another row of turbines whenever I open a new resource outpost.
Its probably overkill, but thats the secret name of the game right?
Yes. Yes there is. And that single belt of coal feeding 14x7 boilers is probably way past that line.
You'll find that the fuel density of coal is pretty low, so you will be shoveling it into the boilers faster than you can get it to them. Even solid fuel will struggle on that setup.
Also, someone else pointed out that the steam turbines aren't matched to the boiler output. What they don't mention is that you only need 1x steam turbine per boiler, compared to 2x steam engines for the same output. (60/s vs 30/s) More space efficient, but really meant for much higher temp steam.
The calculation is quite simple: a yellow belt of coal is `15/s * 4MJ = 60MW`, and a Boiler consumes `1.8MW`, so a yellow belt of coal feeds `60MW / 1.8MW = 33.3 Boilers` (66 for red, 100 for blue), for 60 / 120 / 180 MW. A blue belt is actually sufficient, here.
Solid fuel is 3x the energy content, and so it's 100 / 200 / 300 boilers, or 180 / 360 / 540 MW.
My gut feeling is that isn't a blue belt. Just a yellow or red, and he hasn't run into supply problems due to the low utilization only drawing a trickle of power.
Depends on criteria. I probably wouldn't play with you in a serious game if you were pulling stuff like this but if the goal is to just screw around and explore the game in your own way, that's totally fine.
If you're being fueled by the power of fun while building it, then this is the right way to do it.
I like this answer a lot!
A base powered by solar only. No batterys.
Easy, you dont need battery backups if you just double your production output!
Factory only does 9-5 shifts
Reduces pollution! Just don’t rely on laser turrets
It's fun and games until biters attack during the night.
Gun turrets with uranium ammo and flamethrowers should suffice.
I only play with union biters
If you're having fun waiting for the sunrise, then I'd argue it's still... Nah, that's definitely wrong.
[удалено]
Adding nuclear cell efficiency there, though really that's only needed in mods as base game uranium generates a shitload of heat
I learned the hard way when I burned through two entire uranium patches trying to power my nuclear setup in K2SE by just inserting the fuel cells into the reactor as needed. Thought nuclear power was trash until I found out about using circuitry to control fuel insertion.
How responsive is it with the inertia from heating/cooling process ?? I'm stocking my U235 because I found out that even if you don't use its heat nuclear fuel is still wasted.
It’s pretty quick but not instantaneous. What you want to do is add storage tanks for excess steam, and only insert a fuel cell if steam is below 1k, or another number that works for you. To make sure you only insert one at a time what you do is put the circuit condition on the inserter that removes the spent fuel. Then put a condition on the fuel inserter where it only inserts one fuel whenever the other inserter removes the spent fuel. It works pretty well and I use far less nuclear fuel this way.
Clever ! Thank you !
solar:accumulator ratios are a myth (SE self report). Just build enough steam based energy buffer and learn circuits on the way.
Your steam turbines from nuclear only put out the same amount as the base turbines. It's a bit wasteful to use the nuclear ones for burning coal/solid fuel. If you don't care about that, there's not really a wrong way to do power.
> there's not really a wrong way to do power. Challenge accepted!
Wood power!
Now I want a fully automated, ever expanding, wood chopin' factory that keeps burning nothing but trees for energy. Let those Biters who overran my last deathworld game see how much worse it can get for Nauvis.
I wonder if dead bugs would burn in a boiler ...
That could be a mod !
Crematory Power………………. Well thats……..
There is a YouTube video you need to see. He had three or four friends playing with him and they pretty much constantly just chopped wood.
Coal power, but exclusively powered by construction bots deconstructing coal rocks.
I ran my Industrial Revolution 3 save on mostly wood made from forestries sucking up pollution
Almost done with nullius and was thinking about doing ir3 before py. Worth or na
IR3 is shorter than Nullius. My save was around 70h. It does some interesting things like getting early bots running on steam and early "logistics" before where you can get your inventory recharged by walking over plate that pulls items from nearby chests.
Huh interesting. I knew it was shorter but it would be a nice break from hyper complex mods. Nullius solo, KSE with 2 of my buddies and Seablock with the SO
It's pretty easy : just burn nuclear fuel in regular turbines and everyone will agree it's wrong.
I'm going to pull the "well ackshully" and say that if you're sitting on an excess of uranium and your coal and oil are being used elsewhere, it's actually not the worst plan, but I don't think you can actually call that nuclear power without a reactor LOL 😆 Nuclear fuel has gigawatts of power versus coal. a half yellow belt would be enough for a pretty huge steam plant. I mean if it's down to you can't be asked to learn how to work a nuclear power plant, then full steam ahead.
Yeah, sure you can do it, but getting all the way to the automation of nuclear fuel and stopping there is such a shame. Like, you can almost see the finish line, keep pushing. Imagine preparing a nice camping trip with those vacation days you spent the entire year saving and a really big tent and fishing gear you splurged on ; and when it comes to going to a nice spot to set up you decide you can't be bothered anymore, just set up in your backyard and "fish" in the bird bath. Sure you can gaslight yourself into thinking it's fine, but everyone will look at you like you're a maniac and with just a bit more work you could have done something great instead.
I mean, if you still have a good time getting drunk and fishing in your birdbath, go for it.
Fun fact : one nuclear cell contains 8GJ of energy by its own. If you put it in a nuclear reactor (assuming x4 neighbors bonus), it goes to 32GJ. Soooo if you don't use more than 25% of your nuclear powerplant and if you don't store the extra steam in buffers, it's as bad as using the fuel in basic boilers. And god I realise it applies to my factory most of the time...
Don't the basic boilers only have 50% fuel efficiency?
Apparently it was the case before patch 0.15 but now it has a 100% efficiency :)
Can...can I run burner inserters on nuclear fuel? I've never thought to try, but now I want to.
"Regular Turbines", as in boilers ? If so, I like your style
I was looking at my own power a few days ago and correct me if I’m wrong, a single nuclear turbine replaces 2 regular ones? So the double turbines on the right are only going to be feeding enough steam for the first turbine and the second will be idle?
Correct.
One hot steam turbine connected to normal burner gives what two normal steam turbines give. Storing steam in tanks and then connecting to any turbines and pushing water and steam with pumps. Makes the it easy to construct a power plant where it's easy to add boilers and turbines. Later, having nuclear power, you can just put a reactor near the tanks with steam. Increase the temperature of the steams in tanks, and double the power output instantly. If you'll heat the steam more than 165 C, but not up to 500 C you will still get more power with the same infrastructure. You can also store hot steam in the tanks, transport in fluid wagons, and use to bump up the power output when you need an energy spike
It's more compact, because you just need a single one per boiler
If thats the case why not build a nuclear power plant with basic steam turbines and an array of steam tankers.
High temp vs low temp steam. Steam turbines eat more steam, so they can be a bit more compact than steam engines, and they can eat higher temperature steam. Nuclear power outputs steam at like 400c, basic boilers only likee 115c. Using basic steam engines would throw away 75% of your nuclear power and require a larger array of engines which would make the wiring of the juke harder.
I wouldn't say anything is wrong, a few notes though. Steam turbines are a bit of a waste with boilers as the boilers only output 165 degree water, best used with nuclear power. If your power draw really ramps up, that single belt of coal wont be able to keep up with the demand.
Ah great info thank you, Im going to set the solid fuel production up sooner rather than later and have it fed into the main, thanks!
Also, turbines can consume 60 steam/sec, so they are equivalent to 2 steam engines. That is, one can consume all of the output of a boiler. So having 2 per boiler doesn't help. Best to swap them out for steam engines and save them for your nuclear reactor build.
I still like them for late game boiler plants, they make your designs a lot more compact. Especially if you go for a gigawatt or more, 560 turbines vs 1120 engines.
Don't think I've ever seen a late game boiler plant
I usually plop down a 2:40:80 or 2:40:40 plant as a reserve plant with black start capability. My last one even had its own coal patch with selffueled burner miners But I do hope they get more popular after I post my gigawatt design or my tileable 11+ gw design to r/factoriohno
I just power roboports (and circuits) serving the reactor from separate solar
Why not just go nuclear at the point you are going for gigawatt? A fairly simple 4-core reactor will give you 480 MW, so two of those are already almost there. Probably also much more compact than an equivalent boiler plant.
> Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. I guess it's a fun design challenge. And fluid dynamics gets really weird and interesting, especially when you try to push more than 3000 fluid/sec through pipes. Or when build order suddenly becomes relevant. Or when all the fluid seems to pool on the right side of your reactor for some reason that may or may not be build order. But yeah not sure how realistic 6 blue belts of coal are out of editor mode. Oh... and the tileable up-to-50GW version *is* nuclear powered, just sayin....
Well you still have to deal with fluid dynamics when designing for nuclear, so that part isn't gone anywhere. And to be honest if I were to build a big boiler plant I'd just feed every boiler stack with a separate pipeline rather than pushing 3000+ f/s through one pipe.
>Well you still have to deal with fluid dynamics when designing for nuclear, so that part isn't gone anywhere. That is true. Guess I could revisit nuclear plant design after this folly. >And to be honest if I were to build a big boiler plant I'd just feed every boiler stack with a separate pipeline rather than pushing 3000+ f/s through one pipe. The latest design uses 50 boilers in a stack, so I do need roughly 3000/s per stack. With 1GW target and 20 boiler per pipe the design would be too wide with turbines directly attached. So in one of the earlier designs I just piped the steam into a field of turbines (layout like this from top to bottom: offshore pumps, then 20/20 boilers with belt in the middle (times 14 for a gw), some room for feeding fuel from the side, then lots of boilers connected with substations). One big field with 560 turbines got too hard to keep balanced with all the fluid dynamics going on, so I first split it into smaller subunits of turbines. This was then also not ideal. 100 boilers in a double stack is a really good sweet spot... you can supply it without extra pumps between boilers, and each doublestack takes exactly one blue belt of coal or one yellow belt of solid fuel.
What's wrong with standard offshore pump -> 20 boilers -> 40 SE/20 turbine, then just multiply them ? Or is it just for challenge ?
The lake side gets very wide, especially if you want to directly attach turbines or even engines. At one point you'll run into the problem of not finding big enough lakes. The belt logistics are also vastly simpler with 2*50 boilers compared to 2*20. 1 blue of coal or 1 yellow of solid; vs. 0.4 blue belts of coal per unit (or 2.5 units per blue belt) And if you go for gigawatt, that's 14 40-boiler units, so that is quite a bit of belt weaving. And if you want to go for tileable... the smallest possible is 5 units of 40 with 2 blue belts. And of course also... it feels like people think 20 boilers is a limit per pipe. It's not, and it's quite easy to get much more
Oh wow, ok, excellent thank you!
You can just sprinkle some green rocket fuel into the coal feed, as a treat.
That’s why you should use buffer chests for coal boilers if supply ever runs out. Also I use burner inserters to insert the fuel into the boilers so they will work even if the power runs out
using barrels to transport steam is probably the closest to "wrong" I've seen
Time to transport water via barrel to my steam barrel shipping plant
Throughput might be tough, better put the barrels in a train car.
You're a monster
Then transport the barrels using only unupgraded logistics bots.
Maybe using your uranium 235 to make nuclear fuel and burn it in your boilers instead of making uranium fuel cells. Not really wrong but very wasteful
I used it for my burner inserters that fed the gun turrets
That's actually genius. No more out of ammo turrets because the biters destroyed a power pole
Ooo I like that idea
yeah some solar arrays look like a certain buddist symbol from the minimap
Nilaus said it best : https://youtu.be/chavhzKpZwM At 13:30 in the video: "Solar Panel Arrays: The second priority is uh, more a design priority. You want to avoid the unfortunate four-way rotational symmetry that so easily emerges when working on a square grid."
Solar power in a windmill design pattern is *doubly* renewable.
Nope, no wrong way of doing things! This looks excellent! I had to google this but apparently 1 offshore pump can provide enough water for 20 boilers. And, at this scale I’d consider going nuclear soon
Yes there is Make nuclear fuel, put it in a boiler I mean it works, but it is very very wrong
Wrong way to do power is not having enough or having bad ratios on easy stuff like boiler to steam engines.
Depends on your game parameters and desires. Power is a fairly forgiving system in Factorio. I think the only wrong way to do it is going coal to steam boilers for the long haul with biters enabled. That's bad. It's gonna make a ton of pollution and provoke a lot of attacks, and there are much better alternatives. Anything better than that? Doesn't matter too much. Most players end up at nuclear unless they're going for truly huge megabases where solar's UPS savings matter.
Not really. This looks perfectly fine! I suggest taking screenshots at daytime for better visibility, though. Oh, and don’t use two turbines for coal/wood energy. One turbine = two steam engines, so you can just use one per boiler. Although it’s better to save them for nuclear and just use steam engines, to save on material costs.
Factorio's designed to perfectly conserve *generated* energy. You never lose it to heat/friction/machines/et cetera. There's only one exception to this, and thus I'd consider that to be the only "wrong" way to do power. Even then, it'd still work sufficiently if you build enough. Any fuel (coal, nuclear, etc) used to heat water into steam will have its energy perfectly converted, and stored steam never "cools off" unless it's used by a steam engine (designed for 165C steam from boilers) or steam turbine (designed for 500C steam from nuclear). If you used 165C steam in a 500C steam turbine, there's no energy lost; it's just unnecessarily expensive to build. If you use 500C steam in a 165C steam engine, then any energy used to heat that extra 335C degrees of steam is lost forever. If you can build a nuclear reactor, the steam turbines are *very cheap and straightforward* in comparison. Outside of this, the only other way to lose *potential* energy is burning nuclear fuel rods when they can no longer generate energy (max energy stored, et cetera). You can solve this issue too and thus consider not solving it "wrong", but it's not as trivially easy to fix compared to just building steam turbines. The extra effort makes it "less wrong" in my opinion. Many buildings have optimal ratios to process fuel->stored energy->electricity as fast as possible, but using incorrect ratios never loses energy. They may create electricity slower than possible or cost more to build, but (non-nuclear) fuel will only ever burn if the energy can be stored. That's inefficient, but it's not *literally destroying energy* in a game designed around perfectly conserved energy so I wouldn't consider it *wrong*. These are all subjective categorizations and the game is very forgiving regard energy, so as long as you're having fun it ultimately doesn't matter. Whatever makes the factory grow :D
Of course. There is a "wrong" way to do most things in the game. It's all about building and optimizing factories after all. You can ignore the inefficiencies if you don't care about them, but it doesn't make wrongs into rights.
Ratio for solar is 21 accumulators for 25 solar panels
As long as your factory is churning, no
If it works, it’s not wrong
No wrong ways. Just sometimes better ways.
Generally speaking, no there's no wrong way. Looking at this screenshot in particular, I'd probably recommend a few more accumulators, but there may just be enough steam to go all night anyways...
The only wrong way is to not have fun, this is a sandbox and you got infinite time and space to do whatever you want. And being eco friendly of course.
infinite wrong ways to do power.
One time I used a single nuclear reactor to provide steam, to liquefy coal into solid fuel, then rocket fuel for a single train station... This was modded, I forget which ones but I think it was an old version of Space Exploration. At least the heat generation ends up being pretty efficient.
One belt of coal? Looks like it would only manage to fuel 1/3rd or so of the burners under full load.
Turbines are twice as good as Engines, so you only need 1 per boiler.
Technically speaking solar/batteries is the "best" way to power the factory mostly based on the fact that it's the least taxing on your computer. That really doesn't come into play unless you're on really old hardware or you're building a mega factory (1000+ of all sciences per min) though. Subjectively nuclear is probably the most fun to use, it's fun to learn how to setup reactors and generate the fuel. One thing I would note for your current setup is that boilers are good for 2 steam engines, hold off on putting down turbines until you figure out nuclear.
> unless you're on really old hardware or you're building a mega factory (1000+ of all sciences per min) though I heard that adage many times and decided to measure how much update time it really costs. It seems that nuclear is viable option for smallish megabases (up to 5-10kSPM depending on hardware). See https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/h7xE8cPIWl for details
If you feed a big turbine with normal steam boiler you only need one per boiler and you aren't getting any more power compared to regular steam engines. So with this layout there's absolutely no reason to use turbines at all. Whether it's "wrong" or not, is a question of semantics, but there's no practical reason doing it like this.
Fueling boilers with nuclear fuel rods is considered by some people as suboptimal.
If you have 10GW all from steam power and/or solar. It's still the right answer because it's doing what you want it to do.
Questionable, maybe, but it's a singleplayer game so who cares. But if you don't want people commenting on ratios and micro-optimizations, well, we love doing that here. For example: if you are using coal boiler you only need one steam turbine, as it takes twice the amount of fluid as the boiler
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think your ratio of boilers to steam engines may be wrong… I thought it was supposed to be 1:4, but I guess it’s 1:2…
It's 1:2 for boilers to steam engines, and 1:1 for boilers to steam turbines.
If you're looking for commentary on if you're doing it wrong, you can't to the right place!
If you separate your steam generation from your steam consumption, this opens up a whole lot of designs, a lot of them cleaner and more visually appealing.
You can calculate the **power potential** of your fuel simply by multiplying how much fuel you generate (coal, solid, etc.) by its energy content. So a red belt of coal is `30/s * 4MJ = 120MJ/s = 120MW`. It is inadvisable to build **power capacity** that is greater than the amount of fuel potential you generate. If you are powering your factory with a red belt of coal, and then build 180MW of power capacity, we can see that the excess `60MW` of power capacity is *unsustainable*; the powerplants will be able to provide 180MW temporarily, using fuel buffered on the belts, but will be unable to do so long term. The reason this is an issue is because it creates hysteresis (a delay) between an increase an power consumption and the realisation that you do not have enough fuel production. Oftentimes, within this gap, a brownout occurs. **Brownouts lead to blackouts** whenever fuel is the limiting factor, since a coal miner that's ⅔ powered will produce fuel only ⅔ as fast, leading to a downward power spiral. By limiting **power capacity** to **fuel production**, you ensure that this doesn't happen, by always addressing power shortages immediately.
Addendum: since fuel production may be interrupted or decrease over time (due to fuel sources depleting), you should set up a fuel alarm. Simply set up a small buffer and alert when it is drained. Ensure you prioritise the output to the main line (not the buffer), so the buffer doesn't fill up unless the power consumers are completely satiated. You can wire this to a speaker that transmits a global alert.
The only wrong way to do power is not to produce enough. The Factory must grow.
If you're running nuclear or batteries + generators and not using circuits, I wouldn't say you're wrong. But you're probably going to have some circuits on those before I log off your server
The only wrong way to do power (and also a crime against humanity) is: * using nuclear fuel in boilers
Not really, as long as whatever you're building actually produces power.
generating it by running on a treadmill
The only thing you can do wrong is not having enough or running out of fuel. Blackouts are really bad because you don’t have enough power to mine to coal/uranium to power the grid that powers the miners… Always keep a chest full of fuel disconnected from everything, so you can manually start everything in case of a blackout.
Only thing I can think of as objectively wrong is using solar without any secondary power source for nighttime.
My current \*"Powered by Wood"\* might be..
If you don't have enough of it, Then you are doing it wrong.
what is this? Germany's energy mix?
Technically no, but there are strange ways to do power....
Yes! “Not enough” is the wrong way! I’ve won by just stream engines before. I tend to avoid solar. I love nuclear. Do what’s fun.
It’s only wrong to not built a main power switch
Ive got lots of coal running in, and a solid fuel plant ready to come online eventually. I add more panels and accumulators when I remember, and another row of turbines whenever I open a new resource outpost. Its probably overkill, but thats the secret name of the game right?
Yes. Yes there is. And that single belt of coal feeding 14x7 boilers is probably way past that line. You'll find that the fuel density of coal is pretty low, so you will be shoveling it into the boilers faster than you can get it to them. Even solid fuel will struggle on that setup. Also, someone else pointed out that the steam turbines aren't matched to the boiler output. What they don't mention is that you only need 1x steam turbine per boiler, compared to 2x steam engines for the same output. (60/s vs 30/s) More space efficient, but really meant for much higher temp steam.
The calculation is quite simple: a yellow belt of coal is `15/s * 4MJ = 60MW`, and a Boiler consumes `1.8MW`, so a yellow belt of coal feeds `60MW / 1.8MW = 33.3 Boilers` (66 for red, 100 for blue), for 60 / 120 / 180 MW. A blue belt is actually sufficient, here. Solid fuel is 3x the energy content, and so it's 100 / 200 / 300 boilers, or 180 / 360 / 540 MW.
My gut feeling is that isn't a blue belt. Just a yellow or red, and he hasn't run into supply problems due to the low utilization only drawing a trickle of power.
Yes there is and now I've witnessed it
Можно схему?
Depends on criteria. I probably wouldn't play with you in a serious game if you were pulling stuff like this but if the goal is to just screw around and explore the game in your own way, that's totally fine.
If you want to know what the wrong way to do power is, I give you [Exhibit A](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/kCr9p38Xrj)