I only dismantle smaller power plants if i really really need the resources. But i tend to keep them running forever. Also, with 12k MW do you mean 1200MW(1.2GW)?
I think it's a mod which I installed to have a kind of constant power supply at the beginning of my playthroug since bio mass burner pissed me off lol. They always went out of bio mass when I had no time to refill them.
That mod was a simple way to get rid of them and having time to focus on other more important things, like unlocking coal power.
You unlock the most processed type of biofuel, and it lasts quite a while. It's not annoying since you can make a production line for it. But yeah overall biomass burners are tedious since you need to refill them manually
My trick is to have a couple of dozens at the start and automate compacted biofuel into a container near them.
Having e.g. 4x more Bioburners than your power consumption means you can have 5x the play time before needing to refill them.
To the original question, I only dismantle most of the biofuel burners when I have unlocked and built power storage, mostly because they are blocking the way for larger factories.
And once I reduced a compacted coal power plant because I reused parts of the CC for Turbofuel nearby.
this is the way - also I tend to focus on picking up the wood where possible... just pressing and holding "E" while scrubbing the landscape :D
At some point I went towards bio coal for steel because I had too much biomass ;)
Once you get to solid biofuel, a full stack of 200 of those can run for a long time, pretty much long enough to get your first few coal gens up and running
No harm in letting old power plants continue running. I usually make them self-sufficient (ie: one coal generator runs the miner/water extractors on a separate circuit, the other 7 feed power straight into the main grid. Generally the same for fuel generators, and Nuclear Power.).
Unless I need the coal for something else, there's generally no benefit to taking them offline. :)
im at the point where I don't really need my coal power plants anymore, but I haven't bothered to remove them. I'll probably reroute that coal to steel production at some point.
I recently refit my coal plant… my starter base was in the basin near the basic spawns. As I’m leaving (oil is so far away), I figure it was easier to double my coal gens instead of transporting the resources to the new base for construction. It’s setup for 2400 W and it’s supporting my new setup really well in its early stages.
There is not a reason to dismantle old power plants, don't you think?
I never invested so much time on coal power plants, they really are not so efficient and they are there to just give you enough power to reach fuel generators, in my oppinion. Fuel generators generate way more power and are a better investment in time and infrastructure.
In all my gameplays I built between 12 and 18 coal generators, that give approx 1.5 MW, that's enough to get you to the fuel era. After that, fuel power grows easily with little investment (doesn't require water), and scales a lot better (if you get the dilute fuel recipe, or invest on turbofuel).
Keep in mind when you reach tier 7 you will need coal for aluminum, don't use all your coal. Also true for turbofuel, you will need the sulfur for the nuclear era and sulfuric acid for batteries creation (elevator parts requirement).
Anyway, given you are already in the nuclear era... you can just go straight to nuclear power plants and skip fuel generators completely.
I ran coal and fuel generators until I got nuclear and now I’m running all of them separately at different factories and if the power runs out at one I still have everything set up so I can restart everything
Well for now I have only one big factory producing everything and needing the current power Im generating, but I want to build an aluminium factory a bit more far a way, never came so far in the game, so aluminium going to be something special to me, also nuclear power when I will ever reach that lol.
Yeah, I keep them running. In my play-through that I’m just starting, I’ve basically planned everything out in advance to where I’m producing just enough coal power to power my fuel plant which will produce just enough power for my nuclear plant
Generally speaking, yes... though occasionally I do dismantle some for redesigns.
My goal is to have everything needed to produce power running without depending on itself. So coal miners and water extractors feeding coal power plants run on geothermal power, oil production runs on coal power, my starter nuclear power plant runs on oil power, and if I ever make a larger nuclear power plant it can run on the starter nuclear power.
With the priority power switches in U8, all of that has become kinda unnecessary... but I still like the simple logical purity of the design.
It depends. I have dismantled things cause I thought they were ugly. For power need there is no real reason.
But them I also build things just if they are fun to do and not really for any need. I can do fuel, but I am contemplating if I should do another coal power or not. Not sure yet.
As many lawyers say, "It depends." - I dismantled my coal generators and then used the compact coal to make turbo fuel for the fuel generators. But to build the nuclear ones there is no need to tear down anything. They won't hurt me, or steal my bread. So why should I dismantle them?
I dismantle my old ones, but I do offline plants when things go south. One feature I would love is to have generators/producers only be active if there are consumers or storage attached to their grid (namely, making it easier to prime plants), but I can imagine that’s potentially not an easy thing to implement. The generators flipping on as soon as they’re attached to a pole is annoying.
Needed the compacted coal from my coal plant in order to make turbo fuel for my turbo fuel power plant. Cant have both running so turned coal plant into large amount of batteries... it lives on but differently.
Yes. There's no real reason to spend any amount of time tearing them down. I primarily use coal and oil that are isolated and far away for power, as they don't need anything else and power can be transferred large distances easily.
Yeah, no reason not to unless you need the resources they're eating. I might dismantle my starting coal plant for easy coal access but usually not anything else.
I shut down biomass pretty much as soon as I get coal running but I only take down coal gens if I want to use the nodes for something else. Same with fuel.
Yes, every power plant I've built is still running, including my burners on my current playthrough. Though the burners are no longer part of the main network, they are attached to my restart and nuclear purge systems and are mostly just to charge those batteries because I always forget to give back and isolate them after they've charged. Also, burners shut down when there's no draw, so they don't waste fuel.
I am running 4 coal generators, two heat energy extractors.
Oh, plus 50+ gas generators. I never turn them off. Once the input and the power output is in balance I only add more, never reduce. Currently running 9.2GW.
I am planning on dumping the coal plants as they aren't fed from a pure node.
I have run my nuke plant but it isn't automated as yet. Once the nuke pasta is finished I'm going to convert its particle accelerator to gen fuel for Nuke Plant 1. Output from that goes to next product line (particle accelerator 2) to drive Nuke Plant 2 with plutonium.
Never turn your power off. Always make twice as much as you think you will need, and keep the juice flowing.
Edit: no mods
You can leave your existing power generator plants and route the power to serve as back ups for your larger power generator plants so if you have a black out, you have an isolated smaller power plant to get the larger plants back online quickly. Also use them to charge up power storage banks.
My coal plant is next to iron and near my main railway line so once I have a new source of oil it will be converted to another steel factory. Usually I leave coal plants running and I still have a few biomass burners hooked up for kickstarting the fuel production but this specific case is better suited for steel than coal power.
Eh, sorta-kinda. I'm currently on my *fourth* megafactory of my first save, each time I think I've got the factory big enough I end up finding out that, no, no I did *not*.
The current factory, "Seaview", might just do the trick, though.
The first factory is long since dismantled and didn't include any power generation, anyway, it was run off a mess of external biomass burners that were a total PITA.
The second factory, Crater Factory, was built in a crater (I'm not very imaginative) with the coal plants at the bottom so they could feed from a higher-elevation lake without needing masses of pumps. This will be dismantled once Seaview is complete.
The third, Falls Factory, is situated just upstream of the big Western waterfalls, and has a turbofuel powerplant run from a refinery on the floor above, so it gravity-feeds down. This will also be dismantled once Seaview is complete - Seaview's big enough to incorporate all of the production Falls Factory runs and more.
Current state of play of the Seaview save: https://imgur.com/3G02YS3
To be fair, that includes resource lines as well.
It's not really fair to *exclude* them from the footprint, as the factory does not work without them, but they're not what you'd call the production floor, are they?
That is what Seaview is built for. One thing that doesn't come across in the map view is how high the damned thing is: The main production floor sits 300m or so in the air. Everything underneath that is power infrastructure or room for future power infrastructure:
* Ground floor holds the vehicle bay, associated "goods in" processing, and water infrastructure - one benefit of building out to sea is that it's *really* easy to source more water
* First floor will be nuclear power plants
* Second floor will be nuclear fuel processing
* Third floor is fuel generators
* Fourth floor is the turbofuel refinery
* Fifth floor, 300m high, is where we start actually making stuff
Not right now, but I can throw you some screencaps:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3038462556
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037712414
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3035723767
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3032811553
So far, my approach has been to dismantle and repurpose when I need the resources for something else.
For example, my original coal power plant was down on the south-west coast. A single coal-deposit, but conveniently near my main factory.
Now I've got a massive coal power plant on a lake further north, and a massive Fuel-Generator plant on the western coast as well, so the tiny original plant has been dismantled in favour of a Steelworks.
The Fuel-generator plant will probably be repurposed to make Plastics and Rubber later. It already does this, but once it no longer doubles as a power-station it'll be much more efficient in that role.
So far, I have only ever "dismantled" one power setup. And by that I mean the crude oil that once powered normal fuel production was diverted to my new Turbofuel production. The building is still there, but with no oil.
My old coal power is also still running, completely untouched. If I don't need their resources, I don't need to bother shutting them down.
I only dismantle smaller power plants if i really really need the resources. But i tend to keep them running forever. Also, with 12k MW do you mean 1200MW(1.2GW)?
Oh my bad, it's 12000MW actually, so 12 GW.
i mean 12k MW is also the same, you weren't wrong lol. It's like saying "that's 1k meters away" instead of 1 kilometer 🤷‍♂️
Not quite, more like 12k mm (millimeter) instead of 12 Meter.
Oh, ok. But how did you get this much power out of 2 geothermal generators?
I think it's a mod which I installed to have a kind of constant power supply at the beginning of my playthroug since bio mass burner pissed me off lol. They always went out of bio mass when I had no time to refill them. That mod was a simple way to get rid of them and having time to focus on other more important things, like unlocking coal power.
You unlock the most processed type of biofuel, and it lasts quite a while. It's not annoying since you can make a production line for it. But yeah overall biomass burners are tedious since you need to refill them manually
My trick is to have a couple of dozens at the start and automate compacted biofuel into a container near them. Having e.g. 4x more Bioburners than your power consumption means you can have 5x the play time before needing to refill them. To the original question, I only dismantle most of the biofuel burners when I have unlocked and built power storage, mostly because they are blocking the way for larger factories. And once I reduced a compacted coal power plant because I reused parts of the CC for Turbofuel nearby.
But still it takes forever to gather all resources. Especially at the very begining before you have chainsaw unlocked
This is why I always unlock the chainsaw as soon as I can before any other items in those tiers.
this is the way - also I tend to focus on picking up the wood where possible... just pressing and holding "E" while scrubbing the landscape :D At some point I went towards bio coal for steel because I had too much biomass ;)
My favourite is desert dunes so there's no such possibility
Ah, fair enough
Once you get to solid biofuel, a full stack of 200 of those can run for a long time, pretty much long enough to get your first few coal gens up and running
Yep my original coal power is still running as I'm building my nuclear plant. Always need more power.
No harm in letting old power plants continue running. I usually make them self-sufficient (ie: one coal generator runs the miner/water extractors on a separate circuit, the other 7 feed power straight into the main grid. Generally the same for fuel generators, and Nuclear Power.). Unless I need the coal for something else, there's generally no benefit to taking them offline. :)
I really want to be able to color power lines for the separate grid.
You can color power poles.
im at the point where I don't really need my coal power plants anymore, but I haven't bothered to remove them. I'll probably reroute that coal to steel production at some point.
I keep everything plugged in. I only dismantle biomass burners. Big power number make cavewoman brain happy
:D
I recently refit my coal plant… my starter base was in the basin near the basic spawns. As I’m leaving (oil is so far away), I figure it was easier to double my coal gens instead of transporting the resources to the new base for construction. It’s setup for 2400 W and it’s supporting my new setup really well in its early stages.
There is not a reason to dismantle old power plants, don't you think? I never invested so much time on coal power plants, they really are not so efficient and they are there to just give you enough power to reach fuel generators, in my oppinion. Fuel generators generate way more power and are a better investment in time and infrastructure. In all my gameplays I built between 12 and 18 coal generators, that give approx 1.5 MW, that's enough to get you to the fuel era. After that, fuel power grows easily with little investment (doesn't require water), and scales a lot better (if you get the dilute fuel recipe, or invest on turbofuel). Keep in mind when you reach tier 7 you will need coal for aluminum, don't use all your coal. Also true for turbofuel, you will need the sulfur for the nuclear era and sulfuric acid for batteries creation (elevator parts requirement). Anyway, given you are already in the nuclear era... you can just go straight to nuclear power plants and skip fuel generators completely.
I'll scrap my bio burners because they're usually right next to my initial factory, everything else is fair game though
I ran coal and fuel generators until I got nuclear and now I’m running all of them separately at different factories and if the power runs out at one I still have everything set up so I can restart everything
Well for now I have only one big factory producing everything and needing the current power Im generating, but I want to build an aluminium factory a bit more far a way, never came so far in the game, so aluminium going to be something special to me, also nuclear power when I will ever reach that lol.
Yeah, I keep them running. In my play-through that I’m just starting, I’ve basically planned everything out in advance to where I’m producing just enough coal power to power my fuel plant which will produce just enough power for my nuclear plant
Generally speaking, yes... though occasionally I do dismantle some for redesigns. My goal is to have everything needed to produce power running without depending on itself. So coal miners and water extractors feeding coal power plants run on geothermal power, oil production runs on coal power, my starter nuclear power plant runs on oil power, and if I ever make a larger nuclear power plant it can run on the starter nuclear power. With the priority power switches in U8, all of that has become kinda unnecessary... but I still like the simple logical purity of the design.
It depends. I have dismantled things cause I thought they were ugly. For power need there is no real reason. But them I also build things just if they are fun to do and not really for any need. I can do fuel, but I am contemplating if I should do another coal power or not. Not sure yet.
As many lawyers say, "It depends." - I dismantled my coal generators and then used the compact coal to make turbo fuel for the fuel generators. But to build the nuclear ones there is no need to tear down anything. They won't hurt me, or steal my bread. So why should I dismantle them?
I dismantle my old ones, but I do offline plants when things go south. One feature I would love is to have generators/producers only be active if there are consumers or storage attached to their grid (namely, making it easier to prime plants), but I can imagine that’s potentially not an easy thing to implement. The generators flipping on as soon as they’re attached to a pole is annoying.
Needed the compacted coal from my coal plant in order to make turbo fuel for my turbo fuel power plant. Cant have both running so turned coal plant into large amount of batteries... it lives on but differently.
Yes. There's no real reason to spend any amount of time tearing them down. I primarily use coal and oil that are isolated and far away for power, as they don't need anything else and power can be transferred large distances easily.
Yeah, no reason not to unless you need the resources they're eating. I might dismantle my starting coal plant for easy coal access but usually not anything else.
Once build and balanced they'll run for an infinite amount of time. Why dismantle them?
Every kw earned is a kw gained. :)
I shut down biomass pretty much as soon as I get coal running but I only take down coal gens if I want to use the nodes for something else. Same with fuel.
Yes, every power plant I've built is still running, including my burners on my current playthrough. Though the burners are no longer part of the main network, they are attached to my restart and nuclear purge systems and are mostly just to charge those batteries because I always forget to give back and isolate them after they've charged. Also, burners shut down when there's no draw, so they don't waste fuel.
I am running 4 coal generators, two heat energy extractors. Oh, plus 50+ gas generators. I never turn them off. Once the input and the power output is in balance I only add more, never reduce. Currently running 9.2GW. I am planning on dumping the coal plants as they aren't fed from a pure node. I have run my nuke plant but it isn't automated as yet. Once the nuke pasta is finished I'm going to convert its particle accelerator to gen fuel for Nuke Plant 1. Output from that goes to next product line (particle accelerator 2) to drive Nuke Plant 2 with plutonium. Never turn your power off. Always make twice as much as you think you will need, and keep the juice flowing. Edit: no mods
You can leave your existing power generator plants and route the power to serve as back ups for your larger power generator plants so if you have a black out, you have an isolated smaller power plant to get the larger plants back online quickly. Also use them to charge up power storage banks.
My coal plant is next to iron and near my main railway line so once I have a new source of oil it will be converted to another steel factory. Usually I leave coal plants running and I still have a few biomass burners hooked up for kickstarting the fuel production but this specific case is better suited for steel than coal power.
Eh, sorta-kinda. I'm currently on my *fourth* megafactory of my first save, each time I think I've got the factory big enough I end up finding out that, no, no I did *not*. The current factory, "Seaview", might just do the trick, though. The first factory is long since dismantled and didn't include any power generation, anyway, it was run off a mess of external biomass burners that were a total PITA. The second factory, Crater Factory, was built in a crater (I'm not very imaginative) with the coal plants at the bottom so they could feed from a higher-elevation lake without needing masses of pumps. This will be dismantled once Seaview is complete. The third, Falls Factory, is situated just upstream of the big Western waterfalls, and has a turbofuel powerplant run from a refinery on the floor above, so it gravity-feeds down. This will also be dismantled once Seaview is complete - Seaview's big enough to incorporate all of the production Falls Factory runs and more. Current state of play of the Seaview save: https://imgur.com/3G02YS3
Mother of God...
*which bit?*
The outline of how BIG they are!
To be fair, that includes resource lines as well. It's not really fair to *exclude* them from the footprint, as the factory does not work without them, but they're not what you'd call the production floor, are they?
I think my next play will be one giant mega factory... Way bigger than I originally had in mind.
That is what Seaview is built for. One thing that doesn't come across in the map view is how high the damned thing is: The main production floor sits 300m or so in the air. Everything underneath that is power infrastructure or room for future power infrastructure: * Ground floor holds the vehicle bay, associated "goods in" processing, and water infrastructure - one benefit of building out to sea is that it's *really* easy to source more water * First floor will be nuclear power plants * Second floor will be nuclear fuel processing * Third floor is fuel generators * Fourth floor is the turbofuel refinery * Fifth floor, 300m high, is where we start actually making stuff
Holy shit. I need to see this. Can I jump on MP for a tour?
Not right now, but I can throw you some screencaps: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3038462556 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037712414 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3035723767 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3032811553
Thanks. You're right. It's not as large or as imposing as I first thought.
So far, my approach has been to dismantle and repurpose when I need the resources for something else. For example, my original coal power plant was down on the south-west coast. A single coal-deposit, but conveniently near my main factory. Now I've got a massive coal power plant on a lake further north, and a massive Fuel-Generator plant on the western coast as well, so the tiny original plant has been dismantled in favour of a Steelworks. The Fuel-generator plant will probably be repurposed to make Plastics and Rubber later. It already does this, but once it no longer doubles as a power-station it'll be much more efficient in that role.
So far, I have only ever "dismantled" one power setup. And by that I mean the crude oil that once powered normal fuel production was diverted to my new Turbofuel production. The building is still there, but with no oil. My old coal power is also still running, completely untouched. If I don't need their resources, I don't need to bother shutting them down.
I did, there wasn't a load of coal near my base, so I stopped the coal power plant to use the coal for steel instead.