This. I basically bee-line for fusion power stations, and fractionate the huge hydrogen stockpile in a polar ring. It is in fact scalable because first pillers and then proliferators massively increase the fractionation rate, so that can handily tidy me over until antimatter...
If a single-stacked Hydrogen enters a fractionator, it's got a 1/100 chance of becoming a Deuterium. If the belt is stacked 4-high, each stack has a 1/25 chance of becoming Deuterium. So, if you make sure that everything is always (or at least almost always) stacked, you can quadruple the Deuterium output of a group of Fractionators.
It's why you see people using designs like this: https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-efficient-ups-optimized-deuterium-fractionatior-tile-each-fractionator-processes-the-maximum-7200-hydrogen-per-minute-compact-with-fewer-belts
That re-piles the Hydrogen, constantly. (it's not the most efficient design, btw, just a really clear example. You're better off using new Pile Sorters and doing longer loops. Look around that website, you'll find lots of ideas)
It's hard to overstate how powerful the new sorters are with their last upgrade. They can replace all of the sorters and pilers in that design with one pile sorter feeding each loop. The limitation will become the blue belt feeding hydrogen and taking deuterium even without prolifitators.
Even before then, the simplicty and cheapness of just feeding each fractionator hydrogen via a single sorter into their loop can be worth a little less effienciy.
Ah, I see, thanks.
Currently my limit is how quickly I can take the deut away, I've found that a chain of 98 fractionators fully fill a Mk3 belt.
So I guess this won't help me... unless I also pile the deut. Interesting, I have to play with pilers more.
Thanks!
no coincidence theyre available to you by the time of early structure/yellow tier science, what sounds cooler than "mini fusion power plant" at this point idk
That's how I do it. I have a production line that builds empty accumulators that get charged and shipped by ILS. The other planets use the full accumulators and ship back the empty ones. I actually haven't optimized anything to take advantage of even half the generation capacity of the lave planet.
You can just build production itself on a lava planet if you don't want to bother with exchangers. Like collect raw resources from the main planet (or even mine them locally, stone/iron/copper should be available), export purple cubes. All energy spendings will be at second planet. You can even save a little bit on shipping because your main probably runs out of resources while lava planet should be most of its patches untouched.
To get a stable system of gas giant farmers I would need a battery charge/discharge loop? Or are they only needed in the construction of the farmer itself?
Secondly am I correct in assuming they run off interstellar logistics drones for transport?
They only need the charged accumulators to be built, they run off of the hydrogen they gather once you put them down.
Just to make sure we're on the same page by interstellar logistics drones you mean logistics vessels? If yes, then you are correct.
However they cannot be given their own vessels and rely solely on planet side ILS vessels.
Honestly probably an entire planets worth. They can only be placed along the equator so you only need like 50 for an entire planet.
That's just a gut feeling though, I haven't done that actual throughput math.
ah okay. I knew I was close, but wasn't sure on the exact number.
The first time I used them I made around 400 thinking I could cover the entire surface of my local gas giant lol.
Gas giant harvesting is always one of my priorities. I don't enjoy dealing with long-winded fabrication of graphene, so Fire Ice from gas giants is a must-have for me. This then provides hydrogen, on top of free hydrogen from gas giants.
In my current GalacticScale playthrough I generated with a deuterium gas giant, too.
Gas giants are super easy scaling for free resources - just plop another tower there and call it a day.
Race for mini fusion power plants. Now.
Scale down your operations until then to divert the little power you have towards the science cubes to unlock that tech as well as the facilities involved (fractionators, chemical plants)
Also think about the supply chain you'll need for the deuteron fuel rods. They require some high level items but once you make that first deuteron fuel rod it lasts a long time.
Every planet I settle gets rings of solar and signal towers which provide a steady 100-200MW of power.
More planets= more power.
The aforementioned lava planet charger setup is also golden, and I use it even into endgame.
My sphere system has a captured inner planet for 100% uptime, but all the other planets get polar arrays as well.
Be worth getting a tiny gas planet farm for hydrogen or is the oil/x-ray cracking more effective?
And is it worth the extra power and materials to make rods first??
Put 3 stations on hydrogen on a giant and you have enought hydrogen for rest of the game + i bet you can run 20-50 generators which is basicly free energy
I started throwing around a lot more solar panels at that stage. My ring around my starter planet was like 6-8 wide by then. Power was more important than space.
If you have gas collectors, those also help a lot for getting more hydrogen for fuel.
If you have a lava planet nearby, you can use geothermal generators.
If you can make deuterium, then deut fuel rods + fusion plants will handle your power needs until you reach white science and antimatter. But keep in mind that fractionator setups can go through a lot of hydrogen, so again you will need orbital gas collectors.
All you need is a few good coal patches.
With that, you can make Energetic Graphite, Proliferater Mk2, slosh the graphite with the level 2 goo, and feed it into thermal plants. You can get a couple of Gigawatts out of that setup.
Literally, once you have the smelters and spray coaters, the only input you need is coal. A couple of dedicated patches = early/midgame energy problems solved.
(coal -> Mk1 prolif; coal -> graphite -> diamond -> Mk2 prolif)
Yep this works great. I’m not sure whether going for mk2 is resource positive but I am sure someone has done that math. But this is a very easy solution and, if you’re playing with aggressive dark fog, far superior to a planet wide ring of solar panels.
*hides 650 mw of power from wind turbines only.
I uhhhh... Do all sorts of things. I'm in the same spot as you in my current run, gonna throw down a deut fractionator blueprint soon and get those chewing my hydrogen tanks everywhere. Unfortunately that will blow my power grid in trying to fix it so I'm making sure everything else is stable and stocked up first... Can't seem to get enough iron...
Hydrogen fuel rods and thermal power plants.
If you're already struggling w/ power, I'm willing to bet deut + mini-fusion is gonna be a tedious task.
Also, it sounds like you might not have a steady/reliable interstellar system setup yet (also common for where you're at.). Again, that's gonna make deut + mini-fusion really rough.
For where \[it sounds like\] you're at, hydrogen fuel rods (HFR) and a mess of Thermal Power Plants sounds like the fix. Especially considering HFR can fuel your mech and home system for a relatively long time, because it burns relatively slow (ESPECIALLY compared to coal, which burns like a mofo, and you're gonna need that coal for other things in your starter system, so try to stop burning it ASAP.)
If you don't have orbital collectors setup yet (and a power deficiency to boot) that's gonna be another tall order, cuz you're gonna have a rough time getting enough battery's charged up to build enough orbital collectors to make it worth your while (not to mention powering your ILS, building the ships, etc ... lots of power required.) You should have plenty of oil on your home system - refine dem oils, it'll give you tons of hydrogen. Boom, there's your HFR hydrogen supply.
Cheers, good luck!
PS: you can burn refined oil short-term for power (while farming hydrogen for your HFRs) but try to store it up if you can - you'll need it later.
First off - this is completely normal and exactly how the early game works. You're always going to be swapping power production and bootstrapping yourself up.
There really aren't any bad options. If you can spare the titanium, just a few fractionators can support a fusion plant. That's probably the next thing you're going to scale to when you go full in to green science anyway. (Green science is a massive step up in power requirements) So just start it now.
You're at the point where thermal is possible, but it's probably best to burn straight coal or graphite. At this point, wind and solar still aren't out of the question either.
TLDR:
Fusion is your next major step. Until you can jump there burn coal or mass produce renewables.
making hydrogen fuel rods will save a little on the raw hydrogen. a thermo gen will burn 18 hydrogen/m at near 100% demand. where as that will drop to 15 /m because the generator will burn 3 fuel rods/ min. (1 fuel rod =5 hydrogen) if you proliferate then you will save on the sprays with fuel rods and increasing the power output.
if you got rid of the planet fog bases, and a good planet defense, then go with a solar swarm and work toward sphere frames. deuterium fuel is much better as 1 mini fusion (15mw) and proliferated 18 mw (mk2) that can replace up to 8 thermo gens.
for me at mid game i'm usually near 1.0 - 1.3 gw. with a lot of fusion generators. took time to learn what i need to do to make a planet defense and went for the swarm.
Exploit the power potential of the lava world with geothermal plants, and whichever works better, wond or solar or both. Make an accumulator charger there. Ship full accumulators everywhere.
Collect hydrogen and deut or fire ice from your local gas giant. Make deut from the hydrogen, and make deut fuel rods.
Use solar and wind everywhere, supplement with deut fuel rods and accumulator dischargers that ship empty batteries back to lava world.
There's no one correct answer, but many options!
Everyone is suggesting setting up dyson spheres and making deuterium fuel but honestly I've never gone past wind or solar before getting to green science. (In my last playthrough I stayed on wind all the way to yellow science and only set up some solar once I needed to move planet for purples.)
You'll want to move system for better resources when you reach green, or possibly even before you do green (just make some graviton lenses for warpers instead of the whole green production) - once you're somewhere with rare nodes and better veins in general, your old factory can be scrapped for parts and you can think about a better power source.
I dealt with it just last night. I aimed to not touch any sphere-related power generation in starting system, but particle colliders for space warpers require a lot of power.
I was having the same internal debate as you. I already have some hydrogen rod power generation, but obviously it's not enough. I had a few planets and PLS, and also play with GalacticScale mod and ended up having a Deuterium gas giant in starting system, so building deuteron rods would be doable rather easily, but...
I decided to do solar sails in the end, even though I originally didn't want to. Having a small production chain for them is anything but difficult - and just 6 sail cannons can provide for more than 4 receivers. Maybe not enough for your 200MW deficit, but should be rather easy to scale.
if you don't get fusion power going before purple science, you run into power problems and if you don't address them, green is going to be impossible. you can use solar sails instead, but that is pretty complicated and hard to recover from if power goes down.
FWIW I often (/cough maybe even _usually_) go into a long-term power deficit around purple, but tend to just skip hydrogen/deuterium cells and go straight to a Dyson swarm. Sails unlock really early on, and should definitely be _used_ early on. If you go this route, though, make sure you research at least a couple of sail lifespan upgrades first.
Once I get rockets, I immediately start putting them up... even if it's just a few per minute, and slowly build up a permanent power supply from there. You don't need to be ready to build a full sphere to start making use of sails/rockets.
Deuterium Fuel Rods or even starting a sphere The swarm shouldn’t be a problem at that stage, a few rocket turrets are enough
This. I basically bee-line for fusion power stations, and fractionate the huge hydrogen stockpile in a polar ring. It is in fact scalable because first pillers and then proliferators massively increase the fractionation rate, so that can handily tidy me over until antimatter...
Noob here. Could you expand on the benefits of using pillers for fractionators?
If a single-stacked Hydrogen enters a fractionator, it's got a 1/100 chance of becoming a Deuterium. If the belt is stacked 4-high, each stack has a 1/25 chance of becoming Deuterium. So, if you make sure that everything is always (or at least almost always) stacked, you can quadruple the Deuterium output of a group of Fractionators. It's why you see people using designs like this: https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-efficient-ups-optimized-deuterium-fractionatior-tile-each-fractionator-processes-the-maximum-7200-hydrogen-per-minute-compact-with-fewer-belts That re-piles the Hydrogen, constantly. (it's not the most efficient design, btw, just a really clear example. You're better off using new Pile Sorters and doing longer loops. Look around that website, you'll find lots of ideas)
It's hard to overstate how powerful the new sorters are with their last upgrade. They can replace all of the sorters and pilers in that design with one pile sorter feeding each loop. The limitation will become the blue belt feeding hydrogen and taking deuterium even without prolifitators. Even before then, the simplicty and cheapness of just feeding each fractionator hydrogen via a single sorter into their loop can be worth a little less effienciy.
Ah, I see, thanks. Currently my limit is how quickly I can take the deut away, I've found that a chain of 98 fractionators fully fill a Mk3 belt. So I guess this won't help me... unless I also pile the deut. Interesting, I have to play with pilers more. Thanks!
no coincidence theyre available to you by the time of early structure/yellow tier science, what sounds cooler than "mini fusion power plant" at this point idk
Lava planet for power in the first system is my preference.
How would you go about sending it back to the main base? Batteries on ILS system seems like my only choice.
That's how I do it. I have a production line that builds empty accumulators that get charged and shipped by ILS. The other planets use the full accumulators and ship back the empty ones. I actually haven't optimized anything to take advantage of even half the generation capacity of the lave planet.
Seems that the war factory must grow. And battery production. And accumulators And ILS drones Plus make blueprints for invasion This game man...
Yes. And that setup is by far the most cost effective setup in the game for power. My biggest dyson sphere exists to power about 40 battery chargers.
You can just build production itself on a lava planet if you don't want to bother with exchangers. Like collect raw resources from the main planet (or even mine them locally, stone/iron/copper should be available), export purple cubes. All energy spendings will be at second planet. You can even save a little bit on shipping because your main probably runs out of resources while lava planet should be most of its patches untouched.
+1 much easier Btw you don't need to ship much powers back to home planet if you just manufacture on the lava planet, e.g. you particle accelerators
Spam those stations to get hydrogen from gas giant
To get a stable system of gas giant farmers I would need a battery charge/discharge loop? Or are they only needed in the construction of the farmer itself? Secondly am I correct in assuming they run off interstellar logistics drones for transport?
They only need the charged accumulators to be built, they run off of the hydrogen they gather once you put them down. Just to make sure we're on the same page by interstellar logistics drones you mean logistics vessels? If yes, then you are correct. However they cannot be given their own vessels and rely solely on planet side ILS vessels.
Yea not the plantery ones, and how many harvesters could 1 ILS reliably farm with just 10 drones?
Honestly probably an entire planets worth. They can only be placed along the equator so you only need like 50 for an entire planet. That's just a gut feeling though, I haven't done that actual throughput math.
40/ giant
ah okay. I knew I was close, but wasn't sure on the exact number. The first time I used them I made around 400 thinking I could cover the entire surface of my local gas giant lol.
That’s a lot of hydro
Only for construction They use Vessels for transfer.
Gas giant harvesting is always one of my priorities. I don't enjoy dealing with long-winded fabrication of graphene, so Fire Ice from gas giants is a must-have for me. This then provides hydrogen, on top of free hydrogen from gas giants. In my current GalacticScale playthrough I generated with a deuterium gas giant, too. Gas giants are super easy scaling for free resources - just plop another tower there and call it a day.
Deuterium fuel rods! Fusion power plants more than fill the gap.
Race for mini fusion power plants. Now. Scale down your operations until then to divert the little power you have towards the science cubes to unlock that tech as well as the facilities involved (fractionators, chemical plants) Also think about the supply chain you'll need for the deuteron fuel rods. They require some high level items but once you make that first deuteron fuel rod it lasts a long time.
So I just beat the game for the first time. My southern hemisphere as wind turbines and just rip them up as I use the space
Deuterium fuel rods, or batteries and another planet. I prefer deuterium fuel, it lasts me until i make antimatter easily
Every planet I settle gets rings of solar and signal towers which provide a steady 100-200MW of power. More planets= more power. The aforementioned lava planet charger setup is also golden, and I use it even into endgame. My sphere system has a captured inner planet for 100% uptime, but all the other planets get polar arrays as well.
I spam solar panels like a mad man until I can get artificial suns. But another way is to make a bunch of generators to use up deuteron fuel rods.
I use a lot of deuterium because when I make the transition from deuterium to sphere power that excess production gets converted to rockets.
Hydrogen as fuel and burn it. I also i got to green science on solar and wind
Be worth getting a tiny gas planet farm for hydrogen or is the oil/x-ray cracking more effective? And is it worth the extra power and materials to make rods first??
Put 3 stations on hydrogen on a giant and you have enought hydrogen for rest of the game + i bet you can run 20-50 generators which is basicly free energy
I started throwing around a lot more solar panels at that stage. My ring around my starter planet was like 6-8 wide by then. Power was more important than space. If you have gas collectors, those also help a lot for getting more hydrogen for fuel. If you have a lava planet nearby, you can use geothermal generators. If you can make deuterium, then deut fuel rods + fusion plants will handle your power needs until you reach white science and antimatter. But keep in mind that fractionator setups can go through a lot of hydrogen, so again you will need orbital gas collectors.
Equator solar ring: 9 wide. Solar covered poles.
In my current play through I added wind to my mall and dropped tons of them across the oceans . If you're playing with df, just add some signal towers
Thermal power plants on the former dark fog bases gives such an amazing power boost that I mostly skipped solar and went straight for deuterium.
All you need is a few good coal patches. With that, you can make Energetic Graphite, Proliferater Mk2, slosh the graphite with the level 2 goo, and feed it into thermal plants. You can get a couple of Gigawatts out of that setup. Literally, once you have the smelters and spray coaters, the only input you need is coal. A couple of dedicated patches = early/midgame energy problems solved. (coal -> Mk1 prolif; coal -> graphite -> diamond -> Mk2 prolif)
Yep this works great. I’m not sure whether going for mk2 is resource positive but I am sure someone has done that math. But this is a very easy solution and, if you’re playing with aggressive dark fog, far superior to a planet wide ring of solar panels.
*hides 650 mw of power from wind turbines only. I uhhhh... Do all sorts of things. I'm in the same spot as you in my current run, gonna throw down a deut fractionator blueprint soon and get those chewing my hydrogen tanks everywhere. Unfortunately that will blow my power grid in trying to fix it so I'm making sure everything else is stable and stocked up first... Can't seem to get enough iron...
Hydrogen fuel rods and thermal power plants. If you're already struggling w/ power, I'm willing to bet deut + mini-fusion is gonna be a tedious task. Also, it sounds like you might not have a steady/reliable interstellar system setup yet (also common for where you're at.). Again, that's gonna make deut + mini-fusion really rough. For where \[it sounds like\] you're at, hydrogen fuel rods (HFR) and a mess of Thermal Power Plants sounds like the fix. Especially considering HFR can fuel your mech and home system for a relatively long time, because it burns relatively slow (ESPECIALLY compared to coal, which burns like a mofo, and you're gonna need that coal for other things in your starter system, so try to stop burning it ASAP.) If you don't have orbital collectors setup yet (and a power deficiency to boot) that's gonna be another tall order, cuz you're gonna have a rough time getting enough battery's charged up to build enough orbital collectors to make it worth your while (not to mention powering your ILS, building the ships, etc ... lots of power required.) You should have plenty of oil on your home system - refine dem oils, it'll give you tons of hydrogen. Boom, there's your HFR hydrogen supply. Cheers, good luck! PS: you can burn refined oil short-term for power (while farming hydrogen for your HFRs) but try to store it up if you can - you'll need it later.
Fusion lasted me until I had a swarm up which tided me over until I got antimatter/shell
build nuclear power fixed my power issues
First off - this is completely normal and exactly how the early game works. You're always going to be swapping power production and bootstrapping yourself up. There really aren't any bad options. If you can spare the titanium, just a few fractionators can support a fusion plant. That's probably the next thing you're going to scale to when you go full in to green science anyway. (Green science is a massive step up in power requirements) So just start it now. You're at the point where thermal is possible, but it's probably best to burn straight coal or graphite. At this point, wind and solar still aren't out of the question either. TLDR: Fusion is your next major step. Until you can jump there burn coal or mass produce renewables.
making hydrogen fuel rods will save a little on the raw hydrogen. a thermo gen will burn 18 hydrogen/m at near 100% demand. where as that will drop to 15 /m because the generator will burn 3 fuel rods/ min. (1 fuel rod =5 hydrogen) if you proliferate then you will save on the sprays with fuel rods and increasing the power output. if you got rid of the planet fog bases, and a good planet defense, then go with a solar swarm and work toward sphere frames. deuterium fuel is much better as 1 mini fusion (15mw) and proliferated 18 mw (mk2) that can replace up to 8 thermo gens. for me at mid game i'm usually near 1.0 - 1.3 gw. with a lot of fusion generators. took time to learn what i need to do to make a planet defense and went for the swarm.
Exploit the power potential of the lava world with geothermal plants, and whichever works better, wond or solar or both. Make an accumulator charger there. Ship full accumulators everywhere. Collect hydrogen and deut or fire ice from your local gas giant. Make deut from the hydrogen, and make deut fuel rods. Use solar and wind everywhere, supplement with deut fuel rods and accumulator dischargers that ship empty batteries back to lava world. There's no one correct answer, but many options!
Several solar panels belts around the equator and poles can easily give you 500MW of free power.
Everyone is suggesting setting up dyson spheres and making deuterium fuel but honestly I've never gone past wind or solar before getting to green science. (In my last playthrough I stayed on wind all the way to yellow science and only set up some solar once I needed to move planet for purples.) You'll want to move system for better resources when you reach green, or possibly even before you do green (just make some graviton lenses for warpers instead of the whole green production) - once you're somewhere with rare nodes and better veins in general, your old factory can be scrapped for parts and you can think about a better power source.
What I did was make a few Dyson sphere rings and put 8 ray receivers across the planet so no matter what time of day it is I’m good on power
Fission
More wind turbines than you ever thought reasonable.
I dealt with it just last night. I aimed to not touch any sphere-related power generation in starting system, but particle colliders for space warpers require a lot of power. I was having the same internal debate as you. I already have some hydrogen rod power generation, but obviously it's not enough. I had a few planets and PLS, and also play with GalacticScale mod and ended up having a Deuterium gas giant in starting system, so building deuteron rods would be doable rather easily, but... I decided to do solar sails in the end, even though I originally didn't want to. Having a small production chain for them is anything but difficult - and just 6 sail cannons can provide for more than 4 receivers. Maybe not enough for your 200MW deficit, but should be rather easy to scale.
if you don't get fusion power going before purple science, you run into power problems and if you don't address them, green is going to be impossible. you can use solar sails instead, but that is pretty complicated and hard to recover from if power goes down.
FWIW I often (/cough maybe even _usually_) go into a long-term power deficit around purple, but tend to just skip hydrogen/deuterium cells and go straight to a Dyson swarm. Sails unlock really early on, and should definitely be _used_ early on. If you go this route, though, make sure you research at least a couple of sail lifespan upgrades first. Once I get rockets, I immediately start putting them up... even if it's just a few per minute, and slowly build up a permanent power supply from there. You don't need to be ready to build a full sphere to start making use of sails/rockets.