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Which is better in general? Is it still worth replacing steel furnaces with electric furnaces?

I don't find one option better than the other, I use either depending of the situation and what I want to achieve, so I can't vote.

In the long run it's pretty much a no-brainer to transition to electric furnaces, whether to reduce pollution, take advantage of productivity or simplify setups (eliminating fuel belt). The real question is when to transition - for me I usually start using electric furnaces for new smelting when I start producing them for production science packs, but I don't bother getting rid of the old steel furnaces - at least not until the ore patches feeding them runs out.

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Gergely wrote:Which is better in general? Is it still worth replacing steel furnaces with electric furnaces?

What the hell ?

Why people still using oven over electric furnance ?

Oven need coal to operate, while furnance get electricity from solar panels. They are space effecient and enabled using for module. Especially productivity module to help maintain ores.

Oven required secon logistical system for coal wasting space for early game. When you need 3 inserters, additional conveyor and robot to fully operate and halt expansion.


Unless you want speedrun, but that will not work over a long run.

rows of steel furnaces look cooler and there's pretty much infinite coal around so it makes no difference

The value of the Electric furnace has always been the ability to use modules (and Beacons) and electric power not derived from burning fuel (Solar and now nuclear power). They produce less pollution if you aren't burning fuel in boilers to feed them than Steel furnaces too (the fuel burning results in more total pollution without efficiency modules thanks to the 50% efficiency of Boilers, than just using Steel furnaces). Efficiency modules actually make it worthwhile to switch to Electric furnaces even if you are still running on Coal (or Solid fuel/Rocket fuel) for energy production.

I usually use steel furnaces up untill I get modules and then I do the swap
because if you swap before modules you only get rid of the fuel belt and the electric furnaces still have the same speed as steel furnaces

But I can't really test right because I'm doing a bob Angels playthrough and I can only use metallurgy because I've installed a mod called angels smelting patch which disables normal smelting recipies

i won't swap until i have lvl 1 efficiency modules because electric furnaces take much more energy to run.
i set them up in preparation for lvl 3 productivity modules, and a load of speed beacons to save energy.
yes i said save energy, because you can use less furnaces for the same throughput.
also saves on UPS because of less entities on the map.

I used to almost religiously use eff1 modules in electric furnaces, but now with nuclear power you can just make a 160MW powerplant and not worry about the extra power usage. Eff1 modules have the advantage that they are cheaper than solar/accu per kW, but a watt generated by nuclear power is even cheaper than a watt saved by an eff1 module in an electric furnace and nuclear power causes negligible pollution (just from the mining and refining of fuel).

Hellatze wrote:

Gergely wrote:Which is better in general? Is it still worth replacing steel furnaces with electric furnaces?

What the hell? Why people still using oven over electric furnance? Oven need coal to operate, while furnance get electricity from solar panels. They are space effecient and enabled using for module. Especially productivity module to help maintain ores. Oven required secon logistical system for coal wasting space for early game. When you need 3 inserters, additional conveyor and robot to fully operate and halt expansion. Unless you want speedrun, but that will not work over a long run.

You can produce more than enough solid fuel from oil. (And with productivity modules, you can even make rocket fuel a good option.) And that is a renewable source of solid fuel.
Speed modules might do the trick with steel smelting, but productivity modules are a thing of the past since you can always globally increase your mining drill productivity.
Electric funraces take up 2.25 times more space. And don't say that ovens require solid fuel transport belts, because I can always use the same belt to supply the rocket fuel and the ores. It might not take long until the belt runs out of ores, but it is still possible to resupply it partway through the system from the sides. This makes it possible to use up to 210 steel furnaces on the same row effectively.

Here's a design with supply belts. (Note that fuels don't need supply belts)

Gergely wrote:but productivity modules are a thing of the past since you can always globally increase your mining drill productivity.

i disagree. less entities for the same amount of product is good for UPS.

I think which is better depends a lot on what your objectives for the map are, and how long you intend to play on this map.

If you just want to launch a rocket asap, then I'd stick with mostly steel (or even stone) furnaces. (I would also stick to coal based electric power generation).

If I was going to be playing longer and wanted to build a massive nuclear plant, then I'd switch to electric furnaces. For this setup it's just personal preference, but why not. You need some sort of electric power drain to justify that large nuclear plant.

If I wanted to build a megabase that is going to be UPS limited, then I'd want solar power (more UPS friendly than nuclear) and a bot based beaconed + moduled smelting/production setup (again more UPS friendly).

Of course there is a lot of room for other roleplaying choices/desires/coolness factors/resource scarcities (perhaps deliberately self inflicted at map generation time) to influence what you choose to build as well.

In my opinion, the longer you are going to be playing, and the more your base is going to grow, the more worthwhile it is to switch to electric furnaces over the long term (though I would also want to switch to either nuclear or solar power as well).

well said Zavian. gotta agree with ya here.

Gergely wrote:

Hellatze wrote:

Gergely wrote:Which is better in general? Is it still worth replacing steel furnaces with electric furnaces?

What the hell? Why people still using oven over electric furnance? Oven need coal to operate, while furnance get electricity from solar panels. They are space effecient and enabled using for module. Especially productivity module to help maintain ores. Oven required secon logistical system for coal wasting space for early game. When you need 3 inserters, additional conveyor and robot to fully operate and halt expansion. Unless you want speedrun, but that will not work over a long run.

You can produce more than enough solid fuel from oil. (And with productivity modules, you can even make rocket fuel a good option.) And that is a renewable source of solid fuel.
Speed modules might do the trick with steel smelting, but productivity modules are a thing of the past since you can always globally increase your mining drill productivity.
Electric funraces take up 2.25 times more space. And don't say that ovens require solid fuel transport belts, because I can always use the same belt to supply the rocket fuel and the ores. It might not take long until the belt runs out of ores, but it is still possible to resupply it partway through the system from the sides. This makes it possible to use up to 210 steel furnaces on the same row effectively.

Here's a design with supply belts. (Note that fuels don't need supply belts)

20170813140010_1.jpg

The part in bold is a logical fallacy, productivity bonuses at different stages stack multiplicatively, meaning that the use of productivity modules at smeltery level is MORE valuable, thanks to miner productivity than without it (multiplier stacking ftw). Belt-based designs are pretty obsolete come endgame, you can do much better with bot-based designs (e.g. alternating rows and electric furnaces and beacons can give Electric furnaces with +20% to productivity and +360% to speed, which is more space efficient than any Steel furnace setup could ever hope to be, with the added advantage of a 20% productivity bonus to boot; the layout has 1 beacon per furnace, plus some overhead, yet is compact enough for each furnace to be affected by 8 speed beacons).

PM3s for Electric Furnaces + SM3s in Beacons it is for me.

Everything in my base works like that. Power has become cheap... and I need some reason to build a huge GW sized Nuclear Power Plant. xD

The Steel Furnaces aren't really providing any benefits for me to keep them around... and on top of that they are wasting coal... so I never craft a single one of them and I rather skip ahead from Stone Furnaces to Electric Furnaces.

On the space consumption question... well Steel Furnaces get their ass handed to themselves when compared to the beaconized setup. Can't get more compact than the beaconized setup.

I used to transition to electric furnaces too early in most of my games. If you take a closer look, steel furnaces are actually better than an "empty" electric furnaces.

The strategy I like to use is to go from stone furnaces directly to electric furnaces, also because I dont want to produce stuff which eventually becomes obsolete and therefore wastes resources. However, in difficult/longer games Id go for steel furnaces.

The cheapest electric furnace setup, which (slightly) beats steel furnaces are electric furnaces with 1 efficiency modules.

Electric furnaces, because with nuclear, power is free.

I just think electric furnaces look cool
And that I don't need to set up fuel line to fuel everything...

I do Electric for a few reasons, but one is that i Like that they are bigger, the spacing is just right if you want to slap a combinator next to it for some reason