Factorio Forums

cpy wrote:When you play marathon mod you need big production lines to progress and solve high flow logistics and uranium power is 10% of whole update time.

Well that's a bit concerning. I'm now on my 7th 250MW reactor with many production chains still not finished yet, so I may now switch to a solar/nuclear hybrid at this point to alleviate the stress.

One thing that was planned after the v0.15 update is the ability to create a larger power facility outlined in this post, based on this image; Which should generate 1575MW and hopefully cut down heavily on scripting.

That's the one addition I'm eagerly awaiting since it was brought up, as it can be customized and controlled to better suit your needs, plus the very high power output if done right. It will be a great day when it's released, if the Factorio devs don't further delay their 0.15 patch.

cpy wrote:When you play marathon mod you need big production lines to progress and solve high flow logistics and uranium power is 10% of whole update time. If game update was threaded and maybe one day it will, it won't be problem at all since multiple cores are way more powerful than just one core. MInecraft can be theaded and was done by Nallar (TickThreading) who made minecraft servers run 10-100x faster by doing multithreading and heavy optimizations (Mojang is nothing compared to him). So i know that things can be threaded but it's hard to do and not everyone can do it.

Yeah but i bet those belts are UPS killers.

I maybe able to do a little more optimization. But it will have to wait for 0.15...there are features there that currently do not exist in the base game to allow me to do what I want to do.

Minecraft was threaded? Where?

I thought I'd share a reactor plan we are now using on our hard mode Marathon/Bob/Angel server. I created a small 50 MW power plant we could duplicate and deploy rapidly. It does use a 250 MW reactor, but I've never gotten more power out. The fluid dynamics really mess with the reactor design, and I can't unlock the recirculating pumps yet and am limited by the speed of water exchange at the reactor as to how much power I can extract.

The design is mostly blueprintable and is self filling by using a large solar panel for the bootstrap power and circuit controlled pumps to pass pressurized water between loops until they are full. The reactor and HE's must be hand placed.

There are three heat exchanging loops, the first is hot water off the reactor, the second is a heat battery between the reactor and engines, and the third loop is for the engines. Each loop has a tank for buffering and is in constant circulation via one pump. The output side is consumed slowly, so the PE has time to cycle repeatedly to keep the temperature high.

Album at: https://imgur.com/a/gldjo

bug: if you remove the reactor while fuel is in de reactor port it tersets the fuel

dog_365 wrote:bug: if you remove the reactor while fuel is in de reactor port it tersets the fuel

Yes, I know about it. It's already fixed in the unreleased 0.6.7

I'm testing the 40 MW reactor turbines now that I have green circuits, and I'm confused. There appears to be no reason to give water to the condensation loop. I had them running for a half hour without supplying cold water or venting low pressure steam before my teammate pointed it out. Is there a reason to supply them water and dispose of the excess?

Demosthenex wrote:I'm testing the 40 MW reactor turbines now that I have green circuits, and I'm confused. There appears to be no reason to give water to the condensation loop. I had them running for a half hour without supplying cold water or venting low pressure steam before my teammate pointed it out. Is there a reason to supply them water and dispose of the excess?

The reason is to condense the low pressure steam back to water. If not you will run out of water in the secondary loop. I already made the turbine stop working if your low pressure steam backed-up to full in the unreleased version.

Fatmice wrote:The reason is to condense the low pressure steam back to water. If not you will run out of water in the secondary loop. I already made the turbine stop working if your low pressure steam backed-up to full in the unreleased version.

Ok, so like I thought disabling a turbine due to LP steam backup wasn't implemented yet. I just spammed 400 MW worth of reactors around without giving the turbines water...

Also I used only one side of each 250 MW reactor, so that I could have a valve and pump automatically fill the reactor to a fixed amount. With the fixed sides on the steam generator matching the 250, it'd be nice to have a fill port and a circuit output of the contents. I used a modded check valve as a % full reader and then told a pump to fill to 30%.

I'm also rather frustrated that I couldn't use the steam generators with the 500 MW. I even tried routing hot PW from a 500 through 250's just as a passive pipe but couldn't keep the flow high enough. I did find that I could send hot PW to the 40 MW turbine, but it consumed it very quickly.

With a large base and carefully metering our UPS, having 600 engines isn't viable for the 500MW. 66 Bob's mk2 steam engines being replaced by one turbine is awesome.

Still excited to have 10 x 250MW's with one leg though!

Demosthenex wrote:

Fatmice wrote:The reason is to condense the low pressure steam back to water. If not you will run out of water in the secondary loop. I already made the turbine stop working if your low pressure steam backed-up to full in the unreleased version.

Ok, so like I thought disabling a turbine due to LP steam backup wasn't implemented yet. I just spammed 400 MW worth of reactors around without giving the turbines water...

You really don't want to do that. I'm waiting for the 0.15 patch so I can integrate the turbine changes. Turbines will no longer use steam-generator prototype. They will instead use something called electric-interface prototype. It's like an accumulator that you can tune in-game on the fly. I will be using it to meter out energy from the heat provided by the secondary loop. I aim to make it have a spin-up and spin-down where heat use and electric output is less efficient for the amount of low-pressure steam produced. An added benefit is this prototype should also use less tick.

Demosthenex wrote: Also I used only one side of each 250 MW reactor, so that I could have a valve and pump automatically fill the reactor to a fixed amount. With the fixed sides on the steam generator matching the 250, it'd be nice to have a fill port and a circuit output of the contents. I used a modded check valve as a % full reader and then told a pump to fill to 30%.

Just fill the 250W reactor full of pressurized water first, then connect all of the other stuff. The liquids will balance themselves.

Demosthenex wrote: I'm also rather frustrated that I couldn't use the steam generators with the 500 MW. I even tried routing hot PW from a 500 through 250's just as a passive pipe but couldn't keep the flow high enough. I did find that I could send hot PW to the 40 MW turbine, but it consumed it very quickly.

Liquid throughput is a constant source of problems. Since heat is conducted through the fluid, this also hampered the heat throughput. This is the reason the steam generator must be directly connected to the reactor without any pipes. I do not see a solution to this outside of magical heat pipes... The 0.15 update offers a new heat source and boiler behavior. It maybe possible to change how my reactor is connected through these new behaviors. I will have to see though. We are all eagerly waiting for the patch to drop on experimental. As for making the steam generators work with the 500MW reactor, I already made it but haven't release it yet.

Demosthenex wrote: With a large base and carefully metering our UPS, having 600 engines isn't viable for the 500MW. 66 Bob's mk2 steam engines being replaced by one turbine is awesome.
Still excited to have 10 x 250MW's with one leg though!

Once 0.15 drop, I will make changes to the mod so it will be even more UPS friendly. The main issue is the reactor and turbines need on-tick updates. This does not scale very well. The new prototypes will hopefully offer more to work with. I must warn you though, the next version might not be save compatible. However, I will make every effort to avoid breaking save game.

Fatmice wrote: You really don't want to do that. I'm waiting for the 0.15 patch so I can integrate the turbine changes. Turbines will no longer use steam-generator prototype. They will instead use something called electric-interface prototype. It's like an accumulator that you can tune in-game on the fly. I will be using it to meter out energy from the heat provided by the secondary loop. I aim to make it have a spin-up and spin-down where heat use and electric output is less efficient for the amount of low-pressure steam produced. An added benefit is this prototype should also use less tick.

With the size of our evil modpack (Angel + Bob + Marathon), we're unlikely to take the save into 0.15.

Fatmice wrote: Just fill the 250W reactor full of pressurized water first, then connect all of the other stuff. The liquids will balance themselves.

I understand there are valid reasons they can't be blueprinted, but manually filling is a hassle I decided against. Deploying ten of these I'd rather let them fill themselves.

Fatmice wrote: Liquid throughput is a constant source of problems. Since heat is conducted through the fluid, this also hampered the heat throughput. This is the reason the steam generator must be directly connected to the reactor without any pipes. I do not see a solution to this outside of magical heat pipes... The 0.15 update offers a new heat source and boiler behavior. It maybe possible to change how my reactor is connected through these new behaviors. I will have to see though. We are all eagerly waiting for the patch to drop on experimental. As for making the steam generators work with the 500MW reactor, I already made it but haven't release it yet.

Liquids are always an issue. We had one base we belted barrels so it was reliable. I know that's not your issue.

Fatmice wrote: Once 0.15 drop, I will make changes to the mod so it will be even more UPS friendly. The main issue is the reactor and turbines need on-tick updates. This does not scale very well. The new prototypes will hopefully offer more to work with. I must warn you though, the next version might not be save compatible. However, I will make every effort to avoid breaking save game.

Again we're likely to restart.

I'm trying to offer constructive feedback, not criticism. We're having a ton of fun with UP. I'm looking forward to what you can accomplish in 0.15!

Demosthenex wrote: With the size of our evil modpack (Angel + Bob + Marathon), we're unlikely to take the save into 0.15.
I understand there are valid reasons they can't be blueprinted, but manually filling is a hassle I decided against. Deploying ten of these I'd rather let them fill themselves.
Liquids are always an issue. We had one base we belted barrels so it was reliable. I know that's not your issue.
Again we're likely to restart.
I'm trying to offer constructive feedback, not criticism. We're having a ton of fun with UP. I'm looking forward to what you can accomplish in 0.15!

Good to know you are having a good time. I hope 0.15 will offer more room for improvements.