Factorio Forums

When playing Bob's and Angel's:

Is it this simple? To match up the number of a particular type of steam engine which can be supported by a particular type of boiler, simply divide the "Energy consumption" on the boiler by the "Maximum power output" on the steam engine? I would think that's how it works, but sometimes things in this game are more complicated than they seem...

Mr. Tact wrote:When playing Bob's and Angel's:

Is it this simple? To match up the number of a particular type of steam engine which can be supported by a particular type of boiler, simply divide the "Energy consumption" on the boiler by the "Maximum power output" on the steam engine? I would think that's how it works, but sometimes things in this game are more complicated than they seem...

There's also the efficiency of the boiler to keep in mind. Tier 1 boilers waste 50% of the energy that comes into them I believe. Also fluid flow rates, but I know nothing about that, except that sometimes my boilers don't appear to be making enough steam.

Hmm, I always assumed the efficiency rating was applied prior to the provided output value... If someone could point me to a list of how many steam engines of each type can be supported by boilers of each type that would be satisfactory.

you see the power consumption aka MJ fuel /s. Not the amount of power the boiler puts out in steam.

The advanced boilers and steam engines are from Bob's mods, not Angel's mods. So this isn't the right subforum.


Regardless, the equation for figuring out the correct ratio should be: (B*e)/P = N, where "B" is the boiler's power consumption (essentially the rate at which it receives energy from fuel), "e" is the efficiency of the boiler (converted to a decimal, e.g. 50% = 0.5), "P" is the power output of the steam engine, and "N" is the number of steam engines per boiler.

Applying this equation to the vanilla boilers & steam engines (with power measured in kW) results in the following: (3600*0.5)/900 = 2, which is the correct number of vanilla steam engine to each vanilla boiler.

Applying it to the highest tier of Bob's boiler and steam engine results in this: (8100*0.8)/3900 = (108/65), which is the simplest form of the fraction and equates to having 108 Mk3 steam engines to every 65 Mk4 boilers. But the equation works for any boiler and any steam engine.


By the way, don't try to use Angel's electric steam boilers to generate power, it won't work. Those are intended for production of steam for steam cracking, and trying to use them to power steam engines will just result in a drain on your power network.

You need to account for boiler max temp as well as the hidden effectivity multiplier on higher level engines. MK4 boilers and MK3 Engines match up perfectly at 1:2 just like MK1's do. For the ones in between it gets a bit trickier. I made a google doc because I got tired of doing all the math everytime. The third tab has engines/boiler for every configuration.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing