Note: The fuel check in my designs, or any design that uses the removal of the spend fuel cell as trigger, is necessary. If you ever remove a spend fuel cell without a fresh fuel cell to put into the reactor the setup dies. That's really the only argument I need. This issue is specific to memory-le...

If you have no fuel cell available and the output inserter tries to trigger the input inserter, the input insertion will fail and not recover until the player intervenes and manually handloads either a fresh or spent fuel cell into the reactor. To get to that point, you need to leave the power stat...

The belt has had at least 200s since the last trigger to return to a backed-up state. It isn't moving. It shouldn't be moving. Something as simple as a reactor expansion can change that. You could, I suppose, just monitor the belt overall for when it is in a backed up state. It'd more or less be th...

I have had fuel cell production be interrupted because someone depowered the assembler, because the iron line got cut, because kovarex got cut, because a logistics chest got configured poorly, because someone deadlocked an intersection, etc. :v As farcast said: 'different experience'. 'Someone' pre...

There does seem to be a sharp split on this point. I agree that it is an unnecessary check. The thing you need to keep an eye on is the supply of U235: if you keep that up there should always be plenty of fuel cells, and you want to detect and fix any shortfall before it flows through to fuel produ...

I suppose it depends on how often you either can't or won't build build enough fuel cell production for your reactors to decide if waiting for fuel is worth the added complexity. In my experience, never, so that's why I'm against it. Others might have a different experience. It's more usually somet...

Say you have 4 reactors in a 2x2 setup. That produces 480 MW of power at 4 fuel cells every 200s. And now assume you are just using 120MW of power or 4 fuel cells every 800s but you had a brownout because fuel run low. ... Note: if you do have some alternative power your case needs less fuel produc...

EDIT: I suppose synchronicity is assured by simply having a sufficient fuel supply and buffer, which technically requires no circuits at all on the reactor end of things, so I was sloppy in my wording earlier. I meant in terms of ensuring all reactors get precisely one cell in the context of a regu...

wire Master B to all buffer chests, set to enable when fuel cells >= reactor count, read hand content You are reading the sum of the contents of all chests then. How are you going to ensure, that each chest has at least one and not eg one has an ammount of (fuel_cells >= reactor_count) and the othe...

Make that five more than you need for synchronous insertion with steam monitoring. I'm not sure how you'd do a combinator-free regulated insertion? I'd be interested in seeing the logic. Combinator-free steam control for a limited-capacity reactor is simple, but without some form of memory I don't ...

Make that five more than you need for synchronous insertion with steam monitoring. I'm not sure how you'd do a combinator-free regulated insertion? I'd be interested in seeing the logic. Combinator-free steam control for a limited-capacity reactor is simple, but without some form of memory I don't ...

Try it yourself, then let me know if you find a failure. All the control logic cost just 5 combinators. That's four combinators more than you need for synchronous insertion, and three more than you need for synchronous insertion with guaranteed available cells or steam monitoring. Two and a half (c...

Well, you can make a reactor work without pumps. You can even feed it with burner inserters and belts. That leaves the only thing requiring power in the entire array being the ejection inserters... which means you're still stuck running power through the whole thing. If I could only eliminate that ...

Assuming you write that, because you don't like to depend on power to be available to produce power: Have an inner and an outer power grid. The inner power grid would just power the infrastructure to insert fuel cells and it would have its own steam buffer+turbines. Edit: The inner grid ofc must al...

I read a thread about nuclear efficiency and maybe the main thing I got out of it is that the reactors have to be started at the same time in order to get the bonuses. I don't see why that would be necessary. Is that true? Am I also supposed to set all my inserters to put in just one fuel cell at a...

I hate having to power pumps. If it weren't for the fact it's flat impossible to use a burner inserter to extract the fuel cells I wouldn't even run power poles through the reactor input/outputs.

Is the game bugged? Is this a feature where the peaceful bugs go violent after 100 hours into the game and nuclear plant needs total replacement? No, neither of those are known bugs nor features. There's something else going on in your game. I'd also like to point out that I can't see through steam...

Somebody in a forum said that too many turbines suck steam out of the system and then you get no power. Makes no sense to me. Wouldn't they have built in devices to insure that kind of thing wouldn't happen? Turbines only consume steam if they actually need it to produce power, so there's been some...

Not that rail circles are all that circular in Factorio. There are straight diagonal pieces in there. That's true, but it's still got two smaller 22.5 degree curves at the beginning and end of the rail, which causes the same issue. And, even in the case where there was a strict 45 degree diagonal w...

Yeah, this is something I've wanted for ages. It gets particularly irksome in builds that do, by intent, both white- & black-listing of stuff, because troubleshooting it means clicking on individual inserters. Dropping the do-not-allow symbol on top of the blacklist image seems to me to be a ver...