Also, after the 2.0 update it takes a single wire from the reactor to the inserter to set up wasteless fuel consuption. So what's the point against it?
@@dnkbmc how do you make that work for multiple reactors, if you wire them each to their own inserter you could end up with about half of the reactors firing since their temperature won't be the exact same, if that happens you can end up not using neighbor bonus which is also wasteful since you get less power out of the fuel cells
This reminds me of how many people thinkk nuclear power is useless before you unlock kovarex, when in reality about 3 centrifuges can actually supply an entire reactor without kovarex...
less than that. my first save that reached the end of the base game had a single one. later upgraded to 3 while having 4 reactors going. if you have a big stash of fuel/uranium, the ratio is more like one to one.
@@nnelg8139 i mean so what if you have 20 chests full of it? You can also just play with a warehouse mod which gives you access to massive chests that can hold a couple hundred thousand items so its even less of an issue
@@nnelg8139 you don't create enough used fuel cells for it to be a problem and you need u238 for ammo. You also don't need kovorax for recycling used fuel cells either
I’m using nukes on my space platform, and since you can only ship up a tiny amount of fuel per rocket trip (like 10) it makes no sense not to do the trivial circuit condition to save on fuel
Yep, it's very easy to forget about a ship for a while and come back to find all your cells used up and the reactor cold. Even if you're not drawing from nuclear, like if your platform is idling or drawing from solar, the reactor will still consume cells at the same rate
To a certain point. All my spaceships that pass nauvis have a requirement for atleast 1k fuel cells and the landing pads on gleba request fuel cells(complete overkill just for the hell of it)Eventually it becomes trivial again thanks to the main of the video; uranium is infinite
@@Precigian My current factory spikes to 100 gigawatts of power usage, but mostly idles at 10 gigawatts. That would be a LOT of constant uranium usage without a wasteless design, and I don't want to place millions of accumulators.
@@Hlebuw3k You know it’s not actually wasteless unless you use tanks or accumulators, right? Also, I was just joking about it, okay? I don’t like wasting my uranium either. But, as you said before, it would now last 4,500 hours instead of 500. This has nothing to do with the size of your base-before, base X lasted 500 hours, and with automation, base X now lasts 5,000.
This. It takes an extra 30 seconds for me to wire up the inserter, especially in Space Age with Reactors able to read their temperature and contents. Makes reactors self-tuning so I don't have to worry about stamping down 100GW of reactor and it tearing through my Uranium stockpiles. Also it means I have more U235 left over for other purposes.
Yeah, but it’s super trivial to set the inserters now to only insert when all of the reactors reach a threshold temperature. I usually do groups of four, so the four reactors are wired together, out put their temperature and the inserters will only add fuel if the total temp is less than 3200 (eg. 800 * 4 reactors.) Previously when you needed to do steam tanks and whatnot, I would have agreed. Now it’s so trivial it’s silly *not* to do it.
if you're only using reactors in groups of 4 then you're wasting a lot of fuel cells by not making a continuous 2 wide line of reactors. If you're using a continuous 2 wide line but powering them in chunks of 4 then you're not guaranteeing the neighbor bonus is actually used since it will only be used optimally when all reactors are firing. The only way to use fuel optimally is to have the entire line be toggled on/off at the same time, when it's needed.
@ Vanilla makes so much fuel that it isn’t worth my time or effort to make that level of optimization. My temperature check is good enough as far as I’m concerned, since it ensures they’re firing with the neighbor bonus for the quartet, which is good enough for me. Especially since they’re a stop gap until fusion now anyway.
it makes sense on nauvis, but when you going to build reactors on other planest, it's much more betrer to plase 1 logic module end save decent amout of recouses from spending on rocets supplying that reactor
Not really, unless you rush everything, you will stock pile a lot of material on Nauvis. I don't think the unlimited research is available until you see other planets. I spend a few hours trying to design my space ship that I end up request 1.5k Uranium Ammo ,with only 25 per rocket. I requested 500 nuclear fuel and can last 7 hours of nonstop burning 4 reactor in other planet.
@nguyendi92 it's you. I rush through planets(I had only 1 week weekend with wriend) and that's why I had problems with amount of rockets I can afford. and when I first time went to gleba, without infinite researches of productivity, every wasted fuel rod was for gold price
@@brotherfox1660 yeah. It make sense, I take time to make Navius base stable in productions with trains, electricity, and design a big space ship before actually going anywhere.
@@nguyendi92 unlimited productions of steel and mining are actually require only red/green/blue/purple science And that's not even about nuclear, that's about lds/blue circuits for rockets. 50 rockets for 500 fuel are actually quite expensive at the start of space expansion
I'm curious where that would come in handy aquilo? Vulcanius has boosted solar and acid neutralization blows a reactor out of the water factoring in shipping time. Water bottlenecks nuclear on Fulgora and lightning gives all the power you need anyway Not familiar enough with gleba so maybe? Aquilo itself sits on the edge of the solar system so shipping times will be a pain as well as be competing with all the other resources that need to be shipped in. Also there's going to be quite a bit of waste heat in your pipe network from heaters powered by locally sourced solid fuel so siphoning off the excess is likely going to be more efficient than shipping uranium+iron or fuel cells.
@@simonnachreiner8380 "competing with all the other resources that need to be shipped in" You can have more than one space platform. What are you trying to say?
@@Tumbolisu A base has a limited number of rocket silos, so you would want to use those efficiently. It is expensive to launch resources into space, so the space platform is just one part of the equation. The question is then whether you want to use your limited capacity to launch fuel for aquilo, or to launch other necessities
@@eivindsulen8516 Rockets are pretty cheap to make, speed beacons massively help with making them faster, and you can always just make more silos. So, launching items into space becomes a non-issue. You can basically copy-paste a space platform, which means more throughput through space. It might take a little while to actually build all of this, but big mining drills, electromagnetic plants and stack inserters allow you to easily upgrade the production and throughput of your nauvis base to do all that.
If you are so short on fuel that you are scraping the bottom of the barrel, I'd consider handfueling a valid strategy as well. On the other hand, it's not a necessity, but it is pretty cool to have a 100% efficient setup
By that logic why do anithing? It litterally takes 2 minutes to learn and one minute tp set up an inserter that reads a reactor temperature and it saves a ton of fuel in the long run. You can play without optimizing every single aspect of your base, but I would encourage players to learn about simple circuits instead of telling them they "should not" do it. Also, knowing that I'm burning twice the fuel for no reason fucks badly with my OCD. I like to save my u235 to nuke stuff, and nuke are expensive. There's no point in consuming more than necessary for power production. I would agree with you if the solution was some intricate circuit that takes a master's degree to understand and set up, but it's litterally 1 combinator.
Well, except for a single saved combinator per plant, there's also no upside to wasting your fuel cells, especially if you still have solar panels. Also, I want legendary spidertrons and pocket reactors, so I'll have a much higher uranium ore drain :)
The main issue for me is what to do with the excess u238. Uranium processing is not a closed loop and you if you run out of storage, you could end up stuck without power. After kovarex this becomes far less of a issue.
I usually only fill like 2 chests full of u238 before having kovarex (in theory this amount should yield 67 u-235). But even if it's 10 chests. So what?
You can use belts, point your uranium from mining into the side of your recycled uranium. Belts will always let any items in the line flow before adding more.
You get 142 U238 for each U135, that means you will have refined 5680 U238 when you have enough U 235 for Kovarex enriching, that is about 1 1/2 steel chests. A pair of reactors consume 36 fuel cells per hour and say you need 2 hours for researching Kovarex, that is 8 U235, so you need only 2 steel chests for storing your surplus U238. Of course if you want to be safe, you can build more storage chests.
but that's impossible, you 'must' hand feed the reactors or you're wasting fuel. On a serious note though I agree, but personally I wouldn't bother with semi optimized. I go full waste on fuel until I want to or have a reason to optimize it and then I'll make it actually optimized. I see many suggestions here of ways of using circuits that either only works for a single reactor setup (this wastes a ton of fuel since no neighbor bonus) or a setup that won't perform optimally
@@shiinondogewalker2809 Yeah, I agree it's not a waste because uranium is absurdly abundant. But personally I never setup reactors until it's optimal, lol. I can share my old design, but what I did essentially was to have a steam tank bus between heat exchangers and steam turbines and check the steam levels to insert fuel or not. So it only produces steam if it's in demand. It's impossible to have a 100% efficient system because heat pipe radiate heat, but mine was producing 99% of power from the heat generated. It's also infinitely expandable, I ended up making a 20GW plant in the middle of the ocean. It has a single belt lane for feeding and extracing waste by weaving blue and red undergrounds
@@ViniciusNegrao_ there isn't any heat loss actually, it's only a bit limited in how far it can transfer heat because of the gradient. So if you used neighbor bonus properly it sounds like your setup was 100% efficient, but 100% is only possible with syncing all inserters to swing at the same time, and the 100% ignores that it's technically possible to get more power with hand feeding. With a 2 wide lane the limit is 80% of that of hand fed builds, but no one will actually use hand feeding so might as well consider the 2 wide lane 100%
I try to save uranium for the sake of mass producing abombs and uranium fuel for trains. Also it’s cool to think about how I only need to spend minuscule amounts of unenriched uranium and iron to power my 5GW base.
I can say you really dont need to save fuel in reactors. My base consumes now like only 10gw, but in the process of getting there it needed up to 21gw. (Filling all stations with blue circuts really took a long time..). And i still run my first ore patch, now with lvl 137 mining productivity 😅 It really doesnt matter what you do with uranium. I might start to equip my spidertronarmy with atomic bombs, so i dont need to fully relie on artillary and the weak spidertrons with lasers even though i have 6 of them following 1 main spidertron. The first one gets shot to often and everything slows down to much when near biters.. That sucks Edit: i only consume so little electricity because the power shuts off when all boxes of 1 ingredient is full or when one of the needed ingredients is missing. Thats why its so little even though i have like 6k becons or so My base consumes ~2400 science pro minute. But some parts can produce like 4k or so
@alexanderjanke1538 Don't give spidertrons nukes. If you aren't manually controlling their firing they'll nuke a biter point blank vaporizing themselves. However go nuts if you're driving.
@@sawyermccall2370 It's because heat got reduced per distance (or, you know, per heat transferring container). Both heat pipe and reactor count as one single heat transferring container, but reactor span a distance of 5x5 tiles while heat pipe is only one
This is still super wasteful cause you can just heat a reactor at a higher temperature and it will just balance itself out, you can also just not make a reactor that focuses on feeding the steam directly into the engines especially now in 2.0.
Interesting. In v1.1, I always got enrichment cycling before any U235 went into reactors. I never thought about stealing some U235 for reactors *before* enrichment was cycling, and I've copied that in v2.0 and SpaceAge. I see the point you're making and would tentatively agree for power on Nauvis, but I'm finding myself using fission reactors on most of my 2nd generation spacecraft and having a simple circuit metering the input of new fuels cells helps conserve rocket launches to refuel. I also like that I don't have to store or reprocess the spent fuel cell on ships, I just chuck it over the side. On the ships, I fill extra space near the nuclear setup with heatpipes as heat storage, which seems to be more space-efficient than my v1.1 ploy of using tanks of steam.
It can be very handy during the early kovarex too before the stockpile builds because the kovarex process is extremely power hungry to get off the ground. I found in my playtrhough a circuit for saving my early fuel cells gave me time to get to full saturation of my koverex, once saturated i removed the circuit.
Going into space age, I have setup uranium processing early enough to get a head start so I could relatively directly get kovarex going once unlocked. Which I then did, and for no reason am running it with 4 centrifuges. After getting a bit of a buffer of 235, I setup a small plant with 4 reactors, despite my relatively small solar+accumulator setup being easily enough (i think only 8 roboport sized fields), including night, and with an sr-latch disconnected steam setup I then setup fuel insertion control for nuclear with a steam buffer for the reactor before going to Vulcanus, mostly for the fun of it. I now am, not much later, sitting on 3 full steel chests of 235 and the centrifuges are output locked (but the system was designed to do this gracefully). I could probably run my factory with just that, including anything I build in the future, for actually real life years. The point being: of course it isn't necessary, but that kind of tinkering is the point of factorio (for me). It is very nice to know what level of unnecessary it actually is though. Still would set it up again!
For vanilla, yeah, it's only extra effort and zero benefit to ration nuclear fuel. I liked doing it just because it was doable. Though there'll be game mods and mods to make each of the planets' infinite resources (and for Nauvis, that's nuclear) more finite. Removing Kovarex process would make nuclear power more expensive in such a mode.
I didn't say that though. I designed nuclear circuit logic myself and yes i had fun doing it. But there are players out there who think it's necessary.
Nauvis is the electricity dealer of the other planets in space age. The actual limitation is how much fuel you can ship to other planets. Saving fuel is not a bad thing.
It’s useful to save processing power. If the game doesn’t have to run calculations on the heat pipes all the time, you get better updates per second. True, it got even more optimized, but better performance is better performance.
Unfortunately, juat turning off the reactor doesn't increase performance at all. Heat exchangers consume heat, pipes have to update, performance drops. If heat exchanger doesn't consume fuel, then it doesn't produce steam, and thus doesn't produce power.
@@noelka8134 that only matters in a base that is exclusively run on nuclear. Most of those bases also use solar and have nuclear steam built up as reserve power.
@@frankyanish4833 i only store enough reserve steam to fully consume the fuel that's currently burning in the reactor and just run the pumps and inserters off a separate micro solar grid.
While I do agree that it might not be so necessary, if you do set it up early to save for kovarex, it really takes no extra time to just keep it later, it took maybe 5 minutes to set it up and then its just copy paste ;)
I am guessing you made this pre-2.0 cuz now the answer feels like it is "it depends" - on Nauvis: even less point, with big miners and quality modules that 3.5M patch would probably last you 1 million hours - in space: totally worth it to save on rockets sending cells up
if you have a blueprint it's trivial lol, you just have to tune the hysteresis if you don't have a blueprint, if you're used to hardware programming it's like 10 minutes, especially now that you can read temperature and cell count.
It takes up too much space, and I always have to keep building more of it, so annoying. I built my reactor setup once and haven't needed to touch it for 100 hours.
I have a nuclear reactor on gleba and I save uranium there since its annoying to transport but on nauvis its not that useful but its still fun and cool to set up.
So you are saying to not make a circuit condition because it's a waste of time? Considering it only takes like 5 minutes to set that up, this is an extremely subjective opinion. I would gladly spend a few minutes setting up a system that I literally only need to create once. After all, it's a game about making stuff. With 2.0, the circuit has become insanely simple, as it no longer requires a combinator that keeps track of time or a storage tank to measure the amount of steam. Just a single combinator hooked up to all reactors and all inserters is enough. combinator: (average temparture < 600) AND (fuel = 0) OUTPUT (checkmark). inserters: ENABLE/DISABLE (checkmark > 0). To check that the average temperature is less than 600 (or some other number if you think 600 isn't good), you can either manually multiply 600 by the number of reactors and check against that (with 16 reactors, you would compare temperature against 9600), or use an arithmetic combinator to divide the temperature by the number of reactors to get the average, or only enable the temperature output on a single reactor (preferably the one you expect to be the coldest) and simply compare that with 600. The last option is obviously the simplest.
That might be true but the circuit for saving costs one arithmethic combinator, if you got more than two reactors, and a few clicks, that's it. And it probably already comes with the reactor blueprint if you use one. The one good argument to not do it: Reactors showing the missing fuel icon are annoying.
If you build a crappy design like I do you'd know you'd waste cells in the windup to heat everything if you tell the inserters to only go when steam is less then x in a tank. Or... I could just slap some prod 3s in the whole nuclear chain and watch as a single miner fuels a 16 core reactor LMAO
You don't need any except 1 steam tank just to measure that steam generation slowed down in 1.1, and you don't need any steam tanks in 2.0 since you can just measure temperature and fuel directly from reactor. For 2x2 reactor and heat infrastructure there will be enough heat capacity to store all the energy from a single batch, and 2x3 manages to overheat itself even from 510 degrees; though I looking to rebuild my design to use 2-wide heat pipes that go to the heat exchangers instead of just 1-wide because that would be perfectly symetrical for each reactor and it will increase heat throughput, but will make it wider overall.
"pointless waste of time" till in space age you wanna save fuel on a planet with no urainuim or on a spaceship so no its not pointless or senceless....
If you export u-235 to space then the main bottleneck would be shipping 19 u-238 for each 1 u-235. I just checked: you can load 1 rocket with 20 u-238, and you need 19 to one-time craft 10 cells. 1 rocket can load 10 cells directly though. But you can ship 20 u-235 one time, reprocess 5x2 depleted cells and get 6 u-238 back, which cuts down craft to 13 u-238. Or you can just ship u-235 and kovarex rocket fuel which easy to produce on Gleba and burn it in heating tower, which makes it 3 GJ with change instead of 1.21 GJ. That will give only 60 GJ from 20 u-235 instead of 80 GJ from 10 uranium cells and that's without insane neighbour bonuses, or with just 2 rockets 19 u-235 and 7 u-238 left after first batch, which you can top-up with only shipment of u-238.
I save nuclear power cells not because resources are scarce, I do it because I can. It's the same reason I set up my kovarex that there are no a single spare u235 in system, there is exactly 80 pieces in the centrifuge - 40 processing and 40 ready to go. If it can be optimised - I'll do it, especially if it includes circuit logic, I love it
You're missing the point. It's the principle of the matter :P.
Exactly!
Oh i fully agree. It's all about having fun.
Also, after the 2.0 update it takes a single wire from the reactor to the inserter to set up wasteless fuel consuption. So what's the point against it?
@@dnkbmc how do you make that work for multiple reactors, if you wire them each to their own inserter you could end up with about half of the reactors firing since their temperature won't be the exact same, if that happens you can end up not using neighbor bonus which is also wasteful since you get less power out of the fuel cells
@@shiinondogewalker2809 If the temperature is not falling fast enough to trigger both reactors, then you don't need much power to begin with 😅
This reminds me of how many people thinkk nuclear power is useless before you unlock kovarex, when in reality about 3 centrifuges can actually supply an entire reactor without kovarex...
less than that. my first save that reached the end of the base game had a single one. later upgraded to 3 while having 4 reactors going. if you have a big stash of fuel/uranium, the ratio is more like one to one.
Uh, I thought the problem was always about the tons of depleted uranium you'll have to figure out how to deal with somehow? :P
@@nnelg8139 i mean so what if you have 20 chests full of it?
You can also just play with a warehouse mod which gives you access to massive chests that can hold a couple hundred thousand items so its even less of an issue
@@nnelg8139 you don't create enough used fuel cells for it to be a problem and you need u238 for ammo. You also don't need kovorax for recycling used fuel cells either
@@nnelg8139BULLET
I’m using nukes on my space platform, and since you can only ship up a tiny amount of fuel per rocket trip (like 10) it makes no sense not to do the trivial circuit condition to save on fuel
Fair. I made the guide pre 2.0. But i still hold this opinion for regular nuclear plants on nauvis.
Yep, it's very easy to forget about a ship for a while and come back to find all your cells used up and the reactor cold. Even if you're not drawing from nuclear, like if your platform is idling or drawing from solar, the reactor will still consume cells at the same rate
To a certain point. All my spaceships that pass nauvis have a requirement for atleast 1k fuel cells and the landing pads on gleba request fuel cells(complete overkill just for the hell of it)Eventually it becomes trivial again thanks to the main of the video; uranium is infinite
But Ficsit taught me to not waste....
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂❤
Why would I want a reactor that can last 500 hours when I can click a button to make it last 5000 hours?
Because now you have to play for 5000 hours to prove a point
@@Precigian My current factory spikes to 100 gigawatts of power usage, but mostly idles at 10 gigawatts. That would be a LOT of constant uranium usage without a wasteless design, and I don't want to place millions of accumulators.
@@Hlebuw3k You know it’s not actually wasteless unless you use tanks or accumulators, right?
Also, I was just joking about it, okay? I don’t like wasting my uranium either. But, as you said before, it would now last 4,500 hours instead of 500. This has nothing to do with the size of your base-before, base X lasted 500 hours, and with automation, base X now lasts 5,000.
@@Precigian yes you can make it wasteless without those by having heat storage only
@@shiinondogewalker2809 How?
On a space ship you definitely want to conserve resources as much as possible though. It's trivial to setup so why not.
This. It takes an extra 30 seconds for me to wire up the inserter, especially in Space Age with Reactors able to read their temperature and contents. Makes reactors self-tuning so I don't have to worry about stamping down 100GW of reactor and it tearing through my Uranium stockpiles. Also it means I have more U235 left over for other purposes.
I can't live without 2000 nukes.
There is no reason not to save fuel cells, especially at the start when NPP is overbuilt.
Yeah, but it’s super trivial to set the inserters now to only insert when all of the reactors reach a threshold temperature. I usually do groups of four, so the four reactors are wired together, out put their temperature and the inserters will only add fuel if the total temp is less than 3200 (eg. 800 * 4 reactors.) Previously when you needed to do steam tanks and whatnot, I would have agreed. Now it’s so trivial it’s silly *not* to do it.
My one counter argument: The missing fuel icon blinking.
@@Bobylein1337 Honestly, fair.
@@Bobylein1337 counter counter argument, you don't look at it when not there in person.
if you're only using reactors in groups of 4 then you're wasting a lot of fuel cells by not making a continuous 2 wide line of reactors. If you're using a continuous 2 wide line but powering them in chunks of 4 then you're not guaranteeing the neighbor bonus is actually used since it will only be used optimally when all reactors are firing. The only way to use fuel optimally is to have the entire line be toggled on/off at the same time, when it's needed.
@ Vanilla makes so much fuel that it isn’t worth my time or effort to make that level of optimization. My temperature check is good enough as far as I’m concerned, since it ensures they’re firing with the neighbor bonus for the quartet, which is good enough for me. Especially since they’re a stop gap until fusion now anyway.
it makes sense on nauvis, but when you going to build reactors on other planest, it's much more betrer to plase 1 logic module end save decent amout of recouses from spending on rocets supplying that reactor
Not really, unless you rush everything, you will stock pile a lot of material on Nauvis. I don't think the unlimited research is available until you see other planets.
I spend a few hours trying to design my space ship that I end up request 1.5k Uranium Ammo ,with only 25 per rocket. I requested 500 nuclear fuel and can last 7 hours of nonstop burning 4 reactor in other planet.
@nguyendi92 it's you. I rush through planets(I had only 1 week weekend with wriend) and that's why I had problems with amount of rockets I can afford. and when I first time went to gleba, without infinite researches of productivity, every wasted fuel rod was for gold price
@@brotherfox1660 yeah. It make sense, I take time to make Navius base stable in productions with trains, electricity, and design a big space ship before actually going anywhere.
@@nguyendi92, but launches are costly and slow
@@nguyendi92 unlimited productions of steel and mining are actually require only red/green/blue/purple science
And that's not even about nuclear, that's about lds/blue circuits for rockets. 50 rockets for 500 fuel are actually quite expensive at the start of space expansion
Calling that cute little base a mega base ^^
There's a good reason to save nuclear fuel in SA - you need to transport less through space.
I'm curious where that would come in handy aquilo?
Vulcanius has boosted solar and acid neutralization blows a reactor out of the water factoring in shipping time.
Water bottlenecks nuclear on Fulgora and lightning gives all the power you need anyway
Not familiar enough with gleba so maybe?
Aquilo itself sits on the edge of the solar system so shipping times will be a pain as well as be competing with all the other resources that need to be shipped in. Also there's going to be quite a bit of waste heat in your pipe network from heaters powered by locally sourced solid fuel so siphoning off the excess is likely going to be more efficient than shipping uranium+iron or fuel cells.
@@simonnachreiner8380 "competing with all the other resources that need to be shipped in" You can have more than one space platform. What are you trying to say?
@@Tumbolisu A base has a limited number of rocket silos, so you would want to use those efficiently. It is expensive to launch resources into space, so the space platform is just one part of the equation. The question is then whether you want to use your limited capacity to launch fuel for aquilo, or to launch other necessities
@@eivindsulen8516 Rockets are pretty cheap to make, speed beacons massively help with making them faster, and you can always just make more silos. So, launching items into space becomes a non-issue. You can basically copy-paste a space platform, which means more throughput through space.
It might take a little while to actually build all of this, but big mining drills, electromagnetic plants and stack inserters allow you to easily upgrade the production and throughput of your nauvis base to do all that.
@@eivindsulen8516 there's also the option of building more silos to have the capacity you want for launching other necessities + nuclear
If you are so short on fuel that you are scraping the bottom of the barrel, I'd consider handfueling a valid strategy as well.
On the other hand, it's not a necessity, but it is pretty cool to have a 100% efficient setup
By that logic why do anithing?
It litterally takes 2 minutes to learn and one minute tp set up an inserter that reads a reactor temperature and it saves a ton of fuel in the long run. You can play without optimizing every single aspect of your base, but I would encourage players to learn about simple circuits instead of telling them they "should not" do it.
Also, knowing that I'm burning twice the fuel for no reason fucks badly with my OCD.
I like to save my u235 to nuke stuff, and nuke are expensive. There's no point in consuming more than necessary for power production. I would agree with you if the solution was some intricate circuit that takes a master's degree to understand and set up, but it's litterally 1 combinator.
meanwhile I'm burning 20x the required fuel
Somewhere a Toyota engineer is RAGING because you're advocating waste
I always rush a reactor so I can scale production super fast in the midgame, so I always do the efficiency circuit
Well, except for a single saved combinator per plant, there's also no upside to wasting your fuel cells, especially if you still have solar panels.
Also, I want legendary spidertrons and pocket reactors, so I'll have a much higher uranium ore drain :)
The main issue for me is what to do with the excess u238. Uranium processing is not a closed loop and you if you run out of storage, you could end up stuck without power.
After kovarex this becomes far less of a issue.
I usually only fill like 2 chests full of u238 before having kovarex (in theory this amount should yield 67 u-235). But even if it's 10 chests. So what?
@@AVADIIStrategy so you have to *manually* deal with all that, you can't just set it and forget it like all other parts of your factory save mines
@@nnelg8139 Fair point. Before having kovarex theres no u-238 sink other than ammo.
You can use belts, point your uranium from mining into the side of your recycled uranium. Belts will always let any items in the line flow before adding more.
You get 142 U238 for each U135, that means you will have refined 5680 U238 when you have enough U 235 for Kovarex enriching, that is about 1 1/2 steel chests.
A pair of reactors consume 36 fuel cells per hour and say you need 2 hours for researching Kovarex, that is 8 U235, so you need only 2 steel chests for storing your surplus U238. Of course if you want to be safe, you can build more storage chests.
Ok but after you figure the system out you just copypaste it with blueprints, so there is no time wasted in saving it. Why not at that point?
You're right! But you didn't consider a HUGE factor: It's fun to make a circuit that doesn't waste fuel lol
but that's impossible, you 'must' hand feed the reactors or you're wasting fuel.
On a serious note though I agree, but personally I wouldn't bother with semi optimized. I go full waste on fuel until I want to or have a reason to optimize it and then I'll make it actually optimized. I see many suggestions here of ways of using circuits that either only works for a single reactor setup (this wastes a ton of fuel since no neighbor bonus) or a setup that won't perform optimally
@@shiinondogewalker2809 Yeah, I agree it's not a waste because uranium is absurdly abundant. But personally I never setup reactors until it's optimal, lol. I can share my old design, but what I did essentially was to have a steam tank bus between heat exchangers and steam turbines and check the steam levels to insert fuel or not. So it only produces steam if it's in demand. It's impossible to have a 100% efficient system because heat pipe radiate heat, but mine was producing 99% of power from the heat generated. It's also infinitely expandable, I ended up making a 20GW plant in the middle of the ocean. It has a single belt lane for feeding and extracing waste by weaving blue and red undergrounds
@@ViniciusNegrao_ there isn't any heat loss actually, it's only a bit limited in how far it can transfer heat because of the gradient. So if you used neighbor bonus properly it sounds like your setup was 100% efficient, but 100% is only possible with syncing all inserters to swing at the same time, and the 100% ignores that it's technically possible to get more power with hand feeding. With a 2 wide lane the limit is 80% of that of hand fed builds, but no one will actually use hand feeding so might as well consider the 2 wide lane 100%
I try to save uranium for the sake of mass producing abombs and uranium fuel for trains. Also it’s cool to think about how I only need to spend minuscule amounts of unenriched uranium and iron to power my 5GW base.
I can say you really dont need to save fuel in reactors. My base consumes now like only 10gw, but in the process of getting there it needed up to 21gw. (Filling all stations with blue circuts really took a long time..). And i still run my first ore patch, now with lvl 137 mining productivity 😅
It really doesnt matter what you do with uranium.
I might start to equip my spidertronarmy with atomic bombs, so i dont need to fully relie on artillary and the weak spidertrons with lasers even though i have 6 of them following 1 main spidertron. The first one gets shot to often and everything slows down to much when near biters.. That sucks
Edit: i only consume so little electricity because the power shuts off when all boxes of 1 ingredient is full or when one of the needed ingredients is missing. Thats why its so little even though i have like 6k becons or so
My base consumes ~2400 science pro minute. But some parts can produce like 4k or so
@alexanderjanke1538
Don't give spidertrons nukes.
If you aren't manually controlling their firing they'll nuke a biter point blank vaporizing themselves. However go nuts if you're driving.
It is fun designing smart nuclear. Even if its pointless.
I hadn't considered building a whole bunch of other, inactive reactors to transfer the heat. Interesting idea.
It is interesting not sure why since it takes up way more space and 7 trillion times more recourses but it looks cool.
@@sawyermccall2370
It's because heat got reduced per distance (or, you know, per heat transferring container). Both heat pipe and reactor count as one single heat transferring container, but reactor span a distance of 5x5 tiles while heat pipe is only one
@@raizors1331 oh interesting.
This is still super wasteful cause you can just heat a reactor at a higher temperature and it will just balance itself out, you can also just not make a reactor that focuses on feeding the steam directly into the engines especially now in 2.0.
At 1:30, you say seconds instead of minutes... made me question your math for a second 😁
Damn you're right. The math does check out. But i misspoke. The unit was 300 uranium per minute.
But it is NOT efficient, the factory must grow
Interesting. In v1.1, I always got enrichment cycling before any U235 went into reactors. I never thought about stealing some U235 for reactors *before* enrichment was cycling, and I've copied that in v2.0 and SpaceAge. I see the point you're making and would tentatively agree for power on Nauvis, but I'm finding myself using fission reactors on most of my 2nd generation spacecraft and having a simple circuit metering the input of new fuels cells helps conserve rocket launches to refuel. I also like that I don't have to store or reprocess the spent fuel cell on ships, I just chuck it over the side. On the ships, I fill extra space near the nuclear setup with heatpipes as heat storage, which seems to be more space-efficient than my v1.1 ploy of using tanks of steam.
It can be very handy during the early kovarex too before the stockpile builds because the kovarex process is extremely power hungry to get off the ground. I found in my playtrhough a circuit for saving my early fuel cells gave me time to get to full saturation of my koverex, once saturated i removed the circuit.
Going into space age, I have setup uranium processing early enough to get a head start so I could relatively directly get kovarex going once unlocked. Which I then did, and for no reason am running it with 4 centrifuges. After getting a bit of a buffer of 235, I setup a small plant with 4 reactors, despite my relatively small solar+accumulator setup being easily enough (i think only 8 roboport sized fields), including night, and with an sr-latch disconnected steam setup
I then setup fuel insertion control for nuclear with a steam buffer for the reactor before going to Vulcanus, mostly for the fun of it. I now am, not much later, sitting on 3 full steel chests of 235 and the centrifuges are output locked (but the system was designed to do this gracefully). I could probably run my factory with just that, including anything I build in the future, for actually real life years.
The point being: of course it isn't necessary, but that kind of tinkering is the point of factorio (for me). It is very nice to know what level of unnecessary it actually is though. Still would set it up again!
For vanilla, yeah, it's only extra effort and zero benefit to ration nuclear fuel. I liked doing it just because it was doable. Though there'll be game mods and mods to make each of the planets' infinite resources (and for Nauvis, that's nuclear) more finite. Removing Kovarex process would make nuclear power more expensive in such a mode.
once you start sending uranium to aquilo it stops feeling quite as abundant :b
It's always funny when people are saying that you are having fun wrong.
This is a game after all, not an engineering exam.
I didn't say that though. I designed nuclear circuit logic myself and yes i had fun doing it. But there are players out there who think it's necessary.
Nauvis is the electricity dealer of the other planets in space age. The actual limitation is how much fuel you can ship to other planets. Saving fuel is not a bad thing.
I always set up a circuit condition on the first nuclear plant before Kovarex is set up, then it's virtually free energy for the rest of the game.
It’s useful to save processing power.
If the game doesn’t have to run calculations on the heat pipes all the time, you get better updates per second.
True, it got even more optimized, but better performance is better performance.
Unfortunately, juat turning off the reactor doesn't increase performance at all. Heat exchangers consume heat, pipes have to update, performance drops. If heat exchanger doesn't consume fuel, then it doesn't produce steam, and thus doesn't produce power.
@@noelka8134 that only matters in a base that is exclusively run on nuclear.
Most of those bases also use solar and have nuclear steam built up as reserve power.
@@frankyanish4833 i only store enough reserve steam to fully consume the fuel that's currently burning in the reactor and just run the pumps and inserters off a separate micro solar grid.
playing factorio 3 years . Bold of u to assume that i used circuit logic anywhere once in my life. =)
32000 seconds is very much not 538 hours, its closer to 9 hours, if you meant to say minutes, then yes
You're right. I misspoke it's minutes.
While I do agree that it might not be so necessary, if you do set it up early to save for kovarex, it really takes no extra time to just keep it later, it took maybe 5 minutes to set it up and then its just copy paste ;)
I am guessing you made this pre-2.0 cuz now the answer feels like it is "it depends"
- on Nauvis: even less point, with big miners and quality modules that 3.5M patch would probably last you 1 million hours
- in space: totally worth it to save on rockets sending cells up
Exactly. Yes the video was made pre 2.0.
Counterpoint: i will still do it because i can and it feels good for me
very useful, may your factory expand⚙
Hey. You should consider a better pop filter or turn your bass down. Like your vids, but cant follow with headset
This is especially applicable on Gleba
"Don't waste your time" but this is exacly thing what we are do in this game
if you have a blueprint it's trivial lol, you just have to tune the hysteresis
if you don't have a blueprint, if you're used to hardware programming it's like 10 minutes, especially now that you can read temperature and cell count.
so what method do you use then, read the temperature of every reactor and find the minimum and use that to decide when to insert fuel?
the only place where it makes sense to save fuels cells if you bother transporting uranium to other planets or space platforms to use reactors there
I tend to just have an accumulator latch on my reactor(s) so that my base can primarily run on solar.
Solar is pretty op in factorio. I usually dont use it, because of that.
@@heyhoe168 it takes up a ton of space and huge initial investment while reactors barely take up any
It takes up too much space, and I always have to keep building more of it, so annoying. I built my reactor setup once and haven't needed to touch it for 100 hours.
I have a nuclear reactor on gleba and I save uranium there since its annoying to transport but on nauvis its not that useful but its still fun and cool to set up.
I will and you can't stop me.
Nuclear energy is insanely overpowered in this game.
the setup is BP anyway, it literally takes a few seconds to take out the BP...
it's still worth it, not setting up a control system to avoid wasting fuel is Just a waste of resources.
Fair point
If i remember correctly the mining bonus is allready included in the 1.7 mil
it is not.
At least you can ship them everywhere and have Nukular on every planet and platform. But I still think they buffed it too much.
So you are saying to not make a circuit condition because it's a waste of time? Considering it only takes like 5 minutes to set that up, this is an extremely subjective opinion. I would gladly spend a few minutes setting up a system that I literally only need to create once. After all, it's a game about making stuff.
With 2.0, the circuit has become insanely simple, as it no longer requires a combinator that keeps track of time or a storage tank to measure the amount of steam. Just a single combinator hooked up to all reactors and all inserters is enough. combinator: (average temparture < 600) AND (fuel = 0) OUTPUT (checkmark). inserters: ENABLE/DISABLE (checkmark > 0). To check that the average temperature is less than 600 (or some other number if you think 600 isn't good), you can either manually multiply 600 by the number of reactors and check against that (with 16 reactors, you would compare temperature against 9600), or use an arithmetic combinator to divide the temperature by the number of reactors to get the average, or only enable the temperature output on a single reactor (preferably the one you expect to be the coldest) and simply compare that with 600. The last option is obviously the simplest.
uranium is just...so ridiculous... im still gonna try to save every little bit though lmao
some wrong math there, 32000 seconds is about 10 hours, not 500+ (3600 seconds in an hour)
The mistake wasn't the math. I misspoke the value was in minutes not seconds.
@@SimonWoodburyForget it's over 500 hours though, not 10
Too late. I only turn on 4 reactors when my steam drops below a threshold and then the other reactors when it drops below an even lower threshold.
but a rocket can only carry 10 fuel up at a time, and space is limited in the cargo hold.
My argument would be: If it has no fuel, there is no neighbor bonus for his neighbors. So you lose much more than you save.
Typically you setup circuit logic in such a way (like in the thumbnail) that all reactors get fueled at the same time.
Lol are you reading?
lol I was thinking the same. powerpoint 🙂
i dont think it matters at all, if you wanna save then save, if you need more then get more, not like biters are going to stop you
Kovarex is also pointless but people do it anyway.
wait what's the alternative, recycle the 238? lol
What if I WANT TO
Until you build a space platform with NPP.
Nice argumento but I'll do it because I can.
Don't even research the Kovarex :D
That might be true but the circuit for saving costs one arithmethic combinator, if you got more than two reactors, and a few clicks, that's it. And it probably already comes with the reactor blueprint if you use one.
The one good argument to not do it: Reactors showing the missing fuel icon are annoying.
If you build a crappy design like I do you'd know you'd waste cells in the windup to heat everything if you tell the inserters to only go when steam is less then x in a tank. Or... I could just slap some prod 3s in the whole nuclear chain and watch as a single miner fuels a 16 core reactor LMAO
What do you mean waste in windup? In factorio heat only ever goes down when it turns water into steam.
You don't need any except 1 steam tank just to measure that steam generation slowed down in 1.1, and you don't need any steam tanks in 2.0 since you can just measure temperature and fuel directly from reactor. For 2x2 reactor and heat infrastructure there will be enough heat capacity to store all the energy from a single batch, and 2x3 manages to overheat itself even from 510 degrees; though I looking to rebuild my design to use 2-wide heat pipes that go to the heat exchangers instead of just 1-wide because that would be perfectly symetrical for each reactor and it will increase heat throughput, but will make it wider overall.
LALALALALALA i cant hear youuuuu
No me importa. Yo lo hago porque puedo hacerlo, porque me gusta la eficiencia y disfruto con ello.
"pointless waste of time" till in space age you wanna save fuel on a planet with no urainuim or on a spaceship so no its not pointless or senceless....
If you export u-235 to space then the main bottleneck would be shipping 19 u-238 for each 1 u-235. I just checked: you can load 1 rocket with 20 u-238, and you need 19 to one-time craft 10 cells. 1 rocket can load 10 cells directly though. But you can ship 20 u-235 one time, reprocess 5x2 depleted cells and get 6 u-238 back, which cuts down craft to 13 u-238. Or you can just ship u-235 and kovarex rocket fuel which easy to produce on Gleba and burn it in heating tower, which makes it 3 GJ with change instead of 1.21 GJ. That will give only 60 GJ from 20 u-235 instead of 80 GJ from 10 uranium cells and that's without insane neighbour bonuses, or with just 2 rockets 19 u-235 and 7 u-238 left after first batch, which you can top-up with only shipment of u-238.
I save nuclear power cells not because resources are scarce, I do it because I can. It's the same reason I set up my kovarex that there are no a single spare u235 in system, there is exactly 80 pieces in the centrifuge - 40 processing and 40 ready to go. If it can be optimised - I'll do it, especially if it includes circuit logic, I love it
wtf ITS iven more important in FSA
great video
very deutsch :D
Yey! I can save 4 logic combinators instead now!
PS it is still useful early game prior to covarex launch AND it is mandatory in space.