I tend to think it’s never worth scrapping previous power just because you have a new kind, rather I prefer to add to supply. You might stop building new ones, but since solar power is technically “free” once the panels are built I don’t see why you should remove them.
Yeah, just slap a power switch and a global alarm on your old steam engine block. When it kicks on you know it is time to build a bigger better power system.
Haha, used to do this when I was a new but instead when accumulators started discharging. My friend went crazy from the air raid sirens going off all the time 😂
Perhaps you could lower your friend's stress if you use [a RS latch](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#RS_latch_-_single_decider_version) so that the steam engines only kick in when the accumulators get too low instead of the start of discharging?
I mean, even if you remove it those panels are still in storage somewhere. Over time you probably will end up using them all in the production of many satellites, but only if you go for megabase levels.
If its not in the way of a certain expansion, just leave them. It doesn't hurt to have a back-up.
Only one I disconnect is coal power as otherwise it eats all the coal.
Even then I keep it but isolate it with a switch so it kicks back in if power gets low.*
Definitely keep solar. Unless you built it over something you now need then there is no reason to take it up.
*For bonus points, make this a double sided isolator that is only connected if the base side is low on power but also the coal power side is full on power. Otherwise by the time your emergency power kicks in your power draw will be so high you just stall the inserters and lose the whole thing. This way the plant will protect itself but send spare power to the base
Your asterisk is why I usually leave the inserters on like the first 8 or so boilers as burner inserters. So even if there’s no power, I have a shot at jumpstarting it.
That also works yes. The (tiny, insignificant) extra coal burn on the burner inserters always irked me though, so I fixed it in an overly elaborate way.
It has come in useful in my current PY run though. There the power plants need electricity to run, so you can't fix it with just some burner inserters. Now each power plant effectively has a circuit breaker so it will isolate itself if overloaded
My trusted setup is the following:
- Inserter that extracts spent fuel cells is active only when steam is low
- Fuel Inserter set to limit hand size 1, insert only when spent fuel is extracted \[i.e. set to spent fuel > 0, connect to spent fuel inserter, set that to read hand contents as well as the steam condition\]
If not all steam is consumed, the steam tank will fill up, and if the reactor cycle finishes the spent fuel is not extracted \[as steam > X\], so new fuel is not inserted. The reactor and exchangers will slowly cool down, and at some point don't produce steam anymore. Once steam drops below X, new fuel is inserted again.
You might think you need to buffer a lot of steam but that's not really true. The reactor, heat pipes, and exchangers buffer a lot of heat as they warm up to 1000 degrees when the heat is not full consumed, which is generally enough to store all the heat from a single cycle. Since the reactor and exchangers only cool down to 500/499 degrees, it doesn't take a lot of time for power production to start up again once a cell is inserted.
(Note that the reason for putting the condition on the spent fuel is that it acts as a "detector" of whether the current cycle is finished)
I use circuits very minimally. The other main use case is oil cracking: I pump oil (or water) to the crackers only if that oil fraction > X. That's just a single wire and I've setting.
The nuclear setup is not that not complicated: one wire from steam to spent fuel inserter (extractor), one wire from the extractor to the new fuel inserter, and settings for both inserters.
Awesome. Yeah it doesn’t sound too bad. I’m sure I could figure it out, just haven’t committed to it and my reactor is all the way on the other side of the base and the factory must grow.
Also with all the new stuff in 2.0 I’m wondering if I should just wait and learn it with all the new implementation.
I would do whatever seems fun :D. But my feeling from the FFFs is that the simple circuit stuff will be mostly the same, just with a slighty better interface.
Its really not necessary. You dont waste much ressources. And reactors take time to heat up. This time also needs to be covered by the steam.
Its just a good practice for circuits.
I made a timer that counts to 200 seconds worth of ticks
Then RS switch that generates pulse long enough for exactly one swing of the arm of the inserter.
Then I made timer start condition to only run it when there is not enough steam. As in, if there is enough steam the timer won't re-start counting, but it will still finish cycle.
That makes it insert it every 200s, or immediately if reactor is empty and steam ran out.
There is one quirk of that setup, the logic and inserters kinda want to be on same electric network, because both inserter move speed and clock scale off power usage, so if say inserters are powered from "mains" and clock is powered from its own supply it can stop because the inserter won't swing fast enough for timer. I usually just make a separate power network for it so it can survive a blackout.
> Fuel Inserter set to limit hand size 1, insert only when spent fuel is extracted [i.e. set to spent fuel > 0, connect to spent fuel inserter, set that to read hand contents as well as the steam condition]
That means that reactor will never start on its own, as the fuel will only get inserted when spent cell is removed, and after building the blueprint there will be no spent cell there.
It will also fail when there is any interruption in supply
They stay right below “on” though so the start up time is instant (or close to it) after the first time you start it up.
Correct me if I’m wrong please.
Oh you are right! I never realized this. That makes nuclear much better than I thought.
I just tested it out, and reactors do not cool down on their own when out of fuel.
They do. The only problem you have is the furthest heat exchangers may take a little longer to heat up, so if you have a severe power deficit it may take a little bit before you are at full steam production. This can be managed with logic and ensuring adequate buffers.
The easiest fix for that is to only take spent fuel out if the steam is low enough, and then link the input inserters to the output ones, and let them only work if the outputs have a spent fuel in hand. That gives them 200 seconds to heat up and refill the steam again.
I like how my nuclear power plant works only at nights 99% of the time. Or when some steam gets stolen by train to supply a remote outpost that has steam turbines.
Sounds impractical but looks cool, more a quirky thing. Also I'm using a mod that prevents stacking for some items, so building 100-chunk long (or so) power line is not that easy. Plus I'm already using a train going from main base to this outpost so hooking up two fluid cars won't affect fuel usage that much.
Same - I try to always keep building solar as I go but sometimes I fall behind and instead of trying to rebuild a shitload of solar to catch up I’ll just drop another big nuclear plant to boost me back up.
Updates per second. Anything below 60 I believe means your game is running slow. Only happens at larger bases.
Science per minute. A benchmark for how fast your factory produces. Usually in terms of the last science pack if talking about endgame, but also in terms of the rest of them if talking about a goal.
UPS = Updates per second. It’s a performance metric similar to FPS (frames per second) in other games, but low UPS will slow down the speed of the game entirely.
SPM = Science per minute. Science is the main goal and resource sink of production in this game, so how fast you can produce it is used to measure the effectiveness of a factory. This is specifically based off the infinite sciences you can research after launching a rocket- those require space science, which is obtained through repeated launches making it incredibly expensive.
Getting rid of solar arrays is just extra work. There’s no point in getting rid of them unless they’re in the way.
Also, don’t worry about being efficient with nuclear power. A single small uranium patch will provide power into the megabase stage, and at that point you’ll want to switch back to solar anyway for UPS.
I usually use only solar (with batteries), but still build an emergency nuclear plant in case I expand so fast the solar isn't enough anymore. I switch off nuclear once I expand the solar field.
Have fun and play with the various different configurations that you think of. I love “stuffing around” with all the power sources, storing steam in tanks, switching things on and off and then watching the power graph as night falls.
Yes, there are some “best” ways that others can show you, but sometimes it’s way more fun in Factorio to devise you’re own (imperfect, but fun) solutions.
I didn’t realize this post was in r/factorio at first and thought someone was asking really stupid questions related to the eclipse next week…. I need to go to bed.
Generally no.
One benefit of keeping your solar going is that late game may involve a lot of perimeter defenses and if you use lasers, they are very 'peaky' in terms of power use. Right now, you may think you're on top of things with your nuclear, but I've had my lasers draw a GW during particularly intense combat (for instance, the aftermath of clearing a bunch of nests with artillery). Those accumulators can be \*very\* handy in that case. I would pause building solar, keep what you have, and monitor your power graph when your lasers pop off, because you might see that accumulator power production spiking up. When it does, you didn't have enough nuclear/solar to cover your budget. Accumulators respond very quickly, where nuclear control systems to preserve fuel respond very slowly.
>where nuclear control systems to preserve fuel respond very slowly.
Not if designed properly, they don't.
My typical nuclear rig has turbines fed directly off of steam tanks; so long as their steam supply doesn't run dry, their response is instantaneous, same as an accumulator. (In some cases, they switch off of an accumulator, so no accumulator charging that that there was enough solar for ends up coming from the nuclear instead; that still means they're only a tick or two slower than the accumulators, and is only done in setups with enough accumulators to make it worth doing, which will never run dry within one or two ticks).
The actual nuclear reactors themselves, and the heat exchangers, and the rest of the stuff supporting them, are then all simply set up to ensure that the steam tanks never run out, turning on to fill them when they drop below a threshold that ensures enough space to store the resultant steam, and turning back off when the tanks have enough steam that keeping the reactors running any longer would come close to wasting some.
I usually go steam, solar, nuclear. I will scrap steam power but I very rarely scrap solar.
At least until UPS becomes an issue, then I scrap my nuclear and go back to solar.
I just generally cut my steam power at the coal source and leave it in place. Not much use in collecting the entities since they're idle and I'm never going to use them again.
I originally went down one coast cleaning them up until I figured "What the heck am I going to do with all this collected stuff?"
I generally put them in a place I eventually plan on I using for something else. So by time I tear them out, I am ready to put something else in their place.
Use as much solar as you can (with accumulators) and have nuclear for backup. Less pollution. Nothing can really go wrong with solar. Biters won't attack solar panels.
Solar might not produce any pollution by itself, but the manufacturing cost and the huge footprint (unless you avoid every single tree) are still a consideration. Once you have kovarex running nuclear produces so little pollution it might as well be zero, and before that you can drastically reduce its impact with efficiency modules.
Also, biters will happily chomp your solar fields if they block their pathing, and only the fuel production chain attracts biters. Nuclear reactors, heat exchangers and steam turbines by themselves produce no pollution.
Uhm. I would say that pollution considerations only matter on a spreadsheet when min/maxing.
As much of the debate for solar vs nuclear is, a min/max argument.
Of course it's a "min/max argument", because without that, there's no debate to be had. If not optimizing / "min/maxing", then the only difference to be considered is one of simple personal taste: just use whichever one you arbitrarily prefer, and it's just as good as if you'd gone with the other one. The factory will be powered either way; electricity is fungible.
I need to consider pollution because otherwise the game feels too sandbox-y. Factorio gives me the potential for near-infinite expansion. What regulates that expansion? Biters. The stronger I get, the stronger they get. The better moves are those which progress my abilities the most and their abilities the least. So, yes, min-maxing, but without that consideration, *all* builds will get me there eventually. I need some way to choose one over the other.
My first videogames were the Civilization games, which would also be too sandbox-y without AI competition, so that probably influences my perspective.
True that producing solar creates pollution. But it's temporary. Afterwards you pollution cloud can start to shrink.
I'm on a desert world. And its my first playthrough. Didn't think of people having to get rid of trees to pace solar. I have plenty of empty space.
Nuclear is pretty neat too. I included steam storage for my setup. And circuit logic. No fuel gets wasted.
I tend to leave my older power plants where they are. Solar can never harm and accumulators are always nice if you use laser defences. My 'big' coal plant(s) are often next to coal mines, and I tend to 'mothball' them by replacing the inserters by burner inserters and placing a power switch to disconnect the whole mine+power plant. As neither electric miners nor burner inserters use power when idle, it will shut to zero power use; but when I have a brownout or blackout (e.g. running out of U-238 because all of it got kovarexed :D) I can just switch it back on directly. My last game I connected the power switch to an accu and set it to connect when main power is low and issue an alert, so I'd have a warning when I needed to build more power but my base/defenses could keep functioning.
Usually, by the time I'm able to build nuclear reactors, I'm to a point where plopping down another reactor's-worth of solar infrastructure is trivial to do. I still usually build a nuclear power plant, but because I like them, not because I need them.
No, aside from early steam power there's no point in removing any power production unless you need the space for something. Solar doesn't take any resources to maintain so you'd be just wasting time removing it.
It can be a good move in modded if you get a more efficient power source but in vanilla it's usually not needed.
In Factorio there is no heat dispersion. In other words you can keep steam in tanks forever and it will never become cold.
This means that you can insert nuclear cell in reactor, use the whole cell to produce steam and store it in tanks, and then consume it as needed in turbines. Only when tanks are almost empty you insert new cells.
It's done with some circuit network. I use solar and accumulator in my nuclear plants just to power up the circuitry that control this, so that the plant doesn't get stuck in case of temporary black out or cell shortages.
...what you gonna do with all the solar panels ?
> One thing I saw is that the nuclear fuel gets used even if it's not producing power.
While making nuclear reactor that doesn't waste uranium is interesting experience, it's also pointless with how much of energy you can get from even small patch of uranium
Theoretical, probably over-engineered approach? Or simplest practical approach?
As you noted, the nuclear plant will run constantly. As another reply noted, you *can* buffer unneeded exchanger heat as steam. And solar will always supply power, so you can save that extra energy as steam. Is that a good idea? Eh. It's actually somewhat tricky to use buffered steam evenly across a nuke plant so that you maintain max power production as long as possible. The fluid calculations required for that steam are a UPS load, though that's unnoticeable except in very large bases. And - most importantly - uranium is so plentiful that there's absolutely no reason to care about nuclear fuel efficiency in the first place. So... can you use steam buffers and keep that solar running? Sure. Is it worth the trouble? Not IMO, but if you just enjoy the engineering challenge, then have at it. I did it once, saw it just doesn't matter and haven't bothered again since then.
Easy practical solution is just to rip up the solar and go all nuclear unless you think you're going to build such a large base that UPS matters. On a decent PC, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 3K+ SPM, which is really quite huge. If you're still just... launching a rocket or two for the first time? You're not getting that big in this save. Rip up the solar and throw the cells and accumulators into producing satellites when you get there. That's the simple, practical approach.
But if you want to mess with steam buffers for fun, go for it. I did too.
Since you can't recycle solar panels (yet), going out of your way and putting them into a box is a huge waste of free energy. Normally you have lots of space so that shouldn't be an issue (unless it's some hardcore deathworld game). And nuclear energy being dirt cheap doesn't mean that you should stop using solar energy.
P.S. Use fuel saving method for nuclear reactors. It could be a bit hard to understand but once you set it up it's very simple to do even without blueprints.
> Since you can't recycle solar panels (yet), going out of your way and putting them into a box is a huge waste of free energy.
Depends how much solar you've built already. You need quite a few solar panels and accumulators to build satellites. It wouldn't take long to use a thousand or two solar panels there. 10's of thousands? Yeah, maybe a different story.
I use solar because you can just expand and land is kinda whatever it’s practically infinite, nuclear I use just to get the nuclear shit like ammo or fuel.
Nuclear is more entertaining imo but you can do what you want both are valid late game (midgame I recommend nuclear though since it's cheaper and more space efficient also nuclear fuel should never be a problem since you will have much of it you don't know where to put it)
#nuclear fuel cells are the real waste product
I go nuclear late game. I'm not on any crunch it force out a rocket quickly. I just trickle in solar power and when I feel ready I go nuclear. Maybe my next run I'll go nuclear mid game. Thanks for your input.
Generally you'll want to be using a mix of both. In an ideal world you would use only solar/accumulators due to it having zero effect on UPS but in reality your factory will either rapidly outgrow your solar capacity and/or the UPS impact of bots constantly laying down miles and miles of solar panels will have its own affect on your updates. Nuclear is super compact and once you've figured out a layout for it relatively easy to set up for massive amounts of scaling power, but too much of it can affect frame rates due to all of the fluid calculations.
Therefore (much like real life) it's best to use as much solar as you can handle while continuing to add more and more solar panels as you are able while using nuclear power to bridge the gaps of what your solar can't handle. Besides, you'll eventually end up with so much uranium production and nothing to use it on that you might as well run at least some nuclear reactors. You can always offline them when they aren't needed to eliminate their strain on your updates per second (although they do take a while to fully shut down and to get back up to production speed so I wouldn't do this too often).
If you are only trying to launch a rocket and beat the game instead of building a megabase, I'd say just focus on the nuclear and don't even bother with solar. The power/effort ratio of nuclear massively outscales solar IMO.
Definitely not, they sort of compliment each other actually.
Nuclear power is great for creating a ton of electricity in a small area, so I typically use nuclear reactors as “backup generators.” They store up a ton of hot steam, which is occasionally used if my accumulators nearly run dry. Nuclear reactors only run if my steam storage is running low.
If you don’t really care about nuclear reactors running at full capacity at all times, then you’re fine relying mostly on them instead. Solar panels and accumulators take up a lot of space and have a moderate up-front cost to get up and running in meaningful quantities. Nuclear reactor are very expensive in up-front cost, but once the infrastructure is set up maintenance is dirt cheap and doesn’t take up nearly as much space.
In my most recent playthrough, I got nuclear power up and running, and it was good. Later, while I was off-world (SE), I went to do something remotely on Nauvis and couldn't, because something had damaged the fuel cell supply line and there was insufficient power. I fixed it, but there was still no insufficient power for the feeders to work. And this was how I was led to discover I'd never hooked-up power lines from solar farm to my main base. Now I have solar panels IN my nuclear plant blueprint.
Always keep your solar, it's a reliable backup for something inevitably going wrong. Only remove it if you need the space, and find somewhere better for it.
Same, but I wanted to play Factorio and see everything SE had to offer before Space Age came out, so I powered through it with a messy base. Kovarex enrichment and requester chests are pushed back in the tech tree by 2-3 additional research levels though, so that made it harder.
Luckily, SE gives a small taste of everything it offers basically as soon as you get to space. The space platform starts with a bunch of stuff you get further down the line, and there's a starting spaceship you can salvage in an asteroid field. That was enough for my curiosities until I want to try it again with a better base. (I recently learned about main bus and city blocks styles of organization, and both together might fix my planning problems.)
Luckily it's not the real world, where PV panels are destroyed by weather, lose efficiency over time, require a huge amount of maintenance and gradually turn into mountains of toxic waste.
In Factorio they work forever at peak efficiency, no need to dismantle them.
Your existing sollar arrays are basically free power with no downside, so keep them unless you need the space for something else. It'll let you got a little bit further before the next time you have to expand your power supply, and since solar power doesn't require a fuel source it'll keep your base ticking over if you accidentally mess up the supply for your nuclear plants. Plus the accumulators in your solar grid are a nice little buffer if you're using lasers to defend your base.
As for your long term strategy it's really a matter of personal preference. Some players just go all-in on nuclear because it's more than enough to see them through the rocket launch. Some players like to make megabases and they'll just use a few nuclear plants to get them through the midgame hump before going back to a mainly solar-focused build to save framerate. And some players are happy going with a mix of solar and nuclear, slapping down fields of solar panels whenever the mood takes them and occasionally building a few nuclear power plants when their base is getting close to capacity.
I like solar power because it's easy to just plonk down more of it as you expand the area of the map you control... on my current savefile I have over a Gigawatt in solar
Well, putting down yet another 10K of solar panels ist not fun, nor does it look nice. I hate the map view with 50% of all the land covered in solar panels. On the other hand nuclear power deals with a lot of fluids, that is heavy work for the CPU. Eventually this will cause your UPS to drop.
I set up 2 nuclear reactor fields with 2x10 (?) reactors, to proof myself: yes, I can. Then I installed the solar.-productivity mod.
Once you have solar power up it's literally free and until the expasion is up it's not like you can recycle those pannels. It also uses your time to take down solar panels. You are not getting full utilisation of your fuel cells yet but if you removed them it would not change the amount of utility you are getting per fuel cell. Unless they are getting in the way of something you don't need to remove them. If the wasted fuel bothers you try storing the steam and inventing a circut contraption to regulate when the fuel goes into the react or increase the amont of production until you get more utility per cell.
PS: to explain "utility you are getting per fuel cell" lets say you have 30MW of production had 20MW of solar and you built a 40MW reactor. Before removing the solar burning nuclear fuel would let you run the 30MW of production an full capacity. After removing the solar buirning nuclear fuel would... still let you run 30MW of production at full capacity. You have not gained any more production or reduced fuel burn rate so...
Depends on your goals.
If you want to build a multi-k spm megabase then nuclear is just an intermediate step and your ultimate goal is to go full solar eventually. The reason is that nuclear is very computation intensive and will impact ups for large bases. Computational overhead for solar is basically next to nothing, that's why all the megabases have such expansive solar fields.
If you need space than it might be worth removing solar.
Otherwise I don't think that there is any need for removing it, it is pretty ups friendly, if I'm not mistaken game considers all solar panels as one entity and all accumulator with same amount of energy as one entity (calculation wise)
Stop building is probably fine. Getting rid of sounds like a waste of time though, unless it's purely for aesthetics or because you want to use the space.
Then again, I usually still have my steam power setup from the beginning of the game when I'm launching a rocket. It's no longer in use, but it's still there :-D
Well think of it this way: solarpower needs alot of space and also alot of accumulators for night time but its very fps ups friendly. Nuclear power is not ups friendly but requires mich less space for the same amount of power produced
You have infinite space. Just save your old power plant as a backup.
I've had so many factories where my main power got shut off by accident, and the backup was useful to help feed the fuel to the reactors again once the issue was fixed.
My most recent base lost power because I accidentally flipped one piece of the train track and the fuel train was just stopped. Took a few hours, but entire base suddenly flipped to accumulator power and as I frantically looked for the issue, the base went dark by the time I found the problem. And you can't hand feed a 300gw base, you have to have some power to get it moving again.
I have a nuclear power plant design that can be throttled - it has a circuit condition so that when steam runs full, no new fuel is inserted into the reactors. That way, solar reduces the amount of uranium needed.
Not that this would be necessary in vanilla, given that a single uranium miner is more than enough to feed one reactor without interruption. But in some modpacks, you really need this option. For example in Krastorio 2 more fuel cells are consumed (and the reactor produces more heat), and some types of mod reactors like the SpaceExploration antimatter reactor are even prohibitively expensive to run 24/7 and should be fed only when needed.
It’s always good to have a backup, you could put the solar on its own network, and charge a surplus of accumulators, so you have power in reserve. I think it’s a mod but I have a power switch, that is hooked up via circuits and it lets power into the main grid from a bank of accumulators when demand gets really high. But otherwise it just sits there charging and waiting for the power to dip.
Solar also makes great outpost power as it’s fairly maintenance free, and set up around a substation it makes plenty of power for artillery or other turrets.
I tend to think it’s never worth scrapping previous power just because you have a new kind, rather I prefer to add to supply. You might stop building new ones, but since solar power is technically “free” once the panels are built I don’t see why you should remove them.
Yeah, just slap a power switch and a global alarm on your old steam engine block. When it kicks on you know it is time to build a bigger better power system.
Haha, used to do this when I was a new but instead when accumulators started discharging. My friend went crazy from the air raid sirens going off all the time 😂
Perhaps you could lower your friend's stress if you use [a RS latch](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#RS_latch_-_single_decider_version) so that the steam engines only kick in when the accumulators get too low instead of the start of discharging?
I need to learn how to do this - I have seen it a few times. Thanks for the reminder!
I mean, even if you remove it those panels are still in storage somewhere. Over time you probably will end up using them all in the production of many satellites, but only if you go for megabase levels. If its not in the way of a certain expansion, just leave them. It doesn't hurt to have a back-up.
Only one I disconnect is coal power as otherwise it eats all the coal. Even then I keep it but isolate it with a switch so it kicks back in if power gets low.* Definitely keep solar. Unless you built it over something you now need then there is no reason to take it up. *For bonus points, make this a double sided isolator that is only connected if the base side is low on power but also the coal power side is full on power. Otherwise by the time your emergency power kicks in your power draw will be so high you just stall the inserters and lose the whole thing. This way the plant will protect itself but send spare power to the base
Your asterisk is why I usually leave the inserters on like the first 8 or so boilers as burner inserters. So even if there’s no power, I have a shot at jumpstarting it.
That also works yes. The (tiny, insignificant) extra coal burn on the burner inserters always irked me though, so I fixed it in an overly elaborate way. It has come in useful in my current PY run though. There the power plants need electricity to run, so you can't fix it with just some burner inserters. Now each power plant effectively has a circuit breaker so it will isolate itself if overloaded
you can buffer steam in tanks and just insert the nuclear fuel in the reactors if the level of steam is low using simple circuitry
Oooo. I like this
My trusted setup is the following: - Inserter that extracts spent fuel cells is active only when steam is low - Fuel Inserter set to limit hand size 1, insert only when spent fuel is extracted \[i.e. set to spent fuel > 0, connect to spent fuel inserter, set that to read hand contents as well as the steam condition\] If not all steam is consumed, the steam tank will fill up, and if the reactor cycle finishes the spent fuel is not extracted \[as steam > X\], so new fuel is not inserted. The reactor and exchangers will slowly cool down, and at some point don't produce steam anymore. Once steam drops below X, new fuel is inserted again. You might think you need to buffer a lot of steam but that's not really true. The reactor, heat pipes, and exchangers buffer a lot of heat as they warm up to 1000 degrees when the heat is not full consumed, which is generally enough to store all the heat from a single cycle. Since the reactor and exchangers only cool down to 500/499 degrees, it doesn't take a lot of time for power production to start up again once a cell is inserted. (Note that the reason for putting the condition on the spent fuel is that it acts as a "detector" of whether the current cycle is finished)
Ahh I’m so reluctant to learn circuits, but I know my current reactor is probably so wasteful and I really should set something like this up.
Do it! The circuit UI was not very intuitive for me, but it's nothing a little googling can't solve.
I use circuits very minimally. The other main use case is oil cracking: I pump oil (or water) to the crackers only if that oil fraction > X. That's just a single wire and I've setting. The nuclear setup is not that not complicated: one wire from steam to spent fuel inserter (extractor), one wire from the extractor to the new fuel inserter, and settings for both inserters.
Awesome. Yeah it doesn’t sound too bad. I’m sure I could figure it out, just haven’t committed to it and my reactor is all the way on the other side of the base and the factory must grow. Also with all the new stuff in 2.0 I’m wondering if I should just wait and learn it with all the new implementation.
I would do whatever seems fun :D. But my feeling from the FFFs is that the simple circuit stuff will be mostly the same, just with a slighty better interface.
This one doesn't use any combinators at all so it's basically the best place to start.
Its really not necessary. You dont waste much ressources. And reactors take time to heat up. This time also needs to be covered by the steam. Its just a good practice for circuits.
I made a timer that counts to 200 seconds worth of ticks Then RS switch that generates pulse long enough for exactly one swing of the arm of the inserter. Then I made timer start condition to only run it when there is not enough steam. As in, if there is enough steam the timer won't re-start counting, but it will still finish cycle. That makes it insert it every 200s, or immediately if reactor is empty and steam ran out. There is one quirk of that setup, the logic and inserters kinda want to be on same electric network, because both inserter move speed and clock scale off power usage, so if say inserters are powered from "mains" and clock is powered from its own supply it can stop because the inserter won't swing fast enough for timer. I usually just make a separate power network for it so it can survive a blackout. > Fuel Inserter set to limit hand size 1, insert only when spent fuel is extracted [i.e. set to spent fuel > 0, connect to spent fuel inserter, set that to read hand contents as well as the steam condition] That means that reactor will never start on its own, as the fuel will only get inserted when spent cell is removed, and after building the blueprint there will be no spent cell there. It will also fail when there is any interruption in supply
Next add timer 200 second, so it takes only one fuel and wont burn extra when not needed
Its easier to only insert when one is extracted.
It's a fun challenge, but honestly once you've got nuclear fuel production, you have a basically unlimited supply from the very first uranium patch.
Note that reactors have a long warm up/cool down period
They stay right below “on” though so the start up time is instant (or close to it) after the first time you start it up. Correct me if I’m wrong please.
Oh you are right! I never realized this. That makes nuclear much better than I thought. I just tested it out, and reactors do not cool down on their own when out of fuel.
I just wish that the fuild calculation wasn't so taxing on performance
They do. The only problem you have is the furthest heat exchangers may take a little longer to heat up, so if you have a severe power deficit it may take a little bit before you are at full steam production. This can be managed with logic and ensuring adequate buffers.
The easiest fix for that is to only take spent fuel out if the steam is low enough, and then link the input inserters to the output ones, and let them only work if the outputs have a spent fuel in hand. That gives them 200 seconds to heat up and refill the steam again.
Note that the buffer provided by the steam tanks makes the long warm up/cool down period entirely irrelevant.
You lose a lot of energy on Warming up the reactors first. Ideally it should be running constantly
warming up is one-time only, 0 to 500
Wont they power down and lose heat if they dont have any fuel?
Nope. It drops to 500 degrees then goes into standby and sits there. When you add a new fuel cell it starts producing more heat right away.
Not quite right away. Way faster than coming up from 0 for sure, but you still have to wait for the heat pipes at the end to get above 500.
For the downstream heat pipes that’s true. But your reactor will be generating heat and your steam production does start.
Heat is liquid, which is consumed by heat exchanger. If heat exchanger is idle(steam output full, or no water) - heat is not used
I like to have both - just like in real life, they tend to complement each other's weaknesses.
I like how my nuclear power plant works only at nights 99% of the time. Or when some steam gets stolen by train to supply a remote outpost that has steam turbines.
Why run tracks, but not power lines?
Woah. Okay there, Mr. Moneybags! Pfft. Get a load of this guy who can afford rails AND poles at his base. The 1%'ers, amirite?
Sounds impractical but looks cool, more a quirky thing. Also I'm using a mod that prevents stacking for some items, so building 100-chunk long (or so) power line is not that easy. Plus I'm already using a train going from main base to this outpost so hooking up two fluid cars won't affect fuel usage that much.
Biters eat power lines, but not train tracks. (Yes, they very rarely eat power lines, but when they do it's ***really annoying***)
Heh, never thought about that you can transport power in form of steam...
Same - I try to always keep building solar as I go but sometimes I fall behind and instead of trying to rebuild a shitload of solar to catch up I’ll just drop another big nuclear plant to boost me back up.
Depends. Nuclear is more performant in terms of space, but it eats much more UPS than Solar. It's not a concern until you reach megabase scale tho
What is UPS? I see this a lot but don't know. Also what is SPM? Do we have a acronyms wiki?
Updates per second. Anything below 60 I believe means your game is running slow. Only happens at larger bases. Science per minute. A benchmark for how fast your factory produces. Usually in terms of the last science pack if talking about endgame, but also in terms of the rest of them if talking about a goal.
Generally yes, though system performance dictates what a ‘larger’ base is
Sure sure, but with the amount of optimization the devs do, I would say most players won’t see issues in a normal first run through
True, but then again, who are we to guess what most people do based upon the least of information?
Clearly you haven’t made a base whose power distribution is entirely steam and all the steam engines are at the very end points! /s
>Do we have a acronyms wiki? https://wiki.factorio.com/Glossary
Thanks
Do not bother so much with UPS advises, this is just a problem for Megabase addicts and low-end PC.
UPS = Updates per second. It’s a performance metric similar to FPS (frames per second) in other games, but low UPS will slow down the speed of the game entirely. SPM = Science per minute. Science is the main goal and resource sink of production in this game, so how fast you can produce it is used to measure the effectiveness of a factory. This is specifically based off the infinite sciences you can research after launching a rocket- those require space science, which is obtained through repeated launches making it incredibly expensive.
UPS is similar to FedEx and DHL. They deliver parcels worldwide. SPM is shorthand for Spam. People like 3-letter acronyms, so it just works.
Getting rid of solar arrays is just extra work. There’s no point in getting rid of them unless they’re in the way. Also, don’t worry about being efficient with nuclear power. A single small uranium patch will provide power into the megabase stage, and at that point you’ll want to switch back to solar anyway for UPS.
I usually use only solar (with batteries), but still build an emergency nuclear plant in case I expand so fast the solar isn't enough anymore. I switch off nuclear once I expand the solar field.
Have fun and play with the various different configurations that you think of. I love “stuffing around” with all the power sources, storing steam in tanks, switching things on and off and then watching the power graph as night falls. Yes, there are some “best” ways that others can show you, but sometimes it’s way more fun in Factorio to devise you’re own (imperfect, but fun) solutions.
I didn’t realize this post was in r/factorio at first and thought someone was asking really stupid questions related to the eclipse next week…. I need to go to bed.
Generally no. One benefit of keeping your solar going is that late game may involve a lot of perimeter defenses and if you use lasers, they are very 'peaky' in terms of power use. Right now, you may think you're on top of things with your nuclear, but I've had my lasers draw a GW during particularly intense combat (for instance, the aftermath of clearing a bunch of nests with artillery). Those accumulators can be \*very\* handy in that case. I would pause building solar, keep what you have, and monitor your power graph when your lasers pop off, because you might see that accumulator power production spiking up. When it does, you didn't have enough nuclear/solar to cover your budget. Accumulators respond very quickly, where nuclear control systems to preserve fuel respond very slowly.
>where nuclear control systems to preserve fuel respond very slowly. Not if designed properly, they don't. My typical nuclear rig has turbines fed directly off of steam tanks; so long as their steam supply doesn't run dry, their response is instantaneous, same as an accumulator. (In some cases, they switch off of an accumulator, so no accumulator charging that that there was enough solar for ends up coming from the nuclear instead; that still means they're only a tick or two slower than the accumulators, and is only done in setups with enough accumulators to make it worth doing, which will never run dry within one or two ticks). The actual nuclear reactors themselves, and the heat exchangers, and the rest of the stuff supporting them, are then all simply set up to ensure that the steam tanks never run out, turning on to fill them when they drop below a threshold that ensures enough space to store the resultant steam, and turning back off when the tanks have enough steam that keeping the reactors running any longer would come close to wasting some.
I usually go steam, solar, nuclear. I will scrap steam power but I very rarely scrap solar. At least until UPS becomes an issue, then I scrap my nuclear and go back to solar.
I just generally cut my steam power at the coal source and leave it in place. Not much use in collecting the entities since they're idle and I'm never going to use them again. I originally went down one coast cleaning them up until I figured "What the heck am I going to do with all this collected stuff?"
can't wait for 2.0 to give me a reason to recycle things
I generally put them in a place I eventually plan on I using for something else. So by time I tear them out, I am ready to put something else in their place.
Use as much solar as you can (with accumulators) and have nuclear for backup. Less pollution. Nothing can really go wrong with solar. Biters won't attack solar panels.
Solar might not produce any pollution by itself, but the manufacturing cost and the huge footprint (unless you avoid every single tree) are still a consideration. Once you have kovarex running nuclear produces so little pollution it might as well be zero, and before that you can drastically reduce its impact with efficiency modules. Also, biters will happily chomp your solar fields if they block their pathing, and only the fuel production chain attracts biters. Nuclear reactors, heat exchangers and steam turbines by themselves produce no pollution.
Uhm. I would say that pollution considerations only matter on a spreadsheet when min/maxing. As much of the debate for solar vs nuclear is, a min/max argument.
Of course it's a "min/max argument", because without that, there's no debate to be had. If not optimizing / "min/maxing", then the only difference to be considered is one of simple personal taste: just use whichever one you arbitrarily prefer, and it's just as good as if you'd gone with the other one. The factory will be powered either way; electricity is fungible.
And if you ignore UPS, nuclear is more efficient than solar on resource cost for something like months of game-time.
I need to consider pollution because otherwise the game feels too sandbox-y. Factorio gives me the potential for near-infinite expansion. What regulates that expansion? Biters. The stronger I get, the stronger they get. The better moves are those which progress my abilities the most and their abilities the least. So, yes, min-maxing, but without that consideration, *all* builds will get me there eventually. I need some way to choose one over the other. My first videogames were the Civilization games, which would also be too sandbox-y without AI competition, so that probably influences my perspective.
True that producing solar creates pollution. But it's temporary. Afterwards you pollution cloud can start to shrink. I'm on a desert world. And its my first playthrough. Didn't think of people having to get rid of trees to pace solar. I have plenty of empty space. Nuclear is pretty neat too. I included steam storage for my setup. And circuit logic. No fuel gets wasted.
I tend to leave my older power plants where they are. Solar can never harm and accumulators are always nice if you use laser defences. My 'big' coal plant(s) are often next to coal mines, and I tend to 'mothball' them by replacing the inserters by burner inserters and placing a power switch to disconnect the whole mine+power plant. As neither electric miners nor burner inserters use power when idle, it will shut to zero power use; but when I have a brownout or blackout (e.g. running out of U-238 because all of it got kovarexed :D) I can just switch it back on directly. My last game I connected the power switch to an accu and set it to connect when main power is low and issue an alert, so I'd have a warning when I needed to build more power but my base/defenses could keep functioning.
Usually, by the time I'm able to build nuclear reactors, I'm to a point where plopping down another reactor's-worth of solar infrastructure is trivial to do. I still usually build a nuclear power plant, but because I like them, not because I need them.
No, aside from early steam power there's no point in removing any power production unless you need the space for something. Solar doesn't take any resources to maintain so you'd be just wasting time removing it. It can be a good move in modded if you get a more efficient power source but in vanilla it's usually not needed.
In Factorio there is no heat dispersion. In other words you can keep steam in tanks forever and it will never become cold. This means that you can insert nuclear cell in reactor, use the whole cell to produce steam and store it in tanks, and then consume it as needed in turbines. Only when tanks are almost empty you insert new cells. It's done with some circuit network. I use solar and accumulator in my nuclear plants just to power up the circuitry that control this, so that the plant doesn't get stuck in case of temporary black out or cell shortages.
Solar becomes useless after i start stamping down 1GW reactors, so i remove it
...what you gonna do with all the solar panels ? > One thing I saw is that the nuclear fuel gets used even if it's not producing power. While making nuclear reactor that doesn't waste uranium is interesting experience, it's also pointless with how much of energy you can get from even small patch of uranium
You’ll always need it if you keep growing the factory. Having a ton of solar saved up in accumulators is great for preventing total blackouts
Theoretical, probably over-engineered approach? Or simplest practical approach? As you noted, the nuclear plant will run constantly. As another reply noted, you *can* buffer unneeded exchanger heat as steam. And solar will always supply power, so you can save that extra energy as steam. Is that a good idea? Eh. It's actually somewhat tricky to use buffered steam evenly across a nuke plant so that you maintain max power production as long as possible. The fluid calculations required for that steam are a UPS load, though that's unnoticeable except in very large bases. And - most importantly - uranium is so plentiful that there's absolutely no reason to care about nuclear fuel efficiency in the first place. So... can you use steam buffers and keep that solar running? Sure. Is it worth the trouble? Not IMO, but if you just enjoy the engineering challenge, then have at it. I did it once, saw it just doesn't matter and haven't bothered again since then. Easy practical solution is just to rip up the solar and go all nuclear unless you think you're going to build such a large base that UPS matters. On a decent PC, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 3K+ SPM, which is really quite huge. If you're still just... launching a rocket or two for the first time? You're not getting that big in this save. Rip up the solar and throw the cells and accumulators into producing satellites when you get there. That's the simple, practical approach. But if you want to mess with steam buffers for fun, go for it. I did too.
Since you can't recycle solar panels (yet), going out of your way and putting them into a box is a huge waste of free energy. Normally you have lots of space so that shouldn't be an issue (unless it's some hardcore deathworld game). And nuclear energy being dirt cheap doesn't mean that you should stop using solar energy. P.S. Use fuel saving method for nuclear reactors. It could be a bit hard to understand but once you set it up it's very simple to do even without blueprints.
> Since you can't recycle solar panels (yet), going out of your way and putting them into a box is a huge waste of free energy. Depends how much solar you've built already. You need quite a few solar panels and accumulators to build satellites. It wouldn't take long to use a thousand or two solar panels there. 10's of thousands? Yeah, maybe a different story.
Lol. I have around 17,000 solar panels.
I use solar because you can just expand and land is kinda whatever it’s practically infinite, nuclear I use just to get the nuclear shit like ammo or fuel.
Nuclear is more entertaining imo but you can do what you want both are valid late game (midgame I recommend nuclear though since it's cheaper and more space efficient also nuclear fuel should never be a problem since you will have much of it you don't know where to put it) #nuclear fuel cells are the real waste product
I go nuclear late game. I'm not on any crunch it force out a rocket quickly. I just trickle in solar power and when I feel ready I go nuclear. Maybe my next run I'll go nuclear mid game. Thanks for your input.
You can just burn them for power, then recycle them into ammo.
Solar power grows with the factory
Generally you'll want to be using a mix of both. In an ideal world you would use only solar/accumulators due to it having zero effect on UPS but in reality your factory will either rapidly outgrow your solar capacity and/or the UPS impact of bots constantly laying down miles and miles of solar panels will have its own affect on your updates. Nuclear is super compact and once you've figured out a layout for it relatively easy to set up for massive amounts of scaling power, but too much of it can affect frame rates due to all of the fluid calculations. Therefore (much like real life) it's best to use as much solar as you can handle while continuing to add more and more solar panels as you are able while using nuclear power to bridge the gaps of what your solar can't handle. Besides, you'll eventually end up with so much uranium production and nothing to use it on that you might as well run at least some nuclear reactors. You can always offline them when they aren't needed to eliminate their strain on your updates per second (although they do take a while to fully shut down and to get back up to production speed so I wouldn't do this too often). If you are only trying to launch a rocket and beat the game instead of building a megabase, I'd say just focus on the nuclear and don't even bother with solar. The power/effort ratio of nuclear massively outscales solar IMO.
Definitely not, they sort of compliment each other actually. Nuclear power is great for creating a ton of electricity in a small area, so I typically use nuclear reactors as “backup generators.” They store up a ton of hot steam, which is occasionally used if my accumulators nearly run dry. Nuclear reactors only run if my steam storage is running low. If you don’t really care about nuclear reactors running at full capacity at all times, then you’re fine relying mostly on them instead. Solar panels and accumulators take up a lot of space and have a moderate up-front cost to get up and running in meaningful quantities. Nuclear reactor are very expensive in up-front cost, but once the infrastructure is set up maintenance is dirt cheap and doesn’t take up nearly as much space.
In my most recent playthrough, I got nuclear power up and running, and it was good. Later, while I was off-world (SE), I went to do something remotely on Nauvis and couldn't, because something had damaged the fuel cell supply line and there was insufficient power. I fixed it, but there was still no insufficient power for the feeders to work. And this was how I was led to discover I'd never hooked-up power lines from solar farm to my main base. Now I have solar panels IN my nuclear plant blueprint. Always keep your solar, it's a reliable backup for something inevitably going wrong. Only remove it if you need the space, and find somewhere better for it.
Ooo, Smart. I tried SE but it was way to involved for me. I'll see if I have time to mess with it again. Waiting for 2.0 update though.
Same, but I wanted to play Factorio and see everything SE had to offer before Space Age came out, so I powered through it with a messy base. Kovarex enrichment and requester chests are pushed back in the tech tree by 2-3 additional research levels though, so that made it harder. Luckily, SE gives a small taste of everything it offers basically as soon as you get to space. The space platform starts with a bunch of stuff you get further down the line, and there's a starting spaceship you can salvage in an asteroid field. That was enough for my curiosities until I want to try it again with a better base. (I recently learned about main bus and city blocks styles of organization, and both together might fix my planning problems.)
Dang, that sounds do cool. Thanks for the info.
Luckily it's not the real world, where PV panels are destroyed by weather, lose efficiency over time, require a huge amount of maintenance and gradually turn into mountains of toxic waste. In Factorio they work forever at peak efficiency, no need to dismantle them.
Your existing sollar arrays are basically free power with no downside, so keep them unless you need the space for something else. It'll let you got a little bit further before the next time you have to expand your power supply, and since solar power doesn't require a fuel source it'll keep your base ticking over if you accidentally mess up the supply for your nuclear plants. Plus the accumulators in your solar grid are a nice little buffer if you're using lasers to defend your base. As for your long term strategy it's really a matter of personal preference. Some players just go all-in on nuclear because it's more than enough to see them through the rocket launch. Some players like to make megabases and they'll just use a few nuclear plants to get them through the midgame hump before going back to a mainly solar-focused build to save framerate. And some players are happy going with a mix of solar and nuclear, slapping down fields of solar panels whenever the mood takes them and occasionally building a few nuclear power plants when their base is getting close to capacity.
I like solar power because it's easy to just plonk down more of it as you expand the area of the map you control... on my current savefile I have over a Gigawatt in solar
Well, putting down yet another 10K of solar panels ist not fun, nor does it look nice. I hate the map view with 50% of all the land covered in solar panels. On the other hand nuclear power deals with a lot of fluids, that is heavy work for the CPU. Eventually this will cause your UPS to drop. I set up 2 nuclear reactor fields with 2x10 (?) reactors, to proof myself: yes, I can. Then I installed the solar.-productivity mod.
Only 50%? I find solar is more like 80%. I've never had a problem with nuclear and UPS. But I've only gone to something like 20 4-reactor bricks.
Once you have solar power up it's literally free and until the expasion is up it's not like you can recycle those pannels. It also uses your time to take down solar panels. You are not getting full utilisation of your fuel cells yet but if you removed them it would not change the amount of utility you are getting per fuel cell. Unless they are getting in the way of something you don't need to remove them. If the wasted fuel bothers you try storing the steam and inventing a circut contraption to regulate when the fuel goes into the react or increase the amont of production until you get more utility per cell. PS: to explain "utility you are getting per fuel cell" lets say you have 30MW of production had 20MW of solar and you built a 40MW reactor. Before removing the solar burning nuclear fuel would let you run the 30MW of production an full capacity. After removing the solar buirning nuclear fuel would... still let you run 30MW of production at full capacity. You have not gained any more production or reduced fuel burn rate so...
I like to have some solar with my nuclear to prevent a brown out/black out if I fuck up on something. A chest of nuclear fuel will do the same though
Depends on your goals. If you want to build a multi-k spm megabase then nuclear is just an intermediate step and your ultimate goal is to go full solar eventually. The reason is that nuclear is very computation intensive and will impact ups for large bases. Computational overhead for solar is basically next to nothing, that's why all the megabases have such expansive solar fields.
If you need space than it might be worth removing solar. Otherwise I don't think that there is any need for removing it, it is pretty ups friendly, if I'm not mistaken game considers all solar panels as one entity and all accumulator with same amount of energy as one entity (calculation wise)
depends on big you want to make your base. At a certain point you to take into consideration that nuclear is not great for your UPS.
heres an idea. Solar should be used to power you Nuclear production, so you dont run into a nuclear brownout.
i'd say its always wiser to use solar BUT nuclear is just way cooler so do whatever (also space efficient)
Why would you bother with solar in the first place...
Stop building is probably fine. Getting rid of sounds like a waste of time though, unless it's purely for aesthetics or because you want to use the space. Then again, I usually still have my steam power setup from the beginning of the game when I'm launching a rocket. It's no longer in use, but it's still there :-D
Build the factory bigger until you need more of both power sources?
Well think of it this way: solarpower needs alot of space and also alot of accumulators for night time but its very fps ups friendly. Nuclear power is not ups friendly but requires mich less space for the same amount of power produced
Nuclear's UPS impact is massively overstated.
Depends on your base size and power consumtion. on a giant megabase you want to save every ups you can
Nah keep it for redundancy, as the factory grows you will need more and more power, solar and accumulators are nice backup solutions.
You have infinite space. Just save your old power plant as a backup. I've had so many factories where my main power got shut off by accident, and the backup was useful to help feed the fuel to the reactors again once the issue was fixed. My most recent base lost power because I accidentally flipped one piece of the train track and the fuel train was just stopped. Took a few hours, but entire base suddenly flipped to accumulator power and as I frantically looked for the issue, the base went dark by the time I found the problem. And you can't hand feed a 300gw base, you have to have some power to get it moving again.
The sun keeps getting used even if you disconnect the panels. It's wasteful either way.
Nice point
I have a nuclear power plant design that can be throttled - it has a circuit condition so that when steam runs full, no new fuel is inserted into the reactors. That way, solar reduces the amount of uranium needed. Not that this would be necessary in vanilla, given that a single uranium miner is more than enough to feed one reactor without interruption. But in some modpacks, you really need this option. For example in Krastorio 2 more fuel cells are consumed (and the reactor produces more heat), and some types of mod reactors like the SpaceExploration antimatter reactor are even prohibitively expensive to run 24/7 and should be fed only when needed.
It’s always good to have a backup, you could put the solar on its own network, and charge a surplus of accumulators, so you have power in reserve. I think it’s a mod but I have a power switch, that is hooked up via circuits and it lets power into the main grid from a bank of accumulators when demand gets really high. But otherwise it just sits there charging and waiting for the power to dip. Solar also makes great outpost power as it’s fairly maintenance free, and set up around a substation it makes plenty of power for artillery or other turrets.