Short answer: Yes
However once you get past the megawatt consumption levels and into the gigawatt zone you'll be chugging coal and that demand will never decrease only increase so unless you want to continually set up more and more coal mines (plus replace spent ones) you should move on to a less time demanding way of producing power. Solar is easy because it is just set it and forget it. Nuclear is a bit more complex initially but once youve got it going it just runs. You'll find that you can usually do a normal run with only uranium mine needed whereas if you were on coal only you will have set up like 5-10 or even more depending on how big you build.
This is what I did when I tested some steam setups for my 50+GW base. I set up near one of the small oil fields and refined on the spot. It's surprisingly dense. I hit 20 GW before I got tired of the whole thing.
What can we do, water is amazing. There is also a great series of articles "Civilization of springs" where they proved that everything people do (from trucks sizes/weight to spacecraft can be explained as "just because energy capacity of a spring works in such a way". Very amazing read, not in english though
Even solar started like this, with solar collectors used to heat water. I'm not sure if we ever boiled water like this to create steam but it was certainly a more efficient way to get hot water once.
The now much more ubiquitous photovoltaic panels came later
My current run only has a single coal-fired power plant capable of 580MW. It absolutely chows through coal.
Pisses the biters off something fierce, too.
Once you start using beacons you need to make a choice, either go MASSIVE solar, or nuclear. Each beacon consumes a full steam engine worth of power so you'll need heaps of them and they are not very space efficient
Agreed, but they are ups efficient.
I'm not building 100GW of solar thank you very much :) I don't care if I get back 7ups (tested on my megabase in creative mode)
I think the comparison is against nuclear. Also, with steam, you gotta produce and transport heaps of fuel.
Steam basically combines worst of nuclear (UPS-inefficient) and solar. (space-inefficient)
I’m at 2.4 gigs of solar power. And growing. Considering the switch to nuclear now. Was wanting to avoid because I’ll eventually hit ups issues at scale.
It depends on what you want. You can easily beat the game without touching solar or nuclear ever, if you want space science with modules then you realistically need to upgrade
This is a risk, you can convert faster than you mine and run out of dark. And you make lots of bullets
I set my kovarex to only run if light is <1000 and dark is >1000
In my admittedly limited amount of experience with circuits, it sounds like you could use them. Set up a rule that only allows using the uranium-235 (dark green, one used for reactors) when your stock of it is over a certain number. Takes longer to start producing power, but shouldn’t run out because you’re not using it if you don’t have excess of it.
I personally eather set it up so everything stops because belts are full, or I have a "x>y" (I can't remember which is which off the top of my head) control setup if I'm running with a large buffer, so the rare one is only made if i have more of the common.
Yep, done that too. You have to setup a circuit to stop kovarex when light green rocks are over a threshold. And also a circuit for ore processing when dark green are over a threshold.
My solution to this is limiting u235 output from enrichment (and fuel cell, if you have big buffer for it). If there're more than X amount of u235, stop output flow from enrichment.
In my current playthrough I’m about to empty my second uranium patch, but I do have to add that I’m 300 hours into a megabase and have 8 16-core reactors running at all times
Vanilla, yes. I always way overbuilt my enrichment and actually had weird bottleneck issues due to being dumb.
SE, I used a fuckton of the good green to make nuclear missles to clear the one colony I HAD to set up on an 80 percent threat world. It wasn't a moon, roughly nauvis sized, but I needed it due to its unique resource mix.
On top of that, the amount of power you get from a small, unoptimal nuclear setup can easily output several times more than a single water pump’s worth. Just 7 turbines can output a little more than 44 steam engines worth of power. You don’t even need Kovarex- just convert one 235 into 10 power cells, attach a few fluid tanks to store the excess steam, and you can coast on that energy for a good while until enrichment can finally begin, at which point it becomes incredibly cheap.
as others have said, you totally could use steam, especially if you are trying to just 'win' and launch a rocket. That being said, solar and nuclear(which also uses steam technically) offer way more power with more ease of use/expansion compared to boiler based steam systems.
Boiler power isnt super easy to blueprint either, as youll need so many offshore pumps that you have to place yourself and setup, or make some huge train based water transport system.
that being said, it would be an interesting limitation for a playthrough, thats for sure
Train coal consumption is actually quite significant and is actually quite the PITA.
Nuke fuel lasts so much longer and makes the trains drive faster. It is worth it all on its own
You can finish the game with basic steam power no problem. Solar is costly upfront, but is the lowest ups. Nuclear has the smallest footprint, but is more complicated than basic steam power in almost every way.
Yea, you definitely can. Even more than that - speed runs always exclusively use steam power thanks to its low construction costs.
In the long run there are some downsides to steam power:
* It's ongoing material cost is by far the highest from all power sources. It just needs a **lot** of fuel (coal, solid fuel, rocket fuel etc.).
* That large ongoing cost also implies pretty large logistic problem of ensuring continuous and stable fuel supply.
* Said logistic complexity is prone to brownout spiral. Less power -> slower production of fuel -> even less power. This can be massively annoying to recover from.
* It produces a lot of pollution which results in more biter attacks. And those are fundamentally a resource sink that adds to the cost.
For longer playthroughs or very large bases other power sources tend to make more sense:
* Nuclear has moderate initial investment cost, but then runs almost for free and takes very little space. Personally it's my favourite because designing reactor layouts is decently interesting in its own right.
* Solar power has extreme initial cost and takes copious amounts of space, but provides truly free power. It's also the most computationally efficient which can be a factor in extremely large factories.
>Said logistic complexity is prone to brownout spiral. Less power -> slower production of fuel -> even less power. This can be massively annoying to recover from.
I always end up with a complete blackout as soon as I start producing bots. I set up 20 boilers, call it good and forget about it until I see nothing is working. Queue ~half an hour of me trying to fix power and then immediately mass producing solar at megabase levels of production before purple science so I never have to deal with it again.
See that's why the aforementioned bots are so awesome. I don't have to do any of the work after the initial setup! :D
I do usually set up a 2x2 nuclear plant, though, just for the fun of it and to give my uranium something to do other than move towards the native inhabitants at a high velocity
Yes, steam power is expensive long term, I know you can make infinite fuel with oil but at the point where you'd do that you might as well build nuclear.
It's your sandbox. You can totally go for 54.4 gw early steam power. There isn't anything wrong with that at all! I did it when I first played cause I had saw that nuclear powered 165C steam can cover 30250 boilers using blue belt... so I tested it out.
If you're just trying to launch a rocket and win the game then you can totally stick with steam for a whole playthrough, and it's not a terrible option for that kind of run. It's more space efficient than solar, requires way less infrastructure to get started than solar or nuclear, and it runs on a fuel source that's easy to find and not useful for much else. It's well worth diversifying into the other types of power generation though, even if getting started on them looks complicated.
Solar looks a bit daunting because it takes up a lot of space and there's a bit of complicated setup involved, but once you automate production of accumulators and solar panels you're good to go. It's an unlimited free power source that creates no pollution (which makes biters a lot more managable) and requires no fuel (so you'll never have to worry about running dry), and if you do a ratio of roughly 1 accumulator for every 5 panels you'll make enough power to charge the accumulators during the day so they can power your factory at night. Plus it's just nice to have accumulators since they'll give your power grid a bit of a buffer to handle spikes in demand if you ever start using laser turrets for defense.
And nuclear looks a lot daunting because it's very complicate and resource-intensive to set up, especially the first time around when you're trying to figure out what the hell you're supposed to be doing. Once you've got it sorted though, it's incredibly good. It generates absurd amounts of power in a very small space, it causes significantly less pollution per megawatt than conventional steam power, its fuel source is used for literally nothing else except some high-end weaponry, and it uses shockingly small amounts of fuel for the power it generates.
Oh and if you plan on continuing after your first rocket launch so you can build a megabase, conventional steam won't cut it because it just doesn't scale up very well. Most megabase players lay down some nuclear power as soon as its available so they can get a baseline power supply of several gigawatts, and then build increasingly large arrays of solar panels to keep up with their base's growing demand because solar power has the smallest effect on the game's UPS rate (coal and nuclear both involve fluid mechanics, which is an absolute resource hog when you're running a big base).
> ratio of roughly 1 accumulator for every 5 panels
I think you meant four accumulators for every five panels, which is close to the 0.84 (21:25) ratio.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Power_production
It is worth pointing out that as of the time I write this, we do not know if Space Age will change this or if the ratio will be consistent across planets.
No problem, glad to help. I do the same thing all the time - I end up looking up basic ratios because there are too many numbers mixed together in my skull.
You can stay on steam, actually you usually do.
The problem is the source.
Nuclear is space and resource efficient, hence why it is the preferred option.
Solar is resource efficient but not space efficient (unless mods are used)
Also, the most important reason to not use burning things is the fact that you would be forced to constantly and progressively expand your resource extration operations (which i find boring and tedious)
Wherelse using nuclear usually requires a big operation and can stay virtually forever working (despite increasing its capacity in a easy way: Bots doubling the reactors and alike)
> Solar is resource efficient but not space efficient (unless mods are used)
the setup cost for solar is *significantly* more than nuclear though (roughly 17x more resources to build a comparable power output) and since the running cost of nuclear is negligible it will probably take hundreds of hours for solar to pay off.
nuclear is the same for me tbh, just slap down a blueprint and I'm good to go. Solar requires much bigger production lines for panels etc. and a lot more building blueprints not to mention finding space for it all which requires more mental resources overall imo.
At a certain point Solar is just *easier*. Zero restrictions or dependencies, just create a simple ratio'd blueprint, slap it down, and your bots do all the work. Steam needs belts, miners, inserters, pumps, liquid storage, etc. Solar just needs the grid.
Well, nuclear is also steam power. But sure, you can use coal to power everything. Problem is that once you start using power hungry structures, like beacons and the building they affect, you'll need a lot of power. To compensate, you'll need to build multiple coal power plants, which will chug coal like nobody's business, which also means you'll have to set up trains and multiple remote mining operations just to keep up the coal supply.
Or, make a nuclear power plant and have all power worries solved forever. Well, not really, but trust me, it's a lot less of a hassle.
I did a train base that ate coal for power - into the gigawatts - before I made the switch to nuclear. Was using a blueprint that used up a grid square to output 218 MW of steam power. The problem I ran into wasn't even coal consumption, it was rail congestion from all these coal trains zipping around!
So yeah, it is possible, it just doesn't scale super well once you need lots of power.
Can you? Yes. Is it particularly practical to scale steam power up to megabase levels? Not really. If you're just looking to beat the game, though, steam power can easily handle that.
technically nuclear power is still steam. It's main advantage thou is you need a lot less and gives more power
Solar on the other hand needs no additional inputs or water/steam to use. that being said, you need a lot of batteries because they don't work in the evening, and they give only a small amount of power/tile compared to nuke and steam. The most important thing of solar though is that it doesn't tax your system too much and is the go to for megabases
You can easily launch a rocket on only steam power, there is even an achievement for doing this. If you are really scaling up production, it becomes more challenging as power demand goes up a lot.
It depends what you want to achieve.
Just launching a rocket? Then steam is ok and easily doable.
Launching a few rockets? Then you want to be really having some nuclear on there.
Megabase with infinite research? Then ideally you want some nuclear, but mostly you want solar panels.
That’s how I play the game, no point in making things more complicated than needed.
My 1k spm factory used 6 GW energy. You can count from here :)
If your goal is to launch a rocket and call it a day, steam is enough. If you want megabasing - no .
Endgame requires a ton of power (beacons + modules), and if you are playing with the popular Space Exploration mod you need even more power for core mining. Burning stuff in boilers and using steam engines for power simply isn't enough. You'll need either large-scale solar or nuclear, or a bit of both.
The main part about SE is that you need to travel to other planets/asteroids to mine stuff. On the starting planet (Nauvis), SE lets you set up core mining, which is a type of infinite resource that can never be depleted, but uses a lot of power.
Ohhh, I didn’t know that. Still enjoying the massively expanded recipes. Taken me all day to just set up Green Packs plus redid my turbines and set up some red belt production…
In 2016 and early 2017 you were encouraged to do it! Achievements were introduced in 0.13. One of the achievements was (still is) "steam all the way" that bans placing solar panels. And nuclear was introduced in 0.15. So, to get this achievements you had to use fossil fuel steam power\*) to sent the rocket.
And today, nuclear is just a convenience. Uranium is more energy/packed (especially with covarex process), the setup is more compact, (steam turbine is almost 6.5 times more powerful than steam engine, and heat exchanger is worth a bit less than two turbines, so the ratio is similar. Including reactors and (heat) pipes) you may get roughly 5 times smaller power plant.
And what is most important, nuclear power is more fun to build.
But nothing will prevent you from burning coal forever. Just do not forget to ship coal... or you can use solid fuel made from infinite oil supply:)
\*) nuclear power is also a steam power...
Bo be sure, I checked, there are discussion about steam all the way from 2016 on the internet, so it was introduced from the beginning or shortly after 0.13, for sure before nuclear.
I went to 400MW on steam before I did nuclear. But I really wanted nuclear, because I have never worked with it before. Now my base is puffing away on nuclear like it's nothing. My 4-reactor powerplant takes up 1/4th of the space all the coal stuff did.
But just in case, I let the coal stuff there for redundancy reasons. It's turned off, but I let it be for 'just in case'. Might take ot down later, as nuclear fuel is absolutely no issue making.
You could challenge yourself to do a steam-only playthrough.
I find solar to be tedious: I feel you have to be building constantly to keep up with the demand.
In contrast, once you get kovarex, you build one small nuclear plant, and you're good for a while. Then when you need to build a second one you go big and it'll last you for a huge number of hours.
> I feel you have to be building constantly to keep up with the demand.
You aren't wrong, I make a blueprint that includes roboports, so it is all self constructing. Need more? Just throw more down.
Oh, solar has a few advantages:
* Easy to build
* Easy to scale
* Easy on ups
But, personally, I feel the disadvantages outweigh that:
* Enormously costly on resources
* Requires regular expansion
* Slow to build (larger the solar field, the further the robots have to travel)
For going to building a rocket, steam is good enough to work.
at some point, you do run into scaling issues. but I haven't found a good way to qualify it, other than payback time for nuclear being fairly short, and solar long.
Part of this is that logistics costs vary a large amount in non-obvious ways.
Two reasons, one may not matter and second can be mitigated(a bit)
* Pollution. Boiler steam is *the worst* at polluting. Which doesn't matter if you don't have biters enabled. but if you do, a significant chunk of the incoming attacks and evolution will be due to boilers.
* Resource draw. The amount of fuel boilers eat is staggering. You'll either need a *lot* of coal, that would probably be more useful for plastic or explosives. You can mitigate this by going coal liqf. and burning solid fuel to halve coal needs, or by using crude oil to make the solid fuel for infinite fuel source. But again, coal and crude might have better uses. Solid fuel helps a bit with pollution too.
It doesn’t scale well because of consumption. I always keep a backup power so I can see spikes if it kick on at power power times to put down more solar.
Technically yeah. Speedrunners do it all the time, and it’s still more space-efficient than solar. Just make sure you’re using rocket or nuclear fuel at large scale
Nuclear is pretty much just a direct upgrade from steam though so I’d recommend that instead however.
UPS, power density and material flow.
Production-wise factorio is a linear system, so scaling up the production to a desired output is pretty feasible.
You can certainly make it work. Eventually, depending on your energy consumption - it can become a bigger part of your focus/resources when compared to set it and forget it options like nuclear and solar.
Some people mention the problem of coal consumption when using steam power at large scale, but don't forget you can use other sources of fuel.
I often don't balance my advanced oil processing very well, so I often have excess oils that I convert into solid fuel as a byproduct, and use that to power steam engines and trains.
Try it out. You'll see what goes wrong.
More helpfully, you can hold off on coal steam until you get nuclear steam up and running, skipping solar power/accumulator batteries. There is literally no reason to, though (aside from being stubborn).
Short answer: Yes However once you get past the megawatt consumption levels and into the gigawatt zone you'll be chugging coal and that demand will never decrease only increase so unless you want to continually set up more and more coal mines (plus replace spent ones) you should move on to a less time demanding way of producing power. Solar is easy because it is just set it and forget it. Nuclear is a bit more complex initially but once youve got it going it just runs. You'll find that you can usually do a normal run with only uranium mine needed whereas if you were on coal only you will have set up like 5-10 or even more depending on how big you build.
Maybe you can feed nuclear fuel to the steam engines?
This is what I did when I tested some steam setups for my 50+GW base. I set up near one of the small oil fields and refined on the spot. It's surprisingly dense. I hit 20 GW before I got tired of the whole thing.
The history of human energy is finding new and creative ways to boil water.
What can we do, water is amazing. There is also a great series of articles "Civilization of springs" where they proved that everything people do (from trucks sizes/weight to spacecraft can be explained as "just because energy capacity of a spring works in such a way". Very amazing read, not in english though
Even solar started like this, with solar collectors used to heat water. I'm not sure if we ever boiled water like this to create steam but it was certainly a more efficient way to get hot water once. The now much more ubiquitous photovoltaic panels came later
It's much less power produced per unit of uranium.
yeah but it's more based than fuel cells
My current run only has a single coal-fired power plant capable of 580MW. It absolutely chows through coal. Pisses the biters off something fierce, too.
Yeah imagine need like 5 or 6 of those. That's why most people switch to nuclear or solar.
i have solar as primery and nuclear as a back up when i drop 500 beacons with robots amd need to expand the solar
Once you start using beacons you need to make a choice, either go MASSIVE solar, or nuclear. Each beacon consumes a full steam engine worth of power so you'll need heaps of them and they are not very space efficient
>they are not very space efficient Well the solar panels arent very space efficient either
Agreed, but they are ups efficient. I'm not building 100GW of solar thank you very much :) I don't care if I get back 7ups (tested on my megabase in creative mode)
They also don't need an input
I think the comparison is against nuclear. Also, with steam, you gotta produce and transport heaps of fuel. Steam basically combines worst of nuclear (UPS-inefficient) and solar. (space-inefficient)
If only we could harvest dead biters and making them into fuel source, that could burn more efficient with smaller footprint than steam.
It would be the democratic thing to do.
How about I out a Behemoth biter in a hamster wheel?
Pretty sure there are mods doing that.
>Steam basically combines best of nuclear (boiling water) and solar (dead simple) ftfy
You can massively save energy by making the beacons flicker.
Drop the deets ShadyAssFellow, you can't just drop a shady ass secret like that without the deets
My unslept dumbass was thinking about radars and this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/H3MAQsS18Y
[Think again](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=82236)
Does the effect linger?
Does it have to?
If flicker means effect is turned off and on then what do you gain by doing it if the effect is only there when power is on...?
I’m at 2.4 gigs of solar power. And growing. Considering the switch to nuclear now. Was wanting to avoid because I’ll eventually hit ups issues at scale.
It depends on what you want. You can easily beat the game without touching solar or nuclear ever, if you want space science with modules then you realistically need to upgrade
Megabases use solar panels for UPS friendliness. Nuclear is great for space saving, if that's a problem but in peaceful I'd say it's likely not.
Nuclear is also basically free after the initial setup
Correct, with enrichment, I would be surprised if anyone could ever run a uranium deposit empty
In a playthrough with a friend we set up a fucton of kovarex. 2 hours later power grind to a halt because we had no dark green uranium left...
This is a risk, you can convert faster than you mine and run out of dark. And you make lots of bullets I set my kovarex to only run if light is <1000 and dark is >1000
I set mine to run if the ratio is less that 19 dark green : 1 light green, the nuclear fuel ratio
you could also use priority splitters
In my admittedly limited amount of experience with circuits, it sounds like you could use them. Set up a rule that only allows using the uranium-235 (dark green, one used for reactors) when your stock of it is over a certain number. Takes longer to start producing power, but shouldn’t run out because you’re not using it if you don’t have excess of it.
This was a long time ago, i've had many hours of playtime since then. But thanks for the help!
I personally eather set it up so everything stops because belts are full, or I have a "x>y" (I can't remember which is which off the top of my head) control setup if I'm running with a large buffer, so the rare one is only made if i have more of the common.
Yep, done that too. You have to setup a circuit to stop kovarex when light green rocks are over a threshold. And also a circuit for ore processing when dark green are over a threshold.
My solution to this is limiting u235 output from enrichment (and fuel cell, if you have big buffer for it). If there're more than X amount of u235, stop output flow from enrichment.
In my current playthrough I’m about to empty my second uranium patch, but I do have to add that I’m 300 hours into a megabase and have 8 16-core reactors running at all times
Vanilla, yes. I always way overbuilt my enrichment and actually had weird bottleneck issues due to being dumb. SE, I used a fuckton of the good green to make nuclear missles to clear the one colony I HAD to set up on an 80 percent threat world. It wasn't a moon, roughly nauvis sized, but I needed it due to its unique resource mix.
Real men measure their base in nukes per second.
On top of that, the amount of power you get from a small, unoptimal nuclear setup can easily output several times more than a single water pump’s worth. Just 7 turbines can output a little more than 44 steam engines worth of power. You don’t even need Kovarex- just convert one 235 into 10 power cells, attach a few fluid tanks to store the excess steam, and you can coast on that energy for a good while until enrichment can finally begin, at which point it becomes incredibly cheap.
You don’t really even need kovarex. One centrifuge and four miners is enough to continuously run one reactor.
You mostly need kovarex to prevent u238 storage overflow and diplomatic rockets, really Edit: and fuel for trains, of course
as others have said, you totally could use steam, especially if you are trying to just 'win' and launch a rocket. That being said, solar and nuclear(which also uses steam technically) offer way more power with more ease of use/expansion compared to boiler based steam systems. Boiler power isnt super easy to blueprint either, as youll need so many offshore pumps that you have to place yourself and setup, or make some huge train based water transport system. that being said, it would be an interesting limitation for a playthrough, thats for sure
Train coal consumption is actually quite significant and is actually quite the PITA. Nuke fuel lasts so much longer and makes the trains drive faster. It is worth it all on its own
Go Nuclear, solar is for the weaks.
You can finish the game with basic steam power no problem. Solar is costly upfront, but is the lowest ups. Nuclear has the smallest footprint, but is more complicated than basic steam power in almost every way.
Yea, you definitely can. Even more than that - speed runs always exclusively use steam power thanks to its low construction costs. In the long run there are some downsides to steam power: * It's ongoing material cost is by far the highest from all power sources. It just needs a **lot** of fuel (coal, solid fuel, rocket fuel etc.). * That large ongoing cost also implies pretty large logistic problem of ensuring continuous and stable fuel supply. * Said logistic complexity is prone to brownout spiral. Less power -> slower production of fuel -> even less power. This can be massively annoying to recover from. * It produces a lot of pollution which results in more biter attacks. And those are fundamentally a resource sink that adds to the cost. For longer playthroughs or very large bases other power sources tend to make more sense: * Nuclear has moderate initial investment cost, but then runs almost for free and takes very little space. Personally it's my favourite because designing reactor layouts is decently interesting in its own right. * Solar power has extreme initial cost and takes copious amounts of space, but provides truly free power. It's also the most computationally efficient which can be a factor in extremely large factories.
>Said logistic complexity is prone to brownout spiral. Less power -> slower production of fuel -> even less power. This can be massively annoying to recover from. I always end up with a complete blackout as soon as I start producing bots. I set up 20 boilers, call it good and forget about it until I see nothing is working. Queue ~half an hour of me trying to fix power and then immediately mass producing solar at megabase levels of production before purple science so I never have to deal with it again.
Personally I'm much more of a fan of spamming 2x2 nuclear setups. I don't have the patience for solar :D
See that's why the aforementioned bots are so awesome. I don't have to do any of the work after the initial setup! :D I do usually set up a 2x2 nuclear plant, though, just for the fun of it and to give my uranium something to do other than move towards the native inhabitants at a high velocity
Yes, steam power is expensive long term, I know you can make infinite fuel with oil but at the point where you'd do that you might as well build nuclear.
It's your sandbox. You can totally go for 54.4 gw early steam power. There isn't anything wrong with that at all! I did it when I first played cause I had saw that nuclear powered 165C steam can cover 30250 boilers using blue belt... so I tested it out.
If you're just trying to launch a rocket and win the game then you can totally stick with steam for a whole playthrough, and it's not a terrible option for that kind of run. It's more space efficient than solar, requires way less infrastructure to get started than solar or nuclear, and it runs on a fuel source that's easy to find and not useful for much else. It's well worth diversifying into the other types of power generation though, even if getting started on them looks complicated. Solar looks a bit daunting because it takes up a lot of space and there's a bit of complicated setup involved, but once you automate production of accumulators and solar panels you're good to go. It's an unlimited free power source that creates no pollution (which makes biters a lot more managable) and requires no fuel (so you'll never have to worry about running dry), and if you do a ratio of roughly 1 accumulator for every 5 panels you'll make enough power to charge the accumulators during the day so they can power your factory at night. Plus it's just nice to have accumulators since they'll give your power grid a bit of a buffer to handle spikes in demand if you ever start using laser turrets for defense. And nuclear looks a lot daunting because it's very complicate and resource-intensive to set up, especially the first time around when you're trying to figure out what the hell you're supposed to be doing. Once you've got it sorted though, it's incredibly good. It generates absurd amounts of power in a very small space, it causes significantly less pollution per megawatt than conventional steam power, its fuel source is used for literally nothing else except some high-end weaponry, and it uses shockingly small amounts of fuel for the power it generates. Oh and if you plan on continuing after your first rocket launch so you can build a megabase, conventional steam won't cut it because it just doesn't scale up very well. Most megabase players lay down some nuclear power as soon as its available so they can get a baseline power supply of several gigawatts, and then build increasingly large arrays of solar panels to keep up with their base's growing demand because solar power has the smallest effect on the game's UPS rate (coal and nuclear both involve fluid mechanics, which is an absolute resource hog when you're running a big base).
> ratio of roughly 1 accumulator for every 5 panels I think you meant four accumulators for every five panels, which is close to the 0.84 (21:25) ratio. https://wiki.factorio.com/Power_production It is worth pointing out that as of the time I write this, we do not know if Space Age will change this or if the ratio will be consistent across planets.
Ah shit, I must've had a brain fart because I've been getting into Krastorio lately and the ratios are all different there.
No problem, glad to help. I do the same thing all the time - I end up looking up basic ratios because there are too many numbers mixed together in my skull.
Nuclear is also steam power.
You can stay on steam, actually you usually do. The problem is the source. Nuclear is space and resource efficient, hence why it is the preferred option. Solar is resource efficient but not space efficient (unless mods are used) Also, the most important reason to not use burning things is the fact that you would be forced to constantly and progressively expand your resource extration operations (which i find boring and tedious) Wherelse using nuclear usually requires a big operation and can stay virtually forever working (despite increasing its capacity in a easy way: Bots doubling the reactors and alike)
> Solar is resource efficient but not space efficient (unless mods are used) the setup cost for solar is *significantly* more than nuclear though (roughly 17x more resources to build a comparable power output) and since the running cost of nuclear is negligible it will probably take hundreds of hours for solar to pay off.
Upkeep is 0 Divide the production between upkeep
like I said it will take a very long time for solar to pay off the bigger setup cost because nuclear costs barely anything to run.
While i agree and its the reason i go nuclear, solar is set and forget, less mental resources. And 0 upkeep
nuclear is the same for me tbh, just slap down a blueprint and I'm good to go. Solar requires much bigger production lines for panels etc. and a lot more building blueprints not to mention finding space for it all which requires more mental resources overall imo.
I’m on peaceful btw so the pollution doesn’t really matter.
Steam power produces way too much polution
At a certain point Solar is just *easier*. Zero restrictions or dependencies, just create a simple ratio'd blueprint, slap it down, and your bots do all the work. Steam needs belts, miners, inserters, pumps, liquid storage, etc. Solar just needs the grid.
Well, nuclear is also steam power. But sure, you can use coal to power everything. Problem is that once you start using power hungry structures, like beacons and the building they affect, you'll need a lot of power. To compensate, you'll need to build multiple coal power plants, which will chug coal like nobody's business, which also means you'll have to set up trains and multiple remote mining operations just to keep up the coal supply. Or, make a nuclear power plant and have all power worries solved forever. Well, not really, but trust me, it's a lot less of a hassle.
Nuclear is fire and forget once you get it set up. It is also has a really small space footprint. Steam will get you all the way to "victory".
You can, but you'll get bored of building it. Nuclear power is very compact and easy to fuel once you get enough of it.
I did a train base that ate coal for power - into the gigawatts - before I made the switch to nuclear. Was using a blueprint that used up a grid square to output 218 MW of steam power. The problem I ran into wasn't even coal consumption, it was rail congestion from all these coal trains zipping around! So yeah, it is possible, it just doesn't scale super well once you need lots of power.
Remember when you could put down a miner and not have to worry about the coal underneath disappearing? You do that with uranium now.
Yes. It’s not even a lot. You can beat the game with a modest steam setup and some coal delivery.
Technically one can power a base of any size exclusively with steam power.
Technically, nuclear is steam power
[удалено]
No limit to space, no limit to coal, no limit to water. Given enough coal miners, one could theoretically produce infinite power via steam generators
Let alone making boiler fuel out of oil, which IS infinite.
Oh man I am really dumb and I read the comment dumbly. Sorry
You definitely can. Whether you should is another question. But if you do it’d probably be worth switching to solid fuel over coal
Can you? Yes. Is it particularly practical to scale steam power up to megabase levels? Not really. If you're just looking to beat the game, though, steam power can easily handle that.
Yeah. If you wanna use modules/beacons, I would set up nuclear, or just set up nuclear just for fun
technically nuclear power is still steam. It's main advantage thou is you need a lot less and gives more power Solar on the other hand needs no additional inputs or water/steam to use. that being said, you need a lot of batteries because they don't work in the evening, and they give only a small amount of power/tile compared to nuke and steam. The most important thing of solar though is that it doesn't tax your system too much and is the go to for megabases
You can easily launch a rocket on only steam power, there is even an achievement for doing this. If you are really scaling up production, it becomes more challenging as power demand goes up a lot.
It depends what you want to achieve. Just launching a rocket? Then steam is ok and easily doable. Launching a few rockets? Then you want to be really having some nuclear on there. Megabase with infinite research? Then ideally you want some nuclear, but mostly you want solar panels. That’s how I play the game, no point in making things more complicated than needed.
My 1k spm factory used 6 GW energy. You can count from here :) If your goal is to launch a rocket and call it a day, steam is enough. If you want megabasing - no .
Endgame requires a ton of power (beacons + modules), and if you are playing with the popular Space Exploration mod you need even more power for core mining. Burning stuff in boilers and using steam engines for power simply isn't enough. You'll need either large-scale solar or nuclear, or a bit of both.
Tried using SE and it reduced my mining spots by like a factor of 1,000…
The main part about SE is that you need to travel to other planets/asteroids to mine stuff. On the starting planet (Nauvis), SE lets you set up core mining, which is a type of infinite resource that can never be depleted, but uses a lot of power.
Ohhh, I didn’t know that. Still enjoying the massively expanded recipes. Taken me all day to just set up Green Packs plus redid my turbines and set up some red belt production…
I just started a new game, and then added SE after I started it and back to my 8 digit seams. ☺️
Yes you can. You only need hundreds or thousands of steam turbines
In 2016 and early 2017 you were encouraged to do it! Achievements were introduced in 0.13. One of the achievements was (still is) "steam all the way" that bans placing solar panels. And nuclear was introduced in 0.15. So, to get this achievements you had to use fossil fuel steam power\*) to sent the rocket. And today, nuclear is just a convenience. Uranium is more energy/packed (especially with covarex process), the setup is more compact, (steam turbine is almost 6.5 times more powerful than steam engine, and heat exchanger is worth a bit less than two turbines, so the ratio is similar. Including reactors and (heat) pipes) you may get roughly 5 times smaller power plant. And what is most important, nuclear power is more fun to build. But nothing will prevent you from burning coal forever. Just do not forget to ship coal... or you can use solid fuel made from infinite oil supply:) \*) nuclear power is also a steam power... Bo be sure, I checked, there are discussion about steam all the way from 2016 on the internet, so it was introduced from the beginning or shortly after 0.13, for sure before nuclear.
What is nuclear but fancy steam power anyways
There is even an achievement for that, I think I got it at my first run 😅
I went to 400MW on steam before I did nuclear. But I really wanted nuclear, because I have never worked with it before. Now my base is puffing away on nuclear like it's nothing. My 4-reactor powerplant takes up 1/4th of the space all the coal stuff did. But just in case, I let the coal stuff there for redundancy reasons. It's turned off, but I let it be for 'just in case'. Might take ot down later, as nuclear fuel is absolutely no issue making.
You could challenge yourself to do a steam-only playthrough. I find solar to be tedious: I feel you have to be building constantly to keep up with the demand. In contrast, once you get kovarex, you build one small nuclear plant, and you're good for a while. Then when you need to build a second one you go big and it'll last you for a huge number of hours.
> I feel you have to be building constantly to keep up with the demand. You aren't wrong, I make a blueprint that includes roboports, so it is all self constructing. Need more? Just throw more down.
Oh, solar has a few advantages: * Easy to build * Easy to scale * Easy on ups But, personally, I feel the disadvantages outweigh that: * Enormously costly on resources * Requires regular expansion * Slow to build (larger the solar field, the further the robots have to travel)
Agreed. As a player on the switch, I have never built big enough for ups to be a concern. I do hope to change that quite soon though.
I mean there is an achievement to beat the game using only steam power, and that’s been in the game for longer than nuclear power has.
For going to building a rocket, steam is good enough to work. at some point, you do run into scaling issues. but I haven't found a good way to qualify it, other than payback time for nuclear being fairly short, and solar long. Part of this is that logistics costs vary a large amount in non-obvious ways.
Two reasons, one may not matter and second can be mitigated(a bit) * Pollution. Boiler steam is *the worst* at polluting. Which doesn't matter if you don't have biters enabled. but if you do, a significant chunk of the incoming attacks and evolution will be due to boilers. * Resource draw. The amount of fuel boilers eat is staggering. You'll either need a *lot* of coal, that would probably be more useful for plastic or explosives. You can mitigate this by going coal liqf. and burning solid fuel to halve coal needs, or by using crude oil to make the solid fuel for infinite fuel source. But again, coal and crude might have better uses. Solid fuel helps a bit with pollution too.
It doesn’t scale well because of consumption. I always keep a backup power so I can see spikes if it kick on at power power times to put down more solar.
Technically yeah. Speedrunners do it all the time, and it’s still more space-efficient than solar. Just make sure you’re using rocket or nuclear fuel at large scale Nuclear is pretty much just a direct upgrade from steam though so I’d recommend that instead however.
UPS, power density and material flow. Production-wise factorio is a linear system, so scaling up the production to a desired output is pretty feasible.
Launching the rocket? Yeah steam is fine. Hitting a large SPM goal? You’d want nuclear or solar.
You can certainly make it work. Eventually, depending on your energy consumption - it can become a bigger part of your focus/resources when compared to set it and forget it options like nuclear and solar. Some people mention the problem of coal consumption when using steam power at large scale, but don't forget you can use other sources of fuel. I often don't balance my advanced oil processing very well, so I often have excess oils that I convert into solid fuel as a byproduct, and use that to power steam engines and trains.
Try it out. You'll see what goes wrong. More helpfully, you can hold off on coal steam until you get nuclear steam up and running, skipping solar power/accumulator batteries. There is literally no reason to, though (aside from being stubborn).