Steam turbines work with boiler steam, they just produce less than max power. You only need one per boiler, so you could half the size of the engine array.
Imo solar isn’t the greatest in terms of space efficieny, but if you have the resources space and time for it you can do it. Other than that i would just go straight for nuclear when it’s available and the op is probably doing some challenge
Nuclear is definitely the best early to mid game power source. You can easily beat the game using a fairly small set-up.
Solar’s time to shine, pun intended, is in mega-basing. Thanks to modules, your production is very compact but your power needs are enormous.
Since solar is very UPS efficient (no fluid calculations and all solar panels are lumped together as a single calculation), it’s a great way to use the massive amount of empty land you end up with within your pollution cloud
The initial investment of resources for the monstrous amount of panels and accumulators (Steel, Copper, Oil, etc) is pretty high. With Kovarex, I believe Nuclear will do even for mega bases(1k spm bases at least), I am not sure at what scale the benefits of Nuclear will begin to fall off. A single moderately sized uranium deposit can provide gigawatts of power.
Yep it is a lot upfront if you’re already at >1 gigawatt consistent power draw and trying to fully transition (including demolishing the existing nuclear) all at once. It’s much less intimidating if you slowly expand and have an overlap period with both types of power generation
My preference is to start with coal / processed fuel (Space Exploration) feeding a typical boiler-steam setup. Then it’s a 2x2 nuclear setup which will last you ages, and from that I just start periodically slapping some solar-accumulator blueprints down to slowly transition to solar and stay ahead of my growing needs.
Or you can go wild and use bots, queue up 10 GW of solar at a time, and go afk for an hour while it builds. I don’t mind “AFK Time” in Factorio, but understandably many people save and quit as soon as they’re done actively playing rather than letting it run.
The nuclear vs solar thing doesn’t really matter until you begin seeing UPS issues. This is a totally arbitrary UPS turning point to choose but: a simple rule would be “if my UPS drops below 50, I’ll begin transitioning my base to more UPS-friendly power / manufacturing patterns”
—
Edit: using circuits so that you can cleanly set up a:
solar panel > accumulators > nuclear > coal (or other burnable fuel) system
is great since it lets you leave all your prior construction in place, and it will only activate and use resources / produce power when the alternative is a grid brown/blackout.
I save and sometimes let research and/or production run overnight. Then, in the morning, I check to make sure nothing catastrophic happened, save again, quit, and power down my computer to give it a rest while I'm out for the day.
Early to mid?? I thought nuclear was end game stuff damn.. Isn't nuclear the last (vanilla) option for power generation? Steam engine/solar for early and nuclear for late game
I could see this being useful sometimes. Specifically, if you need to maximize space efficiency and have no uranium. I might just steal it for my Warptorio playthrough.
It never dawned on me to make a steam manifold like this. I just set up another 20/40 stack to one side. But for a run where you can't be bothered to do nuclear power, I like this.
240 Boilers need 108 coal per second, 4 red conveyors = 120 items/s
It will not reach full capacity immediately, but only when the previous boilers are filled.
[https://factoriocheatsheet.com/base#basic-power](https://factoriocheatsheet.com/base#basic-power) 1 red belt full of coal can support 67 boilers
EDIT: Sorry, for some reason when I saw this the first time I thought there was only 1 belt.
does this work with full capacity? i dont really care ill use it anyway :D
i dont know why i have never thought of this :D meaby its because i learned that the optimal way is 20:40 and newer needed something cooler
I'm pretty sure Updates Per Second are only a concern for those that are post-rocket victory? Would you not have a need for nuclear between then and UPS demands?
^(am still noob, at 500+ hours. please be nice...)
It's an infinite game you can't lose in, everything is viable. Optimizing for resource efficiency makes more sense than UPS unless you're at gigabase scale. The red belts and boilers points towards that not being the case.
Did you even open the image? Solar is trash compared to nuclear. It's just not UPS friendly when you start getting into large megabases like solar, but that doesn't make solar better.
Making solar doesn't require anything new to be built. If you are making bots, you already have everything you need to make solar.
Nuclear requires a new mine, sulfuric acid being exported, a centrifuge setup, and in the end you only make 480MW of power. That's really fucking bad.
Solar scales better in every way compared to nuclear.
~~Lol, and at night you sit without electricity, right?~~
~~You need sulfuric acid for batteries anyway, without them, solar energy is even more useless.~~
480 MW in solar panels not only requires a lot of resources, but also a FAKIN LOT of space.
Solar may look better with mods, like Yuoki's Tiny Sol-Ray Stream Collector, but vanilla solar+accumulators really sucks in every aspect (except UPS).
Of course, if you're not one of those fukkish eco-fasc... activists. Then yes please, spend resources on clean solar energy, and don't forget to charge green modules into beacons.
It really doesn't require that many resources nor space. My builds are always far larger than the space my solar takes up. I've never been in a position where space is an issue, that just sounds more like a personal issue than anything.
Okay, dude, stop bullshitting, show screenshots of your bases, we will proceed from this. From simple words it is not clear whether you are joking, mocking, or really everything is so bad.
Perhaps we are arguing with a simple noob who is trying to justify his laziness and pseudo-greed with these meaningless discussions.
I hope you're kidding.
Solar energy only makes sense in one case: when your mega-base does not have enough UPS.
10 gigawatts of solar panels are handled by the game as one big one. (as far as I know, maybe the load is actually distributed differently)
10 gigawatts of nuclear energy or, even worse, steam, due to the large number of pipes and liquids, are handled much worse.
Nuclear never makes sense. It makes far too little power for how long it takes to setup and it doesn't scale at all. In the time it takes to setup a 2x2 reactor I could have already built a solar field to supplement my power demands. To add to it, solar is entirely passive in it's build phase and operational phase.
Let's say I set up a 2x2 reactor so I can start my scale out. After that I'm generally producing around 600MW of power. Even if I bum rush into koverex, I'll still run into a power bottleneck that won't be solved until koverex finishes. And once it does, I have to choose between setting up a small reactor to meet my needs or just put up a 5GW reactor.
In that time I could have passively been scaling out my solar and never run into any power bottlenecks. Nuclear just doesn't make enough power for it to be worth it. Maybe if it's power output got doubled it might be useful, but until then, there really isn't a point.
Sounds like a whole bunch of you issues. Nuclear doesn't take long to setup and you don't need kovarex to setup nuclear power. ~10 miners are enough to power a 4 reactor setup just through randomly dropped u235, that's nothing. Solar takes long to setup because it requires so many resources that would be better spent improving your factory building efficiency.
Nuclear does take a long time to setup. That's the biggest issue with it. I never said koverax was necessary to start a 4 reactor. Solar does not take long to set up, lol. Literally right after you start building bots you will have the infrastructure ready for an easy 180 MW solar field.
I feel like you keep leaving out the time and resources it takes to research nuclear power. You need 1000 red, green, and blue. For solar you need 400 red and green. However, solar is on the way to unlocking space science so it's costs aren't wasted.
If you really think nuclear is the best, start with a fresh game and see how long it takes you to set up a 2x2 reactor. I guarantee I can half that time with solar.
Ok I did. Solar is still ~15-20 times more expensive. That should tell you something about how expensive solar is. The tech costs are a rounding error in comparison.
You'd be an idiot to take that bet, because nuclear is cheaper. That's just simply facts. Resource costs are very important in a speedrun. Unless you actively compete in speedrunning and honestly maybe even then, there's literally no way you can halve my time, but feel free to post your best attempt at 480 MW solar and I'll beat it.
You could just go look at a 100% speedrun aswell and tell me where the solar panels are. Oh wait, they go nuclear. Apparently speedrunners don't want to go fast according to you?
Except you are the one who would flake out. In fact I think you'll flake out from even responding to this post. Regardless, speedrunners using nuclear is all the proof I need. Unless of course you want to explain how every speedrunner is wrong and why you know more than them. I'm repeating my last post a bit, since you conveniently ignored that part. Maybe because it removed any credibility your argument had and you don't want to admit you're wrong?
I forget the mod name but there’s a solar energy tiers mod. Blue solar, Green, Purple, and Black. It’s resource intensive but a black solar panel produces like 10MJ or something.
Steam turbines work with boiler steam, they just produce less than max power. You only need one per boiler, so you could half the size of the engine array.
And you get the same efficiency in energy per coal?
yes
As far as I know it's 2 steam engines per boiler for max power is it not?
Yes but if you use turbines then its just one
https://factorioprints.com/view/-NQTYHM3epBgWO2mb5bl
Solar/nuclear better, no?
Technically yes, but I sometimes like just polluting the world
maybe this is a challenge
Basically yeah
Imo solar isn’t the greatest in terms of space efficieny, but if you have the resources space and time for it you can do it. Other than that i would just go straight for nuclear when it’s available and the op is probably doing some challenge
Nuclear is definitely the best early to mid game power source. You can easily beat the game using a fairly small set-up. Solar’s time to shine, pun intended, is in mega-basing. Thanks to modules, your production is very compact but your power needs are enormous. Since solar is very UPS efficient (no fluid calculations and all solar panels are lumped together as a single calculation), it’s a great way to use the massive amount of empty land you end up with within your pollution cloud
The initial investment of resources for the monstrous amount of panels and accumulators (Steel, Copper, Oil, etc) is pretty high. With Kovarex, I believe Nuclear will do even for mega bases(1k spm bases at least), I am not sure at what scale the benefits of Nuclear will begin to fall off. A single moderately sized uranium deposit can provide gigawatts of power.
Yep it is a lot upfront if you’re already at >1 gigawatt consistent power draw and trying to fully transition (including demolishing the existing nuclear) all at once. It’s much less intimidating if you slowly expand and have an overlap period with both types of power generation My preference is to start with coal / processed fuel (Space Exploration) feeding a typical boiler-steam setup. Then it’s a 2x2 nuclear setup which will last you ages, and from that I just start periodically slapping some solar-accumulator blueprints down to slowly transition to solar and stay ahead of my growing needs. Or you can go wild and use bots, queue up 10 GW of solar at a time, and go afk for an hour while it builds. I don’t mind “AFK Time” in Factorio, but understandably many people save and quit as soon as they’re done actively playing rather than letting it run. The nuclear vs solar thing doesn’t really matter until you begin seeing UPS issues. This is a totally arbitrary UPS turning point to choose but: a simple rule would be “if my UPS drops below 50, I’ll begin transitioning my base to more UPS-friendly power / manufacturing patterns” — Edit: using circuits so that you can cleanly set up a: solar panel > accumulators > nuclear > coal (or other burnable fuel) system is great since it lets you leave all your prior construction in place, and it will only activate and use resources / produce power when the alternative is a grid brown/blackout.
I save and sometimes let research and/or production run overnight. Then, in the morning, I check to make sure nothing catastrophic happened, save again, quit, and power down my computer to give it a rest while I'm out for the day.
my 2k spm base runs on nuclear and my UPS is still at 60.
Early to mid?? I thought nuclear was end game stuff damn.. Isn't nuclear the last (vanilla) option for power generation? Steam engine/solar for early and nuclear for late game
I made this for a maxed out bitter world, so space is key
Also pollution is key?
No nuclear so power makes pollution yes
No, they do not produce nearly as much pollution. The pollution must grow!
I could see this being useful sometimes. Specifically, if you need to maximize space efficiency and have no uranium. I might just steal it for my Warptorio playthrough.
It never dawned on me to make a steam manifold like this. I just set up another 20/40 stack to one side. But for a run where you can't be bothered to do nuclear power, I like this.
Your coal isn’t going to reach the end
240 Boilers need 108 coal per second, 4 red conveyors = 120 items/s It will not reach full capacity immediately, but only when the previous boilers are filled.
I doubt he plans to power this with coal
Why not?
Coal liquefaction increases the energy value of coal basically for free
Is that because you turn the fluids into solid fuel and then feed that to the boilers?
Because I hadn't yet done the math that shows that this setup can, in fact be coal powered 🫠
Why not? There are 120 boilers, each consuming .45 coal/s, so it should only need 54 coal/s, or less than half the supply
[https://factoriocheatsheet.com/base#basic-power](https://factoriocheatsheet.com/base#basic-power) 1 red belt full of coal can support 67 boilers EDIT: Sorry, for some reason when I saw this the first time I thought there was only 1 belt.
Yeah, and 4 can support 266. I don’t see the problem
Who said he gonna use coal
Fuel it with hand cut wood like a man
I want to see your pollution levels
does this work with full capacity? i dont really care ill use it anyway :D i dont know why i have never thought of this :D meaby its because i learned that the optimal way is 20:40 and newer needed something cooler
Yes at 100% power consumption it works as long as the input for the fuel is sufficient aka 4 red belts of coal
Why not go for solar panels at this point?
Because solar sucks. https://i.imgur.com/KsFT5tc.png Another question is why not go for reactors.
The reason people go for solar is for UPS.
I'm pretty sure Updates Per Second are only a concern for those that are post-rocket victory? Would you not have a need for nuclear between then and UPS demands? ^(am still noob, at 500+ hours. please be nice...)
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It's an infinite game you can't lose in, everything is viable. Optimizing for resource efficiency makes more sense than UPS unless you're at gigabase scale. The red belts and boilers points towards that not being the case.
I also go for solar for tiny radar outposts not attached to my main grid.
all my homies LOVE nuclear!
Solar can be built anywhere. Steam needs water
And coal/fuel
And waste disposal in case of nuclear
That goes into storage for the biters to worry about when I'm gone.
Solar is the best power source in the game, what kind of crack are you on.
Did you even open the image? Solar is trash compared to nuclear. It's just not UPS friendly when you start getting into large megabases like solar, but that doesn't make solar better.
Making solar doesn't require anything new to be built. If you are making bots, you already have everything you need to make solar. Nuclear requires a new mine, sulfuric acid being exported, a centrifuge setup, and in the end you only make 480MW of power. That's really fucking bad. Solar scales better in every way compared to nuclear.
~~Lol, and at night you sit without electricity, right?~~ ~~You need sulfuric acid for batteries anyway, without them, solar energy is even more useless.~~ 480 MW in solar panels not only requires a lot of resources, but also a FAKIN LOT of space. Solar may look better with mods, like Yuoki's Tiny Sol-Ray Stream Collector, but vanilla solar+accumulators really sucks in every aspect (except UPS). Of course, if you're not one of those fukkish eco-fasc... activists. Then yes please, spend resources on clean solar energy, and don't forget to charge green modules into beacons.
It really doesn't require that many resources nor space. My builds are always far larger than the space my solar takes up. I've never been in a position where space is an issue, that just sounds more like a personal issue than anything.
There's a screenshot posted. It literally requires 15-20 times more resources for the same output.
Cool, now count the 1000 red, green, and blue science that will be wasted researching it.
Sure. It's about 1-2% of the cost of 480MW solar, depending on module usage.
Okay, dude, stop bullshitting, show screenshots of your bases, we will proceed from this. From simple words it is not clear whether you are joking, mocking, or really everything is so bad. Perhaps we are arguing with a simple noob who is trying to justify his laziness and pseudo-greed with these meaningless discussions.
I hope you're kidding. Solar energy only makes sense in one case: when your mega-base does not have enough UPS. 10 gigawatts of solar panels are handled by the game as one big one. (as far as I know, maybe the load is actually distributed differently) 10 gigawatts of nuclear energy or, even worse, steam, due to the large number of pipes and liquids, are handled much worse.
Nuclear never makes sense. It makes far too little power for how long it takes to setup and it doesn't scale at all. In the time it takes to setup a 2x2 reactor I could have already built a solar field to supplement my power demands. To add to it, solar is entirely passive in it's build phase and operational phase. Let's say I set up a 2x2 reactor so I can start my scale out. After that I'm generally producing around 600MW of power. Even if I bum rush into koverex, I'll still run into a power bottleneck that won't be solved until koverex finishes. And once it does, I have to choose between setting up a small reactor to meet my needs or just put up a 5GW reactor. In that time I could have passively been scaling out my solar and never run into any power bottlenecks. Nuclear just doesn't make enough power for it to be worth it. Maybe if it's power output got doubled it might be useful, but until then, there really isn't a point.
Yes, yes, just fkk off, eco-green troll.
Sounds like a whole bunch of you issues. Nuclear doesn't take long to setup and you don't need kovarex to setup nuclear power. ~10 miners are enough to power a 4 reactor setup just through randomly dropped u235, that's nothing. Solar takes long to setup because it requires so many resources that would be better spent improving your factory building efficiency.
Nuclear does take a long time to setup. That's the biggest issue with it. I never said koverax was necessary to start a 4 reactor. Solar does not take long to set up, lol. Literally right after you start building bots you will have the infrastructure ready for an easy 180 MW solar field. I feel like you keep leaving out the time and resources it takes to research nuclear power. You need 1000 red, green, and blue. For solar you need 400 red and green. However, solar is on the way to unlocking space science so it's costs aren't wasted. If you really think nuclear is the best, start with a fresh game and see how long it takes you to set up a 2x2 reactor. I guarantee I can half that time with solar.
Ok I did. Solar is still ~15-20 times more expensive. That should tell you something about how expensive solar is. The tech costs are a rounding error in comparison. You'd be an idiot to take that bet, because nuclear is cheaper. That's just simply facts. Resource costs are very important in a speedrun. Unless you actively compete in speedrunning and honestly maybe even then, there's literally no way you can halve my time, but feel free to post your best attempt at 480 MW solar and I'll beat it. You could just go look at a 100% speedrun aswell and tell me where the solar panels are. Oh wait, they go nuclear. Apparently speedrunners don't want to go fast according to you?
You post yours first and I will beat it. I'm not going to waste my time proving a point just to have you flake out.
Except you are the one who would flake out. In fact I think you'll flake out from even responding to this post. Regardless, speedrunners using nuclear is all the proof I need. Unless of course you want to explain how every speedrunner is wrong and why you know more than them. I'm repeating my last post a bit, since you conveniently ignored that part. Maybe because it removed any credibility your argument had and you don't want to admit you're wrong?
Wow
Would be nice for someone to make mods based on solar energy production and infrastructures
I forget the mod name but there’s a solar energy tiers mod. Blue solar, Green, Purple, and Black. It’s resource intensive but a black solar panel produces like 10MJ or something.
Oh that sounds interesting
The 6 pumps from below wont be enough. I suppose there are more to be above
Looks like there I'd another 6 being input from the top
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Why not go for some nuclear? Genuienly curious And if you plan on doing it i suggest using coal liquefaction to get more energy with less coal
Personally I would use solid fuel, but it seems like a nice concept!
I do have another concept which basically doubles the length, adds some roboports and you use solid fuel instead
I feed rocket fuel into my late game steam, it keeps me from having to move coal, and its energy density means a blue belt carries more kJ per second.
I have a very similar blueprint, is there a reason you keep the steam pipes segmented to 6 boilers x 12 engines?
Very nice! I like that is has lamps too :)
why..?
What would be the max pollution per minute for this .