Fuels and their uses

[zOldBulldog]

I thought it would be nice (especially towards beginners) to collect in one place all the various (valuable) uses of the different types of fuel (in vanilla, not mods).

Please contribute if I missed anything important.

Wood:
- Useful for early mining drills and furnaces, or to incinerate unwanted wood, wood poles, wood chests.
- But definitely switch to something better as soon as possible.

Coal:
- Furnaces
- Trains
- Coal Liquefaction as alternative to oil fields (and to have something to use coal in the later game).

Solid Fuel:
- Furnaces (although by the time you are ready to start using it this way you are probably using solar or nuclear power)
- Trains
- To make rocket fuel (its main use)

Rocket Fuel:
- Rockets (of course)
- Trains
- To make nuclear fuel

Nuclear fuel
- Trains (this is the best fuel for trains)

----
For pure self-interest I might ask if there are any good uses of solid fuel before the rocket stage besides trains. I tend to spend a lot of time doing designs and since solid fuel is a natural byproduct of oil processing (to keep an oil plant from stalling) I make a lot of solid fuel before I can convert it to rocket fuel. It would be nice to have a way to consume it productively instead of stockpiling it until I start making rocket fuel and rockets.

[Bauer]

+ burner inserters and mining drill

strictly speaking, also wood, wooden boxes and wooden power poles are also "fuel"

[zOldBulldog]

+ burner inserters and mining drill

strictly speaking, also wood, wooden boxes and wooden power poles are also "fuel"

True, but I was trying to focus on useful stuff.

- Burner inserters and drills are really only useful to get you out of the dark ages and into electricity. I don't think anyone uses them long term (except for a couple to generate enough electricity to run the inserters of a steam power plant).

- Similarly, having an incinerator to burn wood, wooden boxes an poles is more about cleaning up your garbage inventory than as an intentional fuel.

[Bauer]

BTW, I in fact use solid fuel for power generation as soon as I enter oil-age. I have a coal loop servicing the furnaces in my base. I insert the excess solid fuel from light oil into that loop and add a 20-boiler power plant or two. With some solid fuel in the mixture the initial coal reserves last much longer.

[Amarula]

Good summary, took me a lot of hours of play to reach this level of understanding.
I think it is also useful for new players to know that grabbing some wood to get your first burner miner going to mine coal is quicker than hand-mining coal.

Once I get my oil refinery going, I switch to solid fuel for my steam power plant, to reserve the coal for making plastic. And depending on the layout, I may grab some for a remote smelting line, if it is closer to grab than coal for the furnaces and I haven't got electric furnaces yet.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Re rocket fuel:

For what it's worth, I don't really find it to be all that great for trains. The reason has nothing to do with acceleration or top speed. It's simply timing.

You can get solid fuel pretty early and it's a good solid upgrade to your trains that lasts a good long while.

By the time I have rocket fuel, I'm already either nearly ready for nuclear fuel or I'm fully ready and I was waiting on rocket fuel to be able to make nuclear fuel.

I can't justify taking the time to clean the solid fuel out of all of trains and stations to upgrade rocket fuel only to do it all over again so soon.

Worse, because of the smaller stack size of rocket fuel, it's more of a pain to get it all out of all of the refueling systems. And even worse, it takes forever to burn off on it's own and will slow the whole train network down as long as there's *any* of it in there.


Edit:
Now I know that someone did the math on the energy cost to make rocket fuel vs the energy gained burning it in furnaces and it's break even or an upgrade depending on modules. Did anyone ever do the math on nuclear fuel?

By the time it's relevant, there aren't going to be too many places that you actually burn fuel anymore. Steam Backup Emergency Power Banks come to mind. Maybe coal liquefaction, depending on what the resources are like.

[zOldBulldog]

I agree with you colonel

I get critical techs very early: solid fuel, electric furnaces
and nuclear... before even laying down my bus.

So, I use:

Coal for my early powerplant and minimum set of early furnaces.
Solid fuel as the first fuel for my trains.
Electric furnaces.
Nuclear power for electricity.

After that I would also go straight to nuclear fuel as rocket fuel is useful to me only for the rocket.

[bobucles]

Did anyone ever do the math on nuclear fuel?

The only reason to use nuclear steam is for the lulz. Reactor fuel cells are better in every possible way, no matter how BAD you are with using them.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Did anyone ever do the math on nuclear fuel?

The only reason to use nuclear steam is for the lulz. Reactor fuel cells are better in every possible way, no matter how BAD you are with using them.

I was gonna say:
Reactor fuel cells can't make steam for coal Liquefaction.

But having articulated the thought, I'm actually not sure that's strictly true. I do think it would be inconvenient to do so, but not impossible, unless there is a temp requirement for coal liquefaction.

Even ignoring that, it doesn't rule out the possibility of emergency auxiliary steam power.

[Tricorius]

For pure self-interest I might ask if there are any good uses of solid fuel before the rocket stage besides trains.

I really only use it situationally, if I have more oil than coal (and I want to reserve coal for plastic).

I’m actually burning completely solid fuel in my current Rail World due to these reasons. Coal is solely in use for plastics (oh, and military science, of course).

I tend to burn fuel boilers far longer than most people, I expect. I only really switch to electric smelting when I’m to the point of ripping apart my starting smelter lines.

I don’t usually burn anything higher than solid in boilers or furnaces though. I tend to jump straight from solid fuel to nuclear fuel for trains and to nuclear / solar for energy. And that is generally the point where I switch to moduled electric furnace arrays.

[herkalurk]

- Burner inserters and drills are really only useful to get you out of the dark ages and into electricity. I don't think anyone uses them long term (except for a couple to generate enough electricity to run the inserters of a steam power plant).

I use burner inserters where possible to cut down on power usage. I have many factories that will sit idle until a train comes to take some of the inventory, then they come to life. Why waste power on an idling inserter for a product I don't make much of, or a product that has a long build time? I have burner inserters on both ends of my rocket fuel creation builders, the input and output product are both fuel. I have thousands of inserters throughout my saved base, I would bet I have nearly a thousand more burner inserters reducing my power. Already average 1.4 GW usage from my nuclear facility.

[ColonelSandersLite]

- Burner inserters and drills are really only useful to get you out of the dark ages and into electricity. I don't think anyone uses them long term (except for a couple to generate enough electricity to run the inserters of a steam power plant).

I use burner inserters where possible to cut down on power usage. I have many factories that will sit idle until a train comes to take some of the inventory, then they come to life. Why waste power on an idling inserter for a product I don't make much of, or a product that has a long build time? I have burner inserters on both ends of my rocket fuel creation builders, the input and output product are both fuel. I have thousands of inserters throughout my saved base, I would bet I have nearly a thousand more burner inserters reducing my power. Already average 1.4 GW usage from my nuclear facility.

If you're gonna do that, why not use a power switch to just cut power to idle portions of the factory? That way, idle power drain is 0.

[FredHp]

What i use:
Coal for power plants and furnaces (i only switch for electrical furnaces when i got modules). Wood (and other trash burnables) gets delivered to power plants by logistic robots so i can get rid of it. When the chest has wood, coal line is stopped until the chest is empty)

Solid Fuel trains.
Rocket Fuel for long distance, very big trains in late game.
Nuclear Fuel only for artillery trains! But artillery trains is only for fun

Coal Powerplants uses Burner Inserters, so it automatically restarts after a fuel and power shortage.

Obviously when nuclear powerplant comes in, i disable all coal powerplants. (An acumulator with some logic to turn an power switch on when acumulator gets bellow 5% and turn off when gets above 15%)

[Aeternus]

Wood: Early on it can be a quick source of fuel, to be replaced by coal asap. Wood's useful for early electric poles, beyond that I treat it as garbage, to be incinerated in a wood burning facility. I'm surprised there's no "charcoaling burner" available to turn wood into usable coal.

Coal's an early game fuel source. At mid to late game it's main use becomes plastic for me. And a little bit towards explosives for artillery ammo, and 'nades for military science.

Solid fuel: is my mainstay midgame usually, at least if there's a decent oilpatch nearby. Solid fuel can power a fair bit of a base, allows you to get nuclear going with a ~500MW chemically powered plant.

Rocket fuel: Once you can get this, convert all solid fuel into rfuel. It's easier to transport, and a belt of rfuel has a LOT more energy density then Sfuel. With some speedbeacons and production modules you can add energy to the output even, net gain. If I remember right a single blue belt can fuel about 2.7GWs worth of electrical power in steam engines, though for performance reasons that's prolly not the best of ideas.

Nuclear fuel (the burner kind): At endgame, I make a little of this for train fuel, just to get the boost to speed and accelleration. But with access to nuclear you should be either fully solar or fully nuclear powered, or a mix of the two, so this fuel tends to not get shoved in burners much

[zOldBulldog]

My personal playstyle moves me up the tech very quickly. Going to nuclear power is easily the first thing I do after my jumpstart base (which is a bit beefier jumpstart than most, about 3x3 chunk, coal powered, and already produces enough solid fuel for trains). Electric smelting and a proper refinery comes next.

So my most likely fuel pattern is:

- Wood/coal for the get out of burner microstarter.
- Coal for one Steam Powerplant (or two at most) and the jumpstart base. I stay in short walking distance until completed.
- Nuclear power and electric smelting.
- Solid fuel for early trains.
- Nuclear fuel for trains soon after.

I am currently tweaking my approach so that I go straight to beaconed designs for everything. I discovered that means massive scaling of my nuclear power. I am past a GW and have only built smelting, oil processing and circuits production... and still about 2000 modules to go in order to wrap them up. I am guessing 2 GW for just these facilities.