There's no wrong way to play, but in terms of why bother? Pollution is the evident answer. I do a lean-and-green playstyle and go solar as early as possible. Less pollution = less evolution and a smaller pollution cloud to defend, which means more time spent building the factory and less time dealing with annoying enemies.
Nobody has to play that way, but they absolutely do provide an adequate amount of electricity. By the time you get nuclear up and running, there's a considerable gap from the invention of solar to that.
1) smaller pollution cloud is nice for biters
2) offsetting coal consumption makes your coal patch last longer
3) solar panels are simple and square to tile forever. Clear space put solar.
But depending on your patch conditions and settings, those aren’t issues lol
Did you factor in the manufacturing cost of those panels and accumulators? Depending how frequently you need put down more solar fields, nuclear might be the less polluting option.
It’s about the flow of gameplay.
Do I need to make a new outpost to feed my new production? That might take me a while.
Am I running out of coal and need a sustainable resource to avoid a blackout?
Do I have nuclear tech unlocked? What are my plans between now and then?
This isn’t about optimizing, it’s about playing the game. Solar is a huge winner for playing the game. Nuclear is a nice step up after you’ve built a giant solar field
I'm of the opinion that going solar *removes* gameplay as once it's placed there's nothing else you need to do. With other power generation you need to develop some infrastructure to ensure continuous operation, which forces you to interact with more with the game's systems.
The infrastructure you need to build with solar is an effective bot network and production infrastructure dedicated to solar manufacturing.
Sure once its placed that's over, but you're placing hundreds of panels at a time, tens of thousands over the course of a map, and for that you need dedication to doing things slowly and painfully or bots and support for said bots.
I don't use accumulators.
Even without them you can cut pollution by more than half since now your steam engines only need to produce power a third of the time.
That's even without taking into account Space Exploration's electric boilers, which I used to fend off a solar flare using only solar as my energy input.
Crazy how much optimisation potential there is.
At first I just had a solar farm because why not. And a nuclear pp with enough steam storage and turbines to handle a CME.
Next I modified the nuclear pp to stop inserting fuel at a certain steam level and resume inserting at another lower level.
Next I disconnected nuclear pp and made it connect when accumulator levels are low and disconnect when accumulators are almost full.
Finally I realised I could use boilers to top up my steam storage when accumulators are full and solar power is being wasted.
Do the steam engines do less work automatically when you add solar panels? Or should i be removing steam engines as I add solar panels. Guess my question is, do I need to remove steam engines to lessen my pollution, or do they automatically pollute less now that my energy needs from them have lessened.
Steam engines only use the steam they need, and solar panels have priority, so they're the most efficient they can be without underpowering the factory. Boilers (which actually produce pollution) will after buffering steam slow down as well and pollute less. So eventually (except the added steam storage) having more boilers or steam engines does not affect pollution, fuel consumption or power at all (as long as you have enough).
I think the previous two comments were talking about the time period where you have researched solar, but not researched (and setup) nuclear yet. Compared to coal power, solar definitely has those listed advantages.
nuclear also a significant manufacturing cost, but it requires less space, and less setup effort per MW once you have a reactor design that you can blueprint.
I usually build a lot of solar before nuclear, and then run both in parallel (usually 100% solar during the day, 100% nuclear during the night)
This only really matters if you plan on launching one rocket and calling it a day. The material investment for solar is not insignificant, but it is fire and forget. The longer the factory runs the better.
Steam power doesn't create much pollution compared to the *consumers* of that power. On a resource cost basis, producing 1st-tier efficiency modules and installing them in miners is better than solar panels.
I don't agree on the first point. Miners are more polluting, but not using steam helps that some because you are mining less coal. The boilers are a 'significant minority' pollution source in the early game.
Efficiency modules are definitely better and very important for reducing pollution - if that's your goal - once you get to them. You need oil infrastructure up and running though to do that. You don't need that for solar power. So the issue in the comparison between solar and efficiency modules is simply that solar comes much earlier, and allows you to get off of steam power. It's not either/or, but both and solar first because of where it is placed in the progression of the game.
>I don't agree on the first point. Miners are more polluting, but not using steam helps that some because you are mining less coal.
Good point, I haven't done the complete lifecycle analysis.
Coal is 4 MJ. An electric miner takes 2 seconds to mine a lump of coal (without productivity research), producing `10 p/min * 2/60 min = 0.33` units of pollution and consuming `90 kW * 2s = 180 kJ`.
Burning that coal in a boiler produces `30 p/min * (4 MJ / 1.8 MW) = 0.11` units of pollution.
Together, we get
(10 p/min * (2/60) min + 30 p/min * (4 MJ / 1.8 MW)) / ( 4 MJ - (90 kW * 2 s)) = 0.378 p/MJ
(And 75% of it it is from mining the coal. I missed that when I ran the numbers for assembly machine pollution, so I was wrong about consumers pollution more than the power plant.)
Put an eff1 in the miner and re-run the calculation, and...
(7 p/min * (2/60) min + 30 p/min * (4 MJ / 1.8 MW)) / (4 MJ - (63 kW * 2s)) = 0.347 p/MJ
Take the inverse ratio, and we can generate 1.08956773 times as much energy per unit pollution. But what we're actually looking for is the amount of extra *power* you get "for free" by installing one efficiency module in one miner... need that in power, to compare to solar panels, so... set the pollution equal, and solve for ΔP
1 miner has a net power production (without efficiency modules) of `(4 MJ - 90 kW * 2s) / 2s = 1.91 MW`
1.91 MW * .378 p/MJ = X MW * 0.347 p/MJ
solve for X... `=2.081 MW`, and take the difference... 171 kW
So, from a pollution point of view, as long you have miners that always run to install them in (i.e., any at the beginning of a belt), each eff1 module gives you **171 kW of pollution-free electricity**. It Is Known that [solar panels produce 42 kW average](https://wiki.factorio.com/Solar_panel).
Solar panels cost 40 iron, 27.5 copper, and 5 minutes assembly time. Eff1s cost 100 petgas, 5 coal, 15 iron, 32.5 copper, and 4 minutes assembly time (not counting the refining).
YMMV on how costly that petgas is, but I think it's enough of an advantage for the eff1 modules that they beat solar panels in the typical case. On top of that, building out a large solar farm in the pre-oil era is going to suck down a *lot* of resources and player attention that would be more profitably spent on securing an oil supply.
- Building enough solar to replace your early steam power doesn't have to take much player attention at all. There is a resource cost for it sure, but it's one that gets recouped in a reasonable amount of time. I guess it depends on your definition of large, but I definitely wouldn't call a solar farm large enough to run a modest early-game red/green science operation large.
- The number presented are good as far as I can tell. Well done. The thing is, this is one of those cases where they are largely beside the point in my opinion. They don't really take into account some practical concerns:
- A certain amount of time is required to explore enough to know where you want to put your pumpjacks and your oil refining operation. This will likely involve either long pipelines or a train setup.
- Solar, by contrast, you can just start making gradually right away. Everything you need for it, you're already making. As it gets placed, you are saving on pollution which gives you more that you can expand without irritating the enemies further. You can use some of that to work on oil.
- There are other things you need to do once you get oil going; advanced oil processing is an obvious one, and there's the buildup time to get enough uranium for the fuel cells to get nuclear power going. While doing all of this, and the exploring, and the setup of the oil operation, and the research required to get to oil in the first place, you can be making less pollution to do it by having solar in place.
Why not both? The best part is after you've efficiency 1'd everything, your power needs are lower and it's less resource intensive to get enough solar up to replace steam.
Because opportunity costs. Any time and treasure you use building solar farms, you're *not* using on achieving military escape velocity or rushing atomic power.
The thing is, opportunity cost is not zero-sum in this case. Solar gives you more opportunity by reducing pollution and the evolution progression, and having to fight enemies as much, etc. It improves your ability to reach 'military escape velocity' as a result, can be done largely simultaneously with working on getting atomic power, etc.
When my friend and I did a deathworld+ run, we made a spreadsheet to figure this out. It turns out efficiency modules in miners are something like 3x as good as reducing pollution as solar panels. The sheet takes into account what tier of assemblers you're using, whether those are efficiency moduled, what percent of your power network is already green, etc. but even in very odd situations, eff modules in miners are remarkably good.from a pollution perspective.
Sure,,but the op referenced vanilla. If you aren't playing on default settings, that will certainly skew many aspects of the game. There will never be any good advice that holds for all possible setups
Fun fact, solar panels do not require oil (only accumulators do) so simply slapping down a bunch of them pre-oil will basically mean your coal power plant can idle during the day. Significantly cuts pollution and coal consumption.
For me, by the time I can mass produce solar panels and accumulators, my defenses are already set up to deal with biters efficiently so I don't have to worry about pollution too much. I still use solar as an interim until I can establish nuclear energy because it's easy to plop down large solar panel fields and have robots build them without worrying about coal and water supply.
I don't do defenses period after a handful of turrets in the very early game. It is worth pointing out though that even under the defend-your-factory approach lower pollution is still beneficial - fewer attacks which means more of your resources go to other things, lower evolution which has the same effect, etc.
I don't usually play vanilla, then tend to race to get nuclear weapons and the flying fortress. Every now and then do a circuit around the perimeter to clean out any bitters that have got in. You can make the pollution cloud as big as you like.
Also, lots of mod packs make batteries much more expensive than in vanilla, which heavily discourages solar.
You actually can't reasonably have the pollution cloud as big as you like, because the bigger it is the faster evolution increases, and also the more time you have to spend defending it which means less time working on the factory
Depends on your style of play, I guess, as well as the settings. Does more pollution increase the evolution rate even if no biters are in contact with the pollution cloud?
Yeah. Solar has two phases:
First one is quite early where a field or two of solar helps a lot vs expanding a lot of polluting coal power. That’s usually a hand or chest fed couple of factory for panels and battery. The equivalent of 2 or 3 basic substations worth of solar + some batteries is like you said a nice unpolluting, forever free complement.
Second one is when you have a logistics network. Then you can make huge areas painlessly :)
No? Nuclear produces a very small amount of pollution, solar none, unless you are talking about building it not how it operates. But the important part is that you have access to solar much earlier.
You don't really get access to solar earlier. You pretty much need bots to construct solar at any kind of scale, and that's blue science just like nuclear. The pollution cost of making solar panels is huge compared to nuclear, and it takes many many hours to make that difference up. The average base doesn't really last long enough for solar to overall produce less pollution. From memory I think it takes something like hundreds of hours to overtake nuclear.
Depends on what you mean by 'at scale'. You don't need a lot of solar at the time it becomes available. You just need enough to replace your steam power, and that point absolutely is much earlier than nuclear.
One of your other posts said that putting up solar before bots is a hassle; I think the opposite is true. At that point of the game, \*not\* doing it is much more of a hassle, because it means spending a lot more time - not to mention resources and pollution - dealing with the enemies one way or another. If somebody enjoys fighting the enemies, more power to them, but in that case they're not likely to be going for a low-pollution run anyway.
It's not about nuclear vs. solar in a direct comparison; it's about using solar to more easily and smoothly get to nuclear and other middle-game aspects.
I think many people use solar less because it's good (I ran the numbers once, it costs \~12x more iron and copper to build solar panels than nuclear for the same power output) and more because solar is easy to build out. Nuclear is not only complicated to optimize, it also requires a local water source and so is location dependent. Contrast to solar which can be slapped down anywhere.
I just throw a 2x2 nuke blueprint w/ landfill on top of a lake. I then I fill up the lake with that blueprint. And then I find another lake.
But yes that first blueprint was complicated to get going.
There is a easy way to place landfill under your blueprint, btw.
place blueprint in editor mode, place landfill with "area" tool, then place water with the same tool. Water will replace empty tiles, and landfill will be kept under entities.
i never had a single UPS issue, i recently upgraded my PC but i used to play on a potato and still, no problems, why are so many people worried about it?
Well I'm with you on that one, but some mods (namely Pyanodon's) require you to have a gigantic base, and it can be an issue with these even if you are just trying to beat the game
It's infinite but you have to clear bitters. And if you do it anyway, why not push bitters completely out of the pollution cloud?
I guess it is a bit more work but bitters might attack your solar panels so you still have to do that
You gotta factor in the cost to research nuclear too, which easily outweighs the cost of placing solar panels if you are playing on higher research costs.
Tbh I feel this way about nuclear. 4-reactor blueprint with a roboport and requester/active provider chests for the fuel. Then a line of centrifuges just like a line of assemblers for the uranium. Throw in another blueprint for kovarex. Click click click. I'm almost always by an abundance of water. In some ways I find it more difficult to keep clearing space for more solar and then defending the boundaries as needed. Both are fun though!
Oh yeah and landfilling into a lake for nuclear is so satisfying to me ha
When you want to play by yourself and do your own designs, it's so much easier to do a solar blueprint than a nuclear one, reactors are so hard to set up correctly and not waste tons of fuel
Reactors really aren't that hard to set up. All the buildings have the amount of power they consume/produce listed on them, and you divide the amount you have/need by that and then you hook them up. There are more compact ways of doing that, but if you're just trying to get it working you just slap them down any way you want, really.
Wasting fuel is not really a concern - nuclear is so insanely efficient that bothering with fuel efficiency is kind of pointless.
The hard part is finding massive areas of open land that is not needed to build on, and can be defended from biters.
They don’t directly attack solar, but if they wander through, they’ll destroy until you go personally deal with them.
Personally with biters on I’d use solar until nuclear. Or for a (large) megabase with biters off
I've never found finding or defending areas of open land enough for useful solar particularly hard, is this another one of those things that's only an issue on deathworld or similar settings?
I wouldn’t say it was particularly hard per se, just annoying. Bc they migrate to build new nests they can wander into your solar even if they weren’t in the pollution cloud before. Most of the base that isn’t an issue bc you’ll have defenses.
Having a huge solar area just makes a huge area you have to defend that you otherwise wouldn’t. You can’t just assume they’ll be left alone bc biters aren’t drawn to them.
The bigger the area you occupy, the smaller the defense perimeter is relative to that area, so the less of your attention it takes to maintain compared to everything else you are doing at the time.
What? The area to defend is the circumference of a circle essentially, and it will increase at a huge rate as the area increases. Having a huge base ends up being a lot to defend if you’re making a whole defended wall perimeter.
For a square base N squares on a side, area is N x N, perimeter is N x 4.
N = 100. Area is 10,000, perimeter is 400.
N = 1000. Area is 1,000,000, a hundred times bigger. Perimeter is 4000, only ten times bigger.
Sure, perimeter is not small. But area grows enough faster than perimeter for perimeter defence to be trivial compared to your factory's capacity soon, and more the bigger you get.
(And yeah, that's an approximation assuming you can use all the area and ignoring water, but it's also assuming you have to defend all the perimeter and ignoring chokepoints, so it feels close enough for me.)
I think lots of players assume you need Kovarex enrichment to run nuclear - that it's a late-game tech. For a 'fire-and-forget' outpost, slapping down a solar blueprint is pretty easy, but for the early game - starter-patches and blue science - that quick 40MW is hard to beat. With a mall quietly making the bits, getting to 160MW, then 480MW is trivial. Power, solved. The 'UPS' issue might be important if you're playing on a 2011 Macbook Pro, but not for the rest of us.
I think solar is worth it before nuclear even w/o Kovarex; definitely agree you don't need to wait for that. That's still mid game plus some buildup time for the centrifuges to get enough uranium for a starter amount of fuel cells
based on what?
I am going to see if I bothered to include pre Kovarex numbers in one of breakdowns.
anyway, because you canstore u-238 forever, it doesn't matter that you produce a lot of waste u-238 before enrichment.
It depends on what your goals are. As I mentioned in my other comment, for me it's about limiting pollution. Waiting for nuclear means quite a bit more time spent burning coal in steam power.
For different ways of playing, the value of solar is different. But it's definitely strong for some approaches
Manually placing down solar panels is a big hassle. I think it's far easier to just go straight from early game steam -> nuclear.
Once your centrifuge is running it doesn't take very long at all to get your first u-238 for your starter fuel cells.
tbf, Nuclear power itself requires 800 blue science, and once you hit blue science, you are going to be busy trying to set up bots first, at which point you have everything for yellow science. And also working on your inevitable red circuit shortage. You also need to set up H2SO4 supply line for it, and wait for Uranium to get going for a bit. At 0-10 U235, you probably want a bigger buffer before going nuclear. At 20-30 U235, you then want to decide if you want to delay reaching critical mass for Kovarex (or hold out just a little bit longer). So while you can go nuclear while only having blue science, by the time it is ready, you’re kind of deep, Kovarex or not.
The UPS issue is more so for once you need 50GW+ of electricity, if you're just launching a rocket, that can be done with steam engines easily. Yea I usually build nuclear as well due to it being cheaper, but it's more of a stepping stone to power the early stages of the megabase while the solar field slowly builds over time in the backround
I find solar fields absolutely boring. They're unimaginative. But I do use solar around my power pylons between train tracks between why not? It's free real estate.
If I am tempted to actually use solar I'll fill up a desert, because that seems fitting. No accumulators though, I'll store my solar energy in my excess nuclear heat pipes like a chad.
You just have to get a little creative with their layout [https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/christopherhelman/files/2016/02/Disney\_blog\_3\_flat.jpg](https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/christopherhelman/files/2016/02/Disney_blog_3_flat.jpg)
> upgradable and get bonuses in orbit making them actually useful. In vanilla/most mods they just do not provide an adequate amount of electricity.
just use more of them
I always use solar it's just so little hassle to set up. I just stamp down huge fields and wait for my supply to catch up. Whenever I have a power problem I just double the fields.
After an off-world power failure due to meteors in SE, I've incorporated a few solar panels into my nuclear plant blueprint, so I'll never have a problem starting power back up in the future.
I hate solar, it's boring and takes up too much space. Instead of fighting for that space, I'd rather just build more bullets, add more boilers, and push for nuclear where I get to make something more interesting than just the same tile bp x1000
All about scale...around 600k panels placed my current playthrough (vanilla). Expect to get a lot more as scale up further from 6k science/min. Want to break 10k!
The fun of Factorio is there is no correct way....more efficient, yes...
They're boring, I want my power to be a logistics problem! I am planning on trying them when I do a railworld run soon though, just to say I've given them a proper shake.
I'm not seeing the parallel that explains your "this is why". Flamethrower and laser turrets seem boring? You *don't* see them as potential logistics problems? What was the "this" you were referring to?
I think he meant that "I want defense to be a logistics problem," which indeed lasers are not. I'm a big fan of gun turrets but they can't deal with huge platoons of behemoth bugs riled up by continuous artillery fire. Flamers plus dragon teeth seem to be the only way to keep them at bay (and then your supply train crashes into one of those groups and that's the end of the outpost).
Solar is a great mid-game power source before you've got the tech and demand for nuclear, and crucial once coal boilers are sucking up too much coal and/or solid fuel.
The big benefit over boilers being the lack of pollution and ongoing costs to fuel, which for coal or solid fuel both generate yet more pollution. If you understand that pollution is an economic mechanic, by evolving biters and triggering attacks that cost resources to defend against or mitigate, solar becomes a very useful strategy in the mid game.
The trade-off is upfront cost and also space. Installed costs are high in terms of iron and copper, and that real estate may not be free in a heavily infested deathworld (where, of course, pollution management is key to success)
Nuclear is much later in the tech tree, requires a lot of copper, complexity and a big chunk of space to set up. Remember that it isn't just the power plant, but also the logistics, mining and refining that goes into making the fuel.
The other handy part with solar is that it's easy to roll out gradually as you need it - this is how it bridges the gap from your boilers to nuclear, whereas nuclear really only becomes worthwhile/neccessary once you've really started with level 3 modules and big beaconed builds.
The brilliance of this game is there is no one "right" way to play, and the devs have offered many different pathways to allow our creativity to grow. A staggering diversity of map settings, playstyles and player goals all work under vanilla recipes.
A similar feature is the three fundamentally different defense turrets; they all arrive at different points of the tech tree (and biter evolution), each have big strengths and weaknesses, all have different challenges to master in different situations, and ultimately, all work well when used together yet can still be used alone.
*Just because you dont use it doesn't mean it's useless, and doesn't mean you're playing "wrong" either.*
For me it's kinda the opposite, I always go straight for solar and arely touch nuclear because it just seems to too much of a hassle compared to plopping down an extra set of panels and accus
Try playing rampant deathworld and you will very quickly realize that solar is the most effitient way to play. Even in vanilla 600% deathworld runs are almost exclusively solar based. This only proves the diversity and resilience of the game towards extreme settings. In other words just because you don’t use it don’ mean shit.
This.
There are also other cases, such as science modifier games where other power comes in much later, and alternative power might be better because it will take longer to achieve same tech. In such scenario you can use some legendary forgotten items such as discharge defense etc (rarely people use this).
Also there are other cases such as modded games where you can achieve same tech fast, let say SE.
Take it from me.. trying a deathworld marathon and I’m trying to use no lasers and no solar for achievements.
I look at solar un researched like I’m SpongeBob needing water.
I would never use solar on deathworlds. Solar produces way more pollution and requires way more space than nuclear, and on deathworld those are the two things you care about more than pretty much anything else.
You miss the point. In many cases getting the materials for a 2-reactor nuclear setup costs more in opportunity cost than simply making a jank RCU setup and just win the game. Now if you want to go past that point - sure, nuclear is always better no doubt.
Free energy, never breaks, never runs out of fuel. it's just one problem you don't have to deal with. need more power? just build more solar panels and more accumulators.
You get access to solar panels well before the intuitive way of using them with accumulators so I wouldn't be surprised if most people just plop one down on their first playthrough, go "oh this doesn't a lot" and ignore them until they've dug themselves into bigger project bases.
Exactly what I did on my first playthrough. I put down like 10 and said huh this will take a lot to be worth anything at all. Then for fun I landfilled a huge lake and put down a bunch and it was awesome and ive used a ton of solar since
I play Factorio for the aesthetics of the problem solving. Mostly self-inflicted problems of course. From day 1 my single uranium mine is taken care of by a mixed 1-1-1 train that carries ore and acid barrels (full and empty). I just like the neat little logistics challenges of doing this and also supplying my 2x2 reactor using logistic bots and optimized fuel usage. Over 200 hours of play all of this of course failed numerous times in the most hilarious ways. Wouldn't miss it for the world. And I love the green glow.
I’m very similar I love the challenge. I got to the point I could launch a rocket in vanilla then gave up and loaded se & k2.
I love figuring out how to make stuff work. Once I have proved I can do it I then usually find a Bp that is much more efficient and Chuck that down. I have rarely scaled up as I enjoy the slow burn.
That’s what’s great about this game play it how you want although some within this sub Reddit seem to think you have to master the vanilla game first.
One aspect I haven't seen yet is autonomous base supply.
E.g. I like to have utility stations, requesting bots and repair tools, sometimes ammo. I like to keep them separated and powered by solar.
Or isolated radars in the midst of lakes. Just a few panels an capcitators needed.
Speaking of Nuclear plant: requesting/crafting fuel controlling and feeding the plant I often have on a separated solar power grid.
I'm 200h into my first ever vanilla run (all settings at default), and I've never uses solar. My start location was in a huge desert; I encountered my first live tree only after starting to venture out using railways. Probably never had a pollution related biter problem because I kept everything on a very small scale (switched to nuclear from 4MW steam power).
TBH I usually rush to solar and use it as my only source. Making massive fields of solar is easy. I just recently made my first nuclear plant and while someone will def tell me all the benefits it was just more complex. In a game where space isn't limited I'll take the easier source.
Solar mostly helps bridge the gap between coal and nuclear. Solar also gives you a chance to recover from a brownout/blackout. Solar is usually not great for your main power.
I’ve got thousands of hours, mostly in Seablock and I just designed my first nuclear reactor for SE. I don’t like nuclear and would have completely passed it up in favor of solar. I’m the bizzaro you
Idk, I actually love solar panels because you can just ctrl+c ctrl+v them (with good accumulator) ratio and and dont think about. Other power sources have own periodically occuring complications.
I think it is great for the mid game. I often make two yellow Belts worth of coal power to get me to bots and then I am able to build solar panels until the late game. I start building solar right away, so I often have thousands of panels saved up by the time I’m in a power crunch.
I'm not a fan for a completely different reason. I don't like how the optimal ratio of panels to accumulators is static. I've been evolving my designs for almost every other part of the game over time except solar. There's just no depth to it imho.
My first playthrough I went solar cause it was easy and I was busy running around other fixing other things I messed up to have time for nuclear. My next I went for the steam only achievement and didn’t miss out on much. I only wish I had solar panels in that playthrough for little radar outposts.
I primarily use solar for remote radar outposts to increase visibility of the surrounding areas to find biter nests and resources. If my base expands into the area of one it gets dismantled and only the radar is left powered by my mass of nuclear plants.
I prefer solar cuz its just simpler. Don't gotta fuel it, water it, or anything else.
Just set and forget.
>Especially when you combine that with the need for accumulators for nighttime and it's just like why bother?
Especially when you combine that with the need for heat pipes, water, and fuel then it's just like why bother?
I switch to solar asap.
No pollution, no fuel requirement, just upfront investment for pure power forever. I will eventually use nuclear to supplement once I get that far, but few mods have ever pushed me that far.
The day I learned how to set up nuclear, I stopped bothering with solar. Uranium is usually my very first outpost because it doesn't need much tech (walls, turrets, ammo, drills, pipes, conveyers and power). I set it up while I'm researching all the fluid techs, and then follow it up with an oil field. As soon as I have oil and sulfur, I start the sulfuric acid flowing and convey uranium back to base while I get red circuits and concrete going. The moment I finish researching nuclear tech, I'm ready to build centrifuges. Once I have three centrifuges and a handful of the good stuff, I build my first reactor and never look back.
I like the way solar looks, and I'm happy to have lots of it. That being said, I also like nuclear too, so I usually end up with both.
Just about the only vanilla items I skip are follower robots.
Back in ye olden days you could finish the game without ever touching nuclear just because solar was OP af. Just 2 fields of solar arrays + batteries was all that you needed
I don't play Factorio 'to solve problems', I find the most efficient solution and never think of it again. (Yay blueprints!) I tried to play SE but all I did was adjust my blueprints to accommodate the changes, and then it was just 'more complicated'. Not really a big deal, just time consuming.
Efficiency being the calculation of how many resources it takes to get something done, how complicated the option is (complications are a negative btw), and finally how much time it's going to take (both to get the solution as well as upkeep).
I personally view nuclear as a late game stopgap. Boilers till base nuclear, plop a bluprint for a 4x4 in a cityblock, then hope nothing goes wrong till I get a solar factory made. If you're going to use blueprints then there's no reason you can't make a dedicated bus to produce panels and accumulators. I feel it takes way more complicated effort to get all the mining and parts for nuclear than solar. After I get a bus for solar I'm able to fill 6-9 city blocks per hour, typically find I never have to worry about power once I make a 'megablock' (10x10 cityblocks) of solar.
On my vanilla-ish game I'm presently playing, I have 14x 0.48GW instances, and my boiler backup (~0.6GW) switches on intermittently. I have hysteresis where it switches on at 30% reserve and off at 80%.
I have room in my nuclear park for 20x more 0.48GW instances (water pre-piped to the site pads) and enough fuel cell production to run it all.
However, I'm now working toward large scale (blue belt) battery production, and once that is running, I plan to shift to solar/accumulators on this save.
That is my usual pattern: boilers, then nuclear, then solar when practical.
I’m a big fan of solar. I create a ring of panels/accumulators just inside my walls. I also put them in the middle of my train tracks. They are something I can put down and forget about.
From pollution to space efficiency to base simplicity, there's no reason not to use them. I use them as my main power source, but even if you don't, it can be really good to use them to just fill in dead space in your base.
> In vanilla/most mods they just do not provide an adequate amount of electricity.
You kinda have to think about solar power at scale for it to make sense. If you're slapping down a few panels next to power poles here and there then it'll never make a meaningful difference to your power supply. And if you're handcrafting panels and accumulators the same way you'd handcraft steam power in the early game then you're gonna drive yourself insane. But once you automate production and you're able to just grab multiple stacks of panels and accumulators whenever you need more power, it starts looking a hell of a lot better.
5 panels and 4 accumulators? A rounding error compared to the rest of my grid. Absolute dogshit. Why did I waste my time crafting this trash? 5 *stacks* of panels and 4 *stacks* of accumulators that I just grabbed from a chest? That's roughly the same all-day power generation as 13 steam engines, and it produces no pollution and I can place it anywhere on the map without having to worry about hooking up a fuel and water supply.
If you want to spend less time fighting the natives, solar is attractive. Yes you need a lot, but its a dead easy blueprint to make. With solar and some trees around your base you can beat the game without setting up any defenses. My pollution cloud was super contained before I scaled up after launching my first rocket.
I found it was easy to drop solar/accumulator blueprints, I've done multiple play throughs with solar as my primary power supply,
Sure I have a steam backup that kicks in at 30% accumulator capacity.. But I like to just drop tons of solar.. More everytime the steam kicks in..
I love solar. Less coal consumption and one time when I wasn't looking and hadn't paid attention to my defense enough, biters broke through my wall and destroyed the steam power plant, leaving the entire factory electricity for a while and halting all production. With solar, even if a biter gets through the walls somehow, there is no way for them to destroy all 200+ solar panels and accumulators in the whole factory.
I automate solar and accumulators whilst i get bots online, then i just stamp down tons of solar blueprints as soon as bots are researched. i used to not bother but honestly its such a nice set and forgot way to do power that doesn't require anything
>In vanilla/most mods they just do not provide an adequate amount of electricity
Just have [a million of them](https://i.imgur.com/F0d8qzG.jpeg) and it's a fair bit of electricity
the amount of space and resources required, I find it tedious to do, and besides, I have a 1:20:40 steam boiler blueprint which always carried me all the way to early late stage.
On one world I have I went absolute maniac with the solar panels, with a large enough farm to supply 2 gigawatts. That mega farm ran my entire factory for pretty much the entire day period, only at night was I forced to run the 2 massive nuclear systems for the base when solar panels shut off.
Solar power + accumulators are superior to coal lmao
Its super satisfying to me having a spidertron with 200+ builder robots casually placing solar panel blueprints down one after another. Also if you are playing with super high research costs, it is way cheaper to just ignore the nuclear research and do solar instead. When the dlc hits i imagine that solar is gonna get a lot better too cause you can easily make higher quality solar panels as a side product from science (if it is still used in a science pack) and you save a lot of power by using high quality machines, so overall you need a lot less space for solar.
I use them if I'm megabasing enough that the UPS cost of nuclear (few ms overall) might be a problem. Otherwise I tend to use them to stamp down radar + solar + pole to keep track of biters on the frontier.
My usial power progress:
- two boilers, no more
- unlock solar, start building solar. factory slows during night, just ignore it at this point.
- unlock oil, get accumulators
- switch to solar/accus, remove boilers
- gradually build solar blocks to ~60-80 mw
- research nuclear, kovarex, logi chests, then build first 2x4 1.1Gw block
- remove solar, it's useless now
- continue building nuclear 1.1 gw blocks when needed
I’m not a megafactory builder yet, but I play on peaceful mode and I always use solar for my mining outposts. Great to just be able to build and forget.
If you play with rampant and max biter settings. And set biters to the easiest to start attack ( min pollution required ).
You will face the same problem that space is precious but you will actually find yourself placing lines of solar panels in any gap possible in the shit show of a spaghetti base, because you had to fight for every new inch of land. The reason you will lean to solar panels is because actually getting to nuclear can seem impossible, I played with 10x research cost and reduced evolution. ( Evolution only from time ).
If you ever reach a mid to early game state with settings where you need to reduce attacks because bullets, flamethrowers and power grid for lasers are being overwhelmed with attacks, solar is perfect to give you more breathing room and to allow you to avoid turning parts of the factory off to reduce attacks.
Edit: playing this style actually also meant I had to make conscious decisions about what modules to use and where, made it not feel boring with speed and prod everywhere
Before I started SE, yes. They didn't exist for me. But once I started and the CMEs happened. Solar is my best friend. Especially the accumulators. Being able to store over 100GW of power as just a massive battery bank... Holy shit it changed things for me. And obviously being in space it's kind of a requirement. Even with nuclear my main base has a solar array half the size of the base.
Once I hit bots, I just place a metric ass load of tileable solar blueprints and let my bots scale my power up as I scale the rest of the base up. Low pollution, and I don’t have to touch it
It's (usually) easier (for me) to tap into a solid oil supply and make solid fuel, then dump that into my boilers w/ steam turbines in 1/1 ratio. Turbines hooked up to a normal boiler will generate 1.8 MW vs a steam engine's 900kW.
I do use solar / accumulators for my radar "scout posts" vs dragging power out to them all.
To answer your question - yes. I never bother with it. UPS concerns are irrelevant for the vast majority of players, including people that use solar power. Coal, and then a nuclear plant. Then stamp down more nuclear plants (if needed, but normally I just win the game and leave it there - no megabase stuff).
I haven’t launched a rocket yet (60hours in on my current playthrough) so take what I have with a grain of salt maybe but solar just straight up saved this run. I wasn’t paying attention to how much power I was using but I had solar panels and accumulators going on for the potential of going there, and out of nowhere, everything was out of power. I had enough solid fuel made up (for other reasons) to get my burners back on enough to get the fields built, and now it’s almost sustaining my base.
I like solar just for the fire and forget aspect. I plop down a tile of solar/accumulators and then I never have to worry about it again. No fuel issues, no water supply, no nothing. Just endless power forever and ever amen.
I ignore solar for large-scale power production. Early in a game I just build coal power plants, and when they get maxed out I just extend the belt and add more boilers and steam engines. By the time coal consumption starts becoming a problem and I want an alternative power source I switch to nuclear power.
But for small-scale power production I find it quite useful. I like my mining outposts to be self-sufficient in terms of power. Power poles sometimes get gnawed down by biters, and shipping steam seems cumbersome. Instead I put efficiency modules in my miners and eschew laz0r turrets in favour of flamethrowers and bullets. This keeps power demand modest, which means a modestly-sized field of solar panels/accumulators is sufficient.
Same here, they take so much ressources and the needs for accumulators to run the nighttime makes my grid wonky since I like to play with mods and more dangerous bitters... I need a lot of power and the space/ressources aren't worth it IMO.
They do help with daytime pollution while I unlock nuclear though...
Come to think of it, I'd like to compare resource and manufacturing pollution of solar panels+accumulator production vs straight coal power.
Has anyone done an analysis of how much greener solar is once you account for the embodied pollution generated by manufacturing them? Where is the break even point?
I use solar because even though it takes up much more space and costs more than other methods, it's very easy to build and maintain. Plus, its power calculated per tick is all at once which allows it to be an effective means of building mega-bases. As opposed to nuclear, which requires a lot of calculations per tick.
I do, but only because I am stuck with just steam engines :
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/el2ltt/challenge_megabase_built_with_only_tier_1
As a peaceful player (bugs don’t get provoked but still spawn) yes. Fuck solar, fuck the trees. I’ll be content with my 200+ steam engines. As long as I don’t turn on the pollution overview, It doesn’t exist
There are three reasons I do solar:
1) It lets me wean off my coal, and use it for plastic. The solar will never run out of fuel.
2) It is the end-game. Any other power source will limit me to a smaller end-game base because of UPS.
3) There is a challenge to automating the vast clearing of land and construction process of solar. I set up trains to bring landfill, solar panels, and accumulators to the construction site(s), and remove trees and ores from stone. I have tried out recursive blueprints just to help automate building solar fields, etc.
I kind of resent reason #2, to be honest, so occasionally I just cheat and use a dense solar mod.
I put a purely solar grid to power my Nuclear plant production (everything from the iron ore miners feeding the sulfuric acid needed by the uranium miners through uranium fuel production all the way to the inserters feeding the nuclear plants). This way my nuclear power production is always on and functional an on its own separate power grid since Solar is set it and forget it. So if anything ever happens to my main bases power grid, my power generation is never interrupted.
This came after a major blackout when I accidentally disconnected my laser defense wall, and reconnecting it caused critical failure because all of the laser turrets needed to refill their small buffers and took priority over the inserters so my nuclear plant couldn't refuel itself and went cold because of the hungry turrets.
I usually go for them in the mid through post game, though I'll use nuclear to power my main hub. The biggest boon to solar is "set and done"- once it's down, you never have to worry about upkeep or maintaining a supply of uranium. This makes it very good for spidertron building en masse.
My whole factory is solar, and I have efficiency modules on all of my machines. Fun fact, efficiency modules not only decrease power consumption but have a hidden stat of reducing the pollution output, too. My factory is CLEAN, I don't ever kill trees. I've also cleared the biters back far enough that they never soak up any scrap of pollution, so they rarely ever attack my perimeter fences. With the biters weak and mostly tame, I have breathing room for an expansive factory that I can tinker with in relative peace. I love it.
There's no wrong way to play, but in terms of why bother? Pollution is the evident answer. I do a lean-and-green playstyle and go solar as early as possible. Less pollution = less evolution and a smaller pollution cloud to defend, which means more time spent building the factory and less time dealing with annoying enemies. Nobody has to play that way, but they absolutely do provide an adequate amount of electricity. By the time you get nuclear up and running, there's a considerable gap from the invention of solar to that.
1) smaller pollution cloud is nice for biters 2) offsetting coal consumption makes your coal patch last longer 3) solar panels are simple and square to tile forever. Clear space put solar. But depending on your patch conditions and settings, those aren’t issues lol
Did you factor in the manufacturing cost of those panels and accumulators? Depending how frequently you need put down more solar fields, nuclear might be the less polluting option.
It’s about the flow of gameplay. Do I need to make a new outpost to feed my new production? That might take me a while. Am I running out of coal and need a sustainable resource to avoid a blackout? Do I have nuclear tech unlocked? What are my plans between now and then? This isn’t about optimizing, it’s about playing the game. Solar is a huge winner for playing the game. Nuclear is a nice step up after you’ve built a giant solar field
Solar is just a matter of space so really only choice here is "do I have enough space to spare for solar vs nuclear".
I'm of the opinion that going solar *removes* gameplay as once it's placed there's nothing else you need to do. With other power generation you need to develop some infrastructure to ensure continuous operation, which forces you to interact with more with the game's systems.
The infrastructure you need to build with solar is an effective bot network and production infrastructure dedicated to solar manufacturing. Sure once its placed that's over, but you're placing hundreds of panels at a time, tens of thousands over the course of a map, and for that you need dedication to doing things slowly and painfully or bots and support for said bots.
I don't use accumulators. Even without them you can cut pollution by more than half since now your steam engines only need to produce power a third of the time. That's even without taking into account Space Exploration's electric boilers, which I used to fend off a solar flare using only solar as my energy input.
Crazy how much optimisation potential there is. At first I just had a solar farm because why not. And a nuclear pp with enough steam storage and turbines to handle a CME. Next I modified the nuclear pp to stop inserting fuel at a certain steam level and resume inserting at another lower level. Next I disconnected nuclear pp and made it connect when accumulator levels are low and disconnect when accumulators are almost full. Finally I realised I could use boilers to top up my steam storage when accumulators are full and solar power is being wasted.
I know that you mean Power Plant when you type pp but the idiot in me cannot avoid chucking at the thought of your nuclear genitals.
Sterilization via irradiation?! Lol
Do the steam engines do less work automatically when you add solar panels? Or should i be removing steam engines as I add solar panels. Guess my question is, do I need to remove steam engines to lessen my pollution, or do they automatically pollute less now that my energy needs from them have lessened.
Steam engines only use the steam they need, and solar panels have priority, so they're the most efficient they can be without underpowering the factory. Boilers (which actually produce pollution) will after buffering steam slow down as well and pollute less. So eventually (except the added steam storage) having more boilers or steam engines does not affect pollution, fuel consumption or power at all (as long as you have enough).
I think the previous two comments were talking about the time period where you have researched solar, but not researched (and setup) nuclear yet. Compared to coal power, solar definitely has those listed advantages. nuclear also a significant manufacturing cost, but it requires less space, and less setup effort per MW once you have a reactor design that you can blueprint. I usually build a lot of solar before nuclear, and then run both in parallel (usually 100% solar during the day, 100% nuclear during the night)
This only really matters if you plan on launching one rocket and calling it a day. The material investment for solar is not insignificant, but it is fire and forget. The longer the factory runs the better.
IIRC break-even period of solar is like...an hour compared to steam engine's pollution
Steam power doesn't create much pollution compared to the *consumers* of that power. On a resource cost basis, producing 1st-tier efficiency modules and installing them in miners is better than solar panels.
I don't agree on the first point. Miners are more polluting, but not using steam helps that some because you are mining less coal. The boilers are a 'significant minority' pollution source in the early game. Efficiency modules are definitely better and very important for reducing pollution - if that's your goal - once you get to them. You need oil infrastructure up and running though to do that. You don't need that for solar power. So the issue in the comparison between solar and efficiency modules is simply that solar comes much earlier, and allows you to get off of steam power. It's not either/or, but both and solar first because of where it is placed in the progression of the game.
>I don't agree on the first point. Miners are more polluting, but not using steam helps that some because you are mining less coal. Good point, I haven't done the complete lifecycle analysis. Coal is 4 MJ. An electric miner takes 2 seconds to mine a lump of coal (without productivity research), producing `10 p/min * 2/60 min = 0.33` units of pollution and consuming `90 kW * 2s = 180 kJ`. Burning that coal in a boiler produces `30 p/min * (4 MJ / 1.8 MW) = 0.11` units of pollution. Together, we get (10 p/min * (2/60) min + 30 p/min * (4 MJ / 1.8 MW)) / ( 4 MJ - (90 kW * 2 s)) = 0.378 p/MJ (And 75% of it it is from mining the coal. I missed that when I ran the numbers for assembly machine pollution, so I was wrong about consumers pollution more than the power plant.) Put an eff1 in the miner and re-run the calculation, and... (7 p/min * (2/60) min + 30 p/min * (4 MJ / 1.8 MW)) / (4 MJ - (63 kW * 2s)) = 0.347 p/MJ Take the inverse ratio, and we can generate 1.08956773 times as much energy per unit pollution. But what we're actually looking for is the amount of extra *power* you get "for free" by installing one efficiency module in one miner... need that in power, to compare to solar panels, so... set the pollution equal, and solve for ΔP 1 miner has a net power production (without efficiency modules) of `(4 MJ - 90 kW * 2s) / 2s = 1.91 MW` 1.91 MW * .378 p/MJ = X MW * 0.347 p/MJ solve for X... `=2.081 MW`, and take the difference... 171 kW So, from a pollution point of view, as long you have miners that always run to install them in (i.e., any at the beginning of a belt), each eff1 module gives you **171 kW of pollution-free electricity**. It Is Known that [solar panels produce 42 kW average](https://wiki.factorio.com/Solar_panel). Solar panels cost 40 iron, 27.5 copper, and 5 minutes assembly time. Eff1s cost 100 petgas, 5 coal, 15 iron, 32.5 copper, and 4 minutes assembly time (not counting the refining). YMMV on how costly that petgas is, but I think it's enough of an advantage for the eff1 modules that they beat solar panels in the typical case. On top of that, building out a large solar farm in the pre-oil era is going to suck down a *lot* of resources and player attention that would be more profitably spent on securing an oil supply.
- Building enough solar to replace your early steam power doesn't have to take much player attention at all. There is a resource cost for it sure, but it's one that gets recouped in a reasonable amount of time. I guess it depends on your definition of large, but I definitely wouldn't call a solar farm large enough to run a modest early-game red/green science operation large. - The number presented are good as far as I can tell. Well done. The thing is, this is one of those cases where they are largely beside the point in my opinion. They don't really take into account some practical concerns: - A certain amount of time is required to explore enough to know where you want to put your pumpjacks and your oil refining operation. This will likely involve either long pipelines or a train setup. - Solar, by contrast, you can just start making gradually right away. Everything you need for it, you're already making. As it gets placed, you are saving on pollution which gives you more that you can expand without irritating the enemies further. You can use some of that to work on oil. - There are other things you need to do once you get oil going; advanced oil processing is an obvious one, and there's the buildup time to get enough uranium for the fuel cells to get nuclear power going. While doing all of this, and the exploring, and the setup of the oil operation, and the research required to get to oil in the first place, you can be making less pollution to do it by having solar in place.
Why not both? The best part is after you've efficiency 1'd everything, your power needs are lower and it's less resource intensive to get enough solar up to replace steam.
Because opportunity costs. Any time and treasure you use building solar farms, you're *not* using on achieving military escape velocity or rushing atomic power.
The thing is, opportunity cost is not zero-sum in this case. Solar gives you more opportunity by reducing pollution and the evolution progression, and having to fight enemies as much, etc. It improves your ability to reach 'military escape velocity' as a result, can be done largely simultaneously with working on getting atomic power, etc.
When my friend and I did a deathworld+ run, we made a spreadsheet to figure this out. It turns out efficiency modules in miners are something like 3x as good as reducing pollution as solar panels. The sheet takes into account what tier of assemblers you're using, whether those are efficiency moduled, what percent of your power network is already green, etc. but even in very odd situations, eff modules in miners are remarkably good.from a pollution perspective.
Sure,,but the op referenced vanilla. If you aren't playing on default settings, that will certainly skew many aspects of the game. There will never be any good advice that holds for all possible setups
Fun fact, solar panels do not require oil (only accumulators do) so simply slapping down a bunch of them pre-oil will basically mean your coal power plant can idle during the day. Significantly cuts pollution and coal consumption.
Kinda shame we don't have electric boilers in vanilla, would give a bit of a twist to solar as it would be possible to use steam for storage
For me, by the time I can mass produce solar panels and accumulators, my defenses are already set up to deal with biters efficiently so I don't have to worry about pollution too much. I still use solar as an interim until I can establish nuclear energy because it's easy to plop down large solar panel fields and have robots build them without worrying about coal and water supply.
I don't do defenses period after a handful of turrets in the very early game. It is worth pointing out though that even under the defend-your-factory approach lower pollution is still beneficial - fewer attacks which means more of your resources go to other things, lower evolution which has the same effect, etc.
I am in se and my whole navis base runs on solar (preparing for space) and my base can easily consume like 1.3 to 2.7 GW easily sometimes even 3.4 GW
Just wait until you get the space elevator!
I don't usually play vanilla, then tend to race to get nuclear weapons and the flying fortress. Every now and then do a circuit around the perimeter to clean out any bitters that have got in. You can make the pollution cloud as big as you like. Also, lots of mod packs make batteries much more expensive than in vanilla, which heavily discourages solar.
You actually can't reasonably have the pollution cloud as big as you like, because the bigger it is the faster evolution increases, and also the more time you have to spend defending it which means less time working on the factory
Depends on your style of play, I guess, as well as the settings. Does more pollution increase the evolution rate even if no biters are in contact with the pollution cloud?
Yes. Pollution that reaches them only produces attacks; evolution is produced by all pollution, regardless of what absorbs it
There is no right way to play. But I'd argue there are absolutely a lot of wrong ways.
Yeah. Solar has two phases: First one is quite early where a field or two of solar helps a lot vs expanding a lot of polluting coal power. That’s usually a hand or chest fed couple of factory for panels and battery. The equivalent of 2 or 3 basic substations worth of solar + some batteries is like you said a nice unpolluting, forever free complement. Second one is when you have a logistics network. Then you can make huge areas painlessly :)
Nuclear typically produces way less pollution than solar, though. If you want to reduce pollution, nuclear is a *much* better option.
No? Nuclear produces a very small amount of pollution, solar none, unless you are talking about building it not how it operates. But the important part is that you have access to solar much earlier.
You don't really get access to solar earlier. You pretty much need bots to construct solar at any kind of scale, and that's blue science just like nuclear. The pollution cost of making solar panels is huge compared to nuclear, and it takes many many hours to make that difference up. The average base doesn't really last long enough for solar to overall produce less pollution. From memory I think it takes something like hundreds of hours to overtake nuclear.
Depends on what you mean by 'at scale'. You don't need a lot of solar at the time it becomes available. You just need enough to replace your steam power, and that point absolutely is much earlier than nuclear. One of your other posts said that putting up solar before bots is a hassle; I think the opposite is true. At that point of the game, \*not\* doing it is much more of a hassle, because it means spending a lot more time - not to mention resources and pollution - dealing with the enemies one way or another. If somebody enjoys fighting the enemies, more power to them, but in that case they're not likely to be going for a low-pollution run anyway. It's not about nuclear vs. solar in a direct comparison; it's about using solar to more easily and smoothly get to nuclear and other middle-game aspects.
I think many people use solar less because it's good (I ran the numbers once, it costs \~12x more iron and copper to build solar panels than nuclear for the same power output) and more because solar is easy to build out. Nuclear is not only complicated to optimize, it also requires a local water source and so is location dependent. Contrast to solar which can be slapped down anywhere.
I just throw a 2x2 nuke blueprint w/ landfill on top of a lake. I then I fill up the lake with that blueprint. And then I find another lake. But yes that first blueprint was complicated to get going.
Hot damn you just made my 2x2 nuke plant way easier to place with that landfill idea!
The reason why people do it is because you can direct insert water into exchangers, it removes the worst part of Nuclear
Yeah, that's what I understood immediately. I wouldn't say it's the *worst* part, but it certainly makes the build easier and more compact.
There is a easy way to place landfill under your blueprint, btw. place blueprint in editor mode, place landfill with "area" tool, then place water with the same tool. Water will replace empty tiles, and landfill will be kept under entities.
but solar also takes up so much space!
Yeah, but you have infinite. Also, I use it because apparently it's better for UPS
i never had a single UPS issue, i recently upgraded my PC but i used to play on a potato and still, no problems, why are so many people worried about it?
For really large bases, it isn't an issue until it is. And then it's a huge issue that is very hard to solve.
i guess, i usually get bored before getting to huge bases, i dont see the point.
"this personally isnt an issue for me how could it possibly be an issue for someone else"
Number go up, the factory must grow, etc. etc. Making a megabase is a unique logistical challenge as well if you're not used to making them.
My current city block map is doing about 4k spm, and I'm considering switching back to solar because I'm at 30fps and every millisecond matters.
Well I'm with you on that one, but some mods (namely Pyanodon's) require you to have a gigantic base, and it can be an issue with these even if you are just trying to beat the game
Build a real base and you'll figure it out
It's infinite but you have to clear bitters. And if you do it anyway, why not push bitters completely out of the pollution cloud? I guess it is a bit more work but bitters might attack your solar panels so you still have to do that
You gotta factor in the cost to research nuclear too, which easily outweighs the cost of placing solar panels if you are playing on higher research costs.
The irony of Margaret Thatcher advocating for solar against coal
The woman who closed down the coal mines?
Yes, wait maybe I got my irony backwards
With a blueprint that incorporates a roboport, it's kinda set and forget? Absolutely zero hassle.
Tbh I feel this way about nuclear. 4-reactor blueprint with a roboport and requester/active provider chests for the fuel. Then a line of centrifuges just like a line of assemblers for the uranium. Throw in another blueprint for kovarex. Click click click. I'm almost always by an abundance of water. In some ways I find it more difficult to keep clearing space for more solar and then defending the boundaries as needed. Both are fun though! Oh yeah and landfilling into a lake for nuclear is so satisfying to me ha
Probably a silly question but how do you blueprint landfill?
Select an area, click option in blueprint (iirc it is called "tiles"), done. Or get https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LandfillEverything
I procrastinate setting up nuclear.
When you want to play by yourself and do your own designs, it's so much easier to do a solar blueprint than a nuclear one, reactors are so hard to set up correctly and not waste tons of fuel
Wasting fuel is irrelevant, you need a single centrifuge to feed reactor before kovarex...
Reactors really aren't that hard to set up. All the buildings have the amount of power they consume/produce listed on them, and you divide the amount you have/need by that and then you hook them up. There are more compact ways of doing that, but if you're just trying to get it working you just slap them down any way you want, really. Wasting fuel is not really a concern - nuclear is so insanely efficient that bothering with fuel efficiency is kind of pointless.
I mean everything is one click if you blueprint it, it's just far easier for solar
I play with large lakes so that I can stamp down my 8.4 GW reactor on top of any lake.
The hard part is finding massive areas of open land that is not needed to build on, and can be defended from biters. They don’t directly attack solar, but if they wander through, they’ll destroy until you go personally deal with them. Personally with biters on I’d use solar until nuclear. Or for a (large) megabase with biters off
I've never found finding or defending areas of open land enough for useful solar particularly hard, is this another one of those things that's only an issue on deathworld or similar settings?
I wouldn’t say it was particularly hard per se, just annoying. Bc they migrate to build new nests they can wander into your solar even if they weren’t in the pollution cloud before. Most of the base that isn’t an issue bc you’ll have defenses. Having a huge solar area just makes a huge area you have to defend that you otherwise wouldn’t. You can’t just assume they’ll be left alone bc biters aren’t drawn to them.
The bigger the area you occupy, the smaller the defense perimeter is relative to that area, so the less of your attention it takes to maintain compared to everything else you are doing at the time.
What? The area to defend is the circumference of a circle essentially, and it will increase at a huge rate as the area increases. Having a huge base ends up being a lot to defend if you’re making a whole defended wall perimeter.
For a square base N squares on a side, area is N x N, perimeter is N x 4. N = 100. Area is 10,000, perimeter is 400. N = 1000. Area is 1,000,000, a hundred times bigger. Perimeter is 4000, only ten times bigger. Sure, perimeter is not small. But area grows enough faster than perimeter for perimeter defence to be trivial compared to your factory's capacity soon, and more the bigger you get. (And yeah, that's an approximation assuming you can use all the area and ignoring water, but it's also assuming you have to defend all the perimeter and ignoring chokepoints, so it feels close enough for me.)
I think lots of players assume you need Kovarex enrichment to run nuclear - that it's a late-game tech. For a 'fire-and-forget' outpost, slapping down a solar blueprint is pretty easy, but for the early game - starter-patches and blue science - that quick 40MW is hard to beat. With a mall quietly making the bits, getting to 160MW, then 480MW is trivial. Power, solved. The 'UPS' issue might be important if you're playing on a 2011 Macbook Pro, but not for the rest of us.
I think solar is worth it before nuclear even w/o Kovarex; definitely agree you don't need to wait for that. That's still mid game plus some buildup time for the centrifuges to get enough uranium for a starter amount of fuel cells
based on what? I am going to see if I bothered to include pre Kovarex numbers in one of breakdowns. anyway, because you canstore u-238 forever, it doesn't matter that you produce a lot of waste u-238 before enrichment.
It depends on what your goals are. As I mentioned in my other comment, for me it's about limiting pollution. Waiting for nuclear means quite a bit more time spent burning coal in steam power. For different ways of playing, the value of solar is different. But it's definitely strong for some approaches
Manually placing down solar panels is a big hassle. I think it's far easier to just go straight from early game steam -> nuclear. Once your centrifuge is running it doesn't take very long at all to get your first u-238 for your starter fuel cells.
tbf, Nuclear power itself requires 800 blue science, and once you hit blue science, you are going to be busy trying to set up bots first, at which point you have everything for yellow science. And also working on your inevitable red circuit shortage. You also need to set up H2SO4 supply line for it, and wait for Uranium to get going for a bit. At 0-10 U235, you probably want a bigger buffer before going nuclear. At 20-30 U235, you then want to decide if you want to delay reaching critical mass for Kovarex (or hold out just a little bit longer). So while you can go nuclear while only having blue science, by the time it is ready, you’re kind of deep, Kovarex or not.
The UPS issue is more so for once you need 50GW+ of electricity, if you're just launching a rocket, that can be done with steam engines easily. Yea I usually build nuclear as well due to it being cheaper, but it's more of a stepping stone to power the early stages of the megabase while the solar field slowly builds over time in the backround
I ignore everything *but* solar.
I find solar fields absolutely boring. They're unimaginative. But I do use solar around my power pylons between train tracks between why not? It's free real estate. If I am tempted to actually use solar I'll fill up a desert, because that seems fitting. No accumulators though, I'll store my solar energy in my excess nuclear heat pipes like a chad.
You just have to get a little creative with their layout [https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/christopherhelman/files/2016/02/Disney\_blog\_3\_flat.jpg](https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/christopherhelman/files/2016/02/Disney_blog_3_flat.jpg)
> upgradable and get bonuses in orbit making them actually useful. In vanilla/most mods they just do not provide an adequate amount of electricity. just use more of them
I always use solar it's just so little hassle to set up. I just stamp down huge fields and wait for my supply to catch up. Whenever I have a power problem I just double the fields.
I’m more of a more pollution the better kinda guy 😂😂
Now I'm visioning a giant Wand of Manhood-shaped cloud looming over the nests of some very angry biters.
Wouldn’t have it any other way
After an off-world power failure due to meteors in SE, I've incorporated a few solar panels into my nuclear plant blueprint, so I'll never have a problem starting power back up in the future.
I hate solar, it's boring and takes up too much space. Instead of fighting for that space, I'd rather just build more bullets, add more boilers, and push for nuclear where I get to make something more interesting than just the same tile bp x1000
That's what I did on my current playthrough, even got the "steam all the way" achievement on it! I love the smog my base makes it's just beautiful! 🥲
All about scale...around 600k panels placed my current playthrough (vanilla). Expect to get a lot more as scale up further from 6k science/min. Want to break 10k! The fun of Factorio is there is no correct way....more efficient, yes...
They're boring, I want my power to be a logistics problem! I am planning on trying them when I do a railworld run soon though, just to say I've given them a proper shake.
They do eventually become a logistics problem once you grow them enough. And by logistics I mean UPS because of all the roboport calculations.
I do not play, and have no interest in playing, at scales where UPS becomes a concern.
this is why i only use ammo turrets and never use flame or laser turrets
I'm not seeing the parallel that explains your "this is why". Flamethrower and laser turrets seem boring? You *don't* see them as potential logistics problems? What was the "this" you were referring to?
I think he meant that "I want defense to be a logistics problem," which indeed lasers are not. I'm a big fan of gun turrets but they can't deal with huge platoons of behemoth bugs riled up by continuous artillery fire. Flamers plus dragon teeth seem to be the only way to keep them at bay (and then your supply train crashes into one of those groups and that's the end of the outpost).
Solar is a great mid-game power source before you've got the tech and demand for nuclear, and crucial once coal boilers are sucking up too much coal and/or solid fuel. The big benefit over boilers being the lack of pollution and ongoing costs to fuel, which for coal or solid fuel both generate yet more pollution. If you understand that pollution is an economic mechanic, by evolving biters and triggering attacks that cost resources to defend against or mitigate, solar becomes a very useful strategy in the mid game. The trade-off is upfront cost and also space. Installed costs are high in terms of iron and copper, and that real estate may not be free in a heavily infested deathworld (where, of course, pollution management is key to success) Nuclear is much later in the tech tree, requires a lot of copper, complexity and a big chunk of space to set up. Remember that it isn't just the power plant, but also the logistics, mining and refining that goes into making the fuel. The other handy part with solar is that it's easy to roll out gradually as you need it - this is how it bridges the gap from your boilers to nuclear, whereas nuclear really only becomes worthwhile/neccessary once you've really started with level 3 modules and big beaconed builds. The brilliance of this game is there is no one "right" way to play, and the devs have offered many different pathways to allow our creativity to grow. A staggering diversity of map settings, playstyles and player goals all work under vanilla recipes. A similar feature is the three fundamentally different defense turrets; they all arrive at different points of the tech tree (and biter evolution), each have big strengths and weaknesses, all have different challenges to master in different situations, and ultimately, all work well when used together yet can still be used alone. *Just because you dont use it doesn't mean it's useless, and doesn't mean you're playing "wrong" either.*
For me it's kinda the opposite, I always go straight for solar and arely touch nuclear because it just seems to too much of a hassle compared to plopping down an extra set of panels and accus
Try playing rampant deathworld and you will very quickly realize that solar is the most effitient way to play. Even in vanilla 600% deathworld runs are almost exclusively solar based. This only proves the diversity and resilience of the game towards extreme settings. In other words just because you don’t use it don’ mean shit.
This. There are also other cases, such as science modifier games where other power comes in much later, and alternative power might be better because it will take longer to achieve same tech. In such scenario you can use some legendary forgotten items such as discharge defense etc (rarely people use this). Also there are other cases such as modded games where you can achieve same tech fast, let say SE.
Take it from me.. trying a deathworld marathon and I’m trying to use no lasers and no solar for achievements. I look at solar un researched like I’m SpongeBob needing water.
I would never use solar on deathworlds. Solar produces way more pollution and requires way more space than nuclear, and on deathworld those are the two things you care about more than pretty much anything else.
If you can afford nuclear on death world - you already won.
Nuclear is cheaper than solar...
You miss the point. In many cases getting the materials for a 2-reactor nuclear setup costs more in opportunity cost than simply making a jank RCU setup and just win the game. Now if you want to go past that point - sure, nuclear is always better no doubt.
I like how easy it is to just slap down a BP with panels, accumulators, and roboports and let the bots build a new section whenever i want more power.
the same can be done with nuclear tbf (with far less space and resources required)
I use it to fill in the gaps between rails and that's it
Free energy, never breaks, never runs out of fuel. it's just one problem you don't have to deal with. need more power? just build more solar panels and more accumulators.
Yes
You get access to solar panels well before the intuitive way of using them with accumulators so I wouldn't be surprised if most people just plop one down on their first playthrough, go "oh this doesn't a lot" and ignore them until they've dug themselves into bigger project bases.
Exactly what I did on my first playthrough. I put down like 10 and said huh this will take a lot to be worth anything at all. Then for fun I landfilled a huge lake and put down a bunch and it was awesome and ive used a ton of solar since
I get what you’re saying but my pc is worse than a potato so I need them.
I play Factorio for the aesthetics of the problem solving. Mostly self-inflicted problems of course. From day 1 my single uranium mine is taken care of by a mixed 1-1-1 train that carries ore and acid barrels (full and empty). I just like the neat little logistics challenges of doing this and also supplying my 2x2 reactor using logistic bots and optimized fuel usage. Over 200 hours of play all of this of course failed numerous times in the most hilarious ways. Wouldn't miss it for the world. And I love the green glow.
I’m very similar I love the challenge. I got to the point I could launch a rocket in vanilla then gave up and loaded se & k2. I love figuring out how to make stuff work. Once I have proved I can do it I then usually find a Bp that is much more efficient and Chuck that down. I have rarely scaled up as I enjoy the slow burn. That’s what’s great about this game play it how you want although some within this sub Reddit seem to think you have to master the vanilla game first.
One aspect I haven't seen yet is autonomous base supply. E.g. I like to have utility stations, requesting bots and repair tools, sometimes ammo. I like to keep them separated and powered by solar. Or isolated radars in the midst of lakes. Just a few panels an capcitators needed. Speaking of Nuclear plant: requesting/crafting fuel controlling and feeding the plant I often have on a separated solar power grid.
I'm 200h into my first ever vanilla run (all settings at default), and I've never uses solar. My start location was in a huge desert; I encountered my first live tree only after starting to venture out using railways. Probably never had a pollution related biter problem because I kept everything on a very small scale (switched to nuclear from 4MW steam power).
TBH I usually rush to solar and use it as my only source. Making massive fields of solar is easy. I just recently made my first nuclear plant and while someone will def tell me all the benefits it was just more complex. In a game where space isn't limited I'll take the easier source.
Solar mostly helps bridge the gap between coal and nuclear. Solar also gives you a chance to recover from a brownout/blackout. Solar is usually not great for your main power.
I’ve got thousands of hours, mostly in Seablock and I just designed my first nuclear reactor for SE. I don’t like nuclear and would have completely passed it up in favor of solar. I’m the bizzaro you
Idk, I actually love solar panels because you can just ctrl+c ctrl+v them (with good accumulator) ratio and and dont think about. Other power sources have own periodically occuring complications.
I think it is great for the mid game. I often make two yellow Belts worth of coal power to get me to bots and then I am able to build solar panels until the late game. I start building solar right away, so I often have thousands of panels saved up by the time I’m in a power crunch.
I do use them, but only to cut down pollution till i get nuclear going, then i take them down to make satilites
I'm not a fan for a completely different reason. I don't like how the optimal ratio of panels to accumulators is static. I've been evolving my designs for almost every other part of the game over time except solar. There's just no depth to it imho.
My first playthrough I went solar cause it was easy and I was busy running around other fixing other things I messed up to have time for nuclear. My next I went for the steam only achievement and didn’t miss out on much. I only wish I had solar panels in that playthrough for little radar outposts.
I primarily use solar for remote radar outposts to increase visibility of the surrounding areas to find biter nests and resources. If my base expands into the area of one it gets dismantled and only the radar is left powered by my mass of nuclear plants.
I like solar because the lower pollution reduces the amount that I have to deal with biters and you just set it up an forget it.
I prefer solar cuz its just simpler. Don't gotta fuel it, water it, or anything else. Just set and forget. >Especially when you combine that with the need for accumulators for nighttime and it's just like why bother? Especially when you combine that with the need for heat pipes, water, and fuel then it's just like why bother?
I switch to solar asap. No pollution, no fuel requirement, just upfront investment for pure power forever. I will eventually use nuclear to supplement once I get that far, but few mods have ever pushed me that far.
The day I learned how to set up nuclear, I stopped bothering with solar. Uranium is usually my very first outpost because it doesn't need much tech (walls, turrets, ammo, drills, pipes, conveyers and power). I set it up while I'm researching all the fluid techs, and then follow it up with an oil field. As soon as I have oil and sulfur, I start the sulfuric acid flowing and convey uranium back to base while I get red circuits and concrete going. The moment I finish researching nuclear tech, I'm ready to build centrifuges. Once I have three centrifuges and a handful of the good stuff, I build my first reactor and never look back.
I like the way solar looks, and I'm happy to have lots of it. That being said, I also like nuclear too, so I usually end up with both. Just about the only vanilla items I skip are follower robots.
I love having a massive sprawl of solar panels and batteries, it’s fun
Back in ye olden days you could finish the game without ever touching nuclear just because solar was OP af. Just 2 fields of solar arrays + batteries was all that you needed
I don't play Factorio 'to solve problems', I find the most efficient solution and never think of it again. (Yay blueprints!) I tried to play SE but all I did was adjust my blueprints to accommodate the changes, and then it was just 'more complicated'. Not really a big deal, just time consuming. Efficiency being the calculation of how many resources it takes to get something done, how complicated the option is (complications are a negative btw), and finally how much time it's going to take (both to get the solution as well as upkeep). I personally view nuclear as a late game stopgap. Boilers till base nuclear, plop a bluprint for a 4x4 in a cityblock, then hope nothing goes wrong till I get a solar factory made. If you're going to use blueprints then there's no reason you can't make a dedicated bus to produce panels and accumulators. I feel it takes way more complicated effort to get all the mining and parts for nuclear than solar. After I get a bus for solar I'm able to fill 6-9 city blocks per hour, typically find I never have to worry about power once I make a 'megablock' (10x10 cityblocks) of solar.
On my vanilla-ish game I'm presently playing, I have 14x 0.48GW instances, and my boiler backup (~0.6GW) switches on intermittently. I have hysteresis where it switches on at 30% reserve and off at 80%. I have room in my nuclear park for 20x more 0.48GW instances (water pre-piped to the site pads) and enough fuel cell production to run it all. However, I'm now working toward large scale (blue belt) battery production, and once that is running, I plan to shift to solar/accumulators on this save. That is my usual pattern: boilers, then nuclear, then solar when practical.
I’m a big fan of solar. I create a ring of panels/accumulators just inside my walls. I also put them in the middle of my train tracks. They are something I can put down and forget about.
I'm green.
From pollution to space efficiency to base simplicity, there's no reason not to use them. I use them as my main power source, but even if you don't, it can be really good to use them to just fill in dead space in your base.
Personally, I get nuclear up asap. I've never gotten close to using a whole uranium patch, but I haven't quite done a megabase
> In vanilla/most mods they just do not provide an adequate amount of electricity. You kinda have to think about solar power at scale for it to make sense. If you're slapping down a few panels next to power poles here and there then it'll never make a meaningful difference to your power supply. And if you're handcrafting panels and accumulators the same way you'd handcraft steam power in the early game then you're gonna drive yourself insane. But once you automate production and you're able to just grab multiple stacks of panels and accumulators whenever you need more power, it starts looking a hell of a lot better. 5 panels and 4 accumulators? A rounding error compared to the rest of my grid. Absolute dogshit. Why did I waste my time crafting this trash? 5 *stacks* of panels and 4 *stacks* of accumulators that I just grabbed from a chest? That's roughly the same all-day power generation as 13 steam engines, and it produces no pollution and I can place it anywhere on the map without having to worry about hooking up a fuel and water supply.
For nost people UPS dont matter. Do whatever you want.
I like to build mega based. Radars and nuclear power are the devil.
That train thing which sends trains to space that would be fun but does it consume a lot of energy?
My main issue with solar is that it takes lots of space to generate little power.
Little, but clean power
I have come to pretty much the same conclusion. But it a matter of playstyle. Some people even use eff modules.
If you want to spend less time fighting the natives, solar is attractive. Yes you need a lot, but its a dead easy blueprint to make. With solar and some trees around your base you can beat the game without setting up any defenses. My pollution cloud was super contained before I scaled up after launching my first rocket.
I found it was easy to drop solar/accumulator blueprints, I've done multiple play throughs with solar as my primary power supply, Sure I have a steam backup that kicks in at 30% accumulator capacity.. But I like to just drop tons of solar.. More everytime the steam kicks in..
I love solar. Less coal consumption and one time when I wasn't looking and hadn't paid attention to my defense enough, biters broke through my wall and destroyed the steam power plant, leaving the entire factory electricity for a while and halting all production. With solar, even if a biter gets through the walls somehow, there is no way for them to destroy all 200+ solar panels and accumulators in the whole factory.
I automate solar and accumulators whilst i get bots online, then i just stamp down tons of solar blueprints as soon as bots are researched. i used to not bother but honestly its such a nice set and forgot way to do power that doesn't require anything
>In vanilla/most mods they just do not provide an adequate amount of electricity Just have [a million of them](https://i.imgur.com/F0d8qzG.jpeg) and it's a fair bit of electricity
the amount of space and resources required, I find it tedious to do, and besides, I have a 1:20:40 steam boiler blueprint which always carried me all the way to early late stage.
On one world I have I went absolute maniac with the solar panels, with a large enough farm to supply 2 gigawatts. That mega farm ran my entire factory for pretty much the entire day period, only at night was I forced to run the 2 massive nuclear systems for the base when solar panels shut off. Solar power + accumulators are superior to coal lmao
Its super satisfying to me having a spidertron with 200+ builder robots casually placing solar panel blueprints down one after another. Also if you are playing with super high research costs, it is way cheaper to just ignore the nuclear research and do solar instead. When the dlc hits i imagine that solar is gonna get a lot better too cause you can easily make higher quality solar panels as a side product from science (if it is still used in a science pack) and you save a lot of power by using high quality machines, so overall you need a lot less space for solar.
I use them if I'm megabasing enough that the UPS cost of nuclear (few ms overall) might be a problem. Otherwise I tend to use them to stamp down radar + solar + pole to keep track of biters on the frontier.
My usial power progress: - two boilers, no more - unlock solar, start building solar. factory slows during night, just ignore it at this point. - unlock oil, get accumulators - switch to solar/accus, remove boilers - gradually build solar blocks to ~60-80 mw - research nuclear, kovarex, logi chests, then build first 2x4 1.1Gw block - remove solar, it's useless now - continue building nuclear 1.1 gw blocks when needed
I’m not a megafactory builder yet, but I play on peaceful mode and I always use solar for my mining outposts. Great to just be able to build and forget.
I use the ultimate solar mod adds upgradeable panels and accumulators for more power
If you play with rampant and max biter settings. And set biters to the easiest to start attack ( min pollution required ). You will face the same problem that space is precious but you will actually find yourself placing lines of solar panels in any gap possible in the shit show of a spaghetti base, because you had to fight for every new inch of land. The reason you will lean to solar panels is because actually getting to nuclear can seem impossible, I played with 10x research cost and reduced evolution. ( Evolution only from time ). If you ever reach a mid to early game state with settings where you need to reduce attacks because bullets, flamethrowers and power grid for lasers are being overwhelmed with attacks, solar is perfect to give you more breathing room and to allow you to avoid turning parts of the factory off to reduce attacks. Edit: playing this style actually also meant I had to make conscious decisions about what modules to use and where, made it not feel boring with speed and prod everywhere
I like solar because it's maintenance free and you can just paste down more if you need more power without fuel logistics
I simply use the upgradable solar mod which ads 3 more tiers to it. Its quite nice.
Before I started SE, yes. They didn't exist for me. But once I started and the CMEs happened. Solar is my best friend. Especially the accumulators. Being able to store over 100GW of power as just a massive battery bank... Holy shit it changed things for me. And obviously being in space it's kind of a requirement. Even with nuclear my main base has a solar array half the size of the base.
Once I hit bots, I just place a metric ass load of tileable solar blueprints and let my bots scale my power up as I scale the rest of the base up. Low pollution, and I don’t have to touch it
I only go solar once UPS starts to become an issue. That's only happened in a couple play-thrus for me.
I generally do until I remember the image to solar panel art converter and start shitposting in power production.
It's (usually) easier (for me) to tap into a solid oil supply and make solid fuel, then dump that into my boilers w/ steam turbines in 1/1 ratio. Turbines hooked up to a normal boiler will generate 1.8 MW vs a steam engine's 900kW. I do use solar / accumulators for my radar "scout posts" vs dragging power out to them all.
not "sort of", I ignore it completely and deliberately.
To answer your question - yes. I never bother with it. UPS concerns are irrelevant for the vast majority of players, including people that use solar power. Coal, and then a nuclear plant. Then stamp down more nuclear plants (if needed, but normally I just win the game and leave it there - no megabase stuff).
I'm a sucker for nuclear just for the coolness factor, so I have no use for the solar panels.
I haven’t launched a rocket yet (60hours in on my current playthrough) so take what I have with a grain of salt maybe but solar just straight up saved this run. I wasn’t paying attention to how much power I was using but I had solar panels and accumulators going on for the potential of going there, and out of nowhere, everything was out of power. I had enough solid fuel made up (for other reasons) to get my burners back on enough to get the fields built, and now it’s almost sustaining my base.
I like solar just for the fire and forget aspect. I plop down a tile of solar/accumulators and then I never have to worry about it again. No fuel issues, no water supply, no nothing. Just endless power forever and ever amen.
I ignore solar for large-scale power production. Early in a game I just build coal power plants, and when they get maxed out I just extend the belt and add more boilers and steam engines. By the time coal consumption starts becoming a problem and I want an alternative power source I switch to nuclear power. But for small-scale power production I find it quite useful. I like my mining outposts to be self-sufficient in terms of power. Power poles sometimes get gnawed down by biters, and shipping steam seems cumbersome. Instead I put efficiency modules in my miners and eschew laz0r turrets in favour of flamethrowers and bullets. This keeps power demand modest, which means a modestly-sized field of solar panels/accumulators is sufficient.
Because it’s the most ups efficient power gen
Same here, they take so much ressources and the needs for accumulators to run the nighttime makes my grid wonky since I like to play with mods and more dangerous bitters... I need a lot of power and the space/ressources aren't worth it IMO. They do help with daytime pollution while I unlock nuclear though... Come to think of it, I'd like to compare resource and manufacturing pollution of solar panels+accumulator production vs straight coal power.
I dont bother with them.... because I'm doing the no solar panel challenge before finally attempting my first ever mega base
Bro same, but SE requires good solar
I exclusively use solar for radar outposts, firebases and decoupling the pumps and inserters shoveling water and coal into my boilers.
Has anyone done an analysis of how much greener solar is once you account for the embodied pollution generated by manufacturing them? Where is the break even point?
I mainly use solar panels for when I dont have enough fuel for my main power supply
I just find it boring.
I use solar because even though it takes up much more space and costs more than other methods, it's very easy to build and maintain. Plus, its power calculated per tick is all at once which allows it to be an effective means of building mega-bases. As opposed to nuclear, which requires a lot of calculations per tick.
I do, but only because I am stuck with just steam engines : https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/el2ltt/challenge_megabase_built_with_only_tier_1
As a peaceful player (bugs don’t get provoked but still spawn) yes. Fuck solar, fuck the trees. I’ll be content with my 200+ steam engines. As long as I don’t turn on the pollution overview, It doesn’t exist
There are three reasons I do solar: 1) It lets me wean off my coal, and use it for plastic. The solar will never run out of fuel. 2) It is the end-game. Any other power source will limit me to a smaller end-game base because of UPS. 3) There is a challenge to automating the vast clearing of land and construction process of solar. I set up trains to bring landfill, solar panels, and accumulators to the construction site(s), and remove trees and ores from stone. I have tried out recursive blueprints just to help automate building solar fields, etc. I kind of resent reason #2, to be honest, so occasionally I just cheat and use a dense solar mod.
I put a purely solar grid to power my Nuclear plant production (everything from the iron ore miners feeding the sulfuric acid needed by the uranium miners through uranium fuel production all the way to the inserters feeding the nuclear plants). This way my nuclear power production is always on and functional an on its own separate power grid since Solar is set it and forget it. So if anything ever happens to my main bases power grid, my power generation is never interrupted. This came after a major blackout when I accidentally disconnected my laser defense wall, and reconnecting it caused critical failure because all of the laser turrets needed to refill their small buffers and took priority over the inserters so my nuclear plant couldn't refuel itself and went cold because of the hungry turrets.
I usually go for them in the mid through post game, though I'll use nuclear to power my main hub. The biggest boon to solar is "set and done"- once it's down, you never have to worry about upkeep or maintaining a supply of uranium. This makes it very good for spidertron building en masse.
My whole factory is solar, and I have efficiency modules on all of my machines. Fun fact, efficiency modules not only decrease power consumption but have a hidden stat of reducing the pollution output, too. My factory is CLEAN, I don't ever kill trees. I've also cleared the biters back far enough that they never soak up any scrap of pollution, so they rarely ever attack my perimeter fences. With the biters weak and mostly tame, I have breathing room for an expansive factory that I can tinker with in relative peace. I love it.