Energy production

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factoriobiker
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Energy production

Post by factoriobiker »

I have a lot of energy from steam and sun cells....
satisfaction 16mw
production 16 / 50mw
accumulator charge 60 / 660 mj

So I wonder what is going on why the accumulators are not fully charged?
what should I do more?

my lasers are getting beat down by bugs....a lot
and bugs are getting closer and closer, they like polition so what elements in my base gives max pollution? steamers for electricity?

SoShootMe
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Re: Energy production

Post by SoShootMe »

factoriobiker wrote: ↑
Thu Sep 03, 2020 3:41 pm
I have a lot of energy from steam and sun cells....
...
So I wonder what is going on why the accumulators are not fully charged?
The amount of energy stored in accumulators varies; you can't tell much from a single figure. Did you just have one or more attacks, so you've had additional drain due to laser fire? Is it the end of the night, so your solar panels haven't been generating any electricity for a while?
factoriobiker wrote: ↑
Thu Sep 03, 2020 3:41 pm
and bugs are getting closer and closer, they like polition so what elements in my base gives max pollution? steamers for electricity?
The enemy expands, but not specifically towards pollution. They do seek out pollution sources (and military structures) when they attack though.

Open the Production window (default key: P), click the Pollution tab and you'll see the rate of pollution produced for entities of each type in your factory. Given a factory of 16MW, if most power is from steam engines, I'd guess the biggest sources are likely boilers, miners and furnaces. More solar power (panels plus accumulators) will reduce the number of boilers you need, and hence their contribution to pollution - though of course you generate some pollution to make them! The higher tier assembling machines also have lower pollution, but they take more power as well which reduces the benefit if the power is from boilers. Depending on where you are in the game, efficiency modules reduce pollution and can be added to many buildings, including miners and electric furnaces.

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Re: Energy production

Post by factoriobiker »

efficency modules? I have 2 sorts, speed , energy saving and efficiency
which one is the best?

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Re: Energy production

Post by SoShootMe »

factoriobiker wrote: ↑
Thu Sep 03, 2020 7:01 pm
efficency modules? I have 2 sorts, speed , energy saving and efficiency
which one is the best?
"Best" depends on how you measure it, but in the context of pollution: on their own, a speed module will increase pollution per item produced and an efficiency module will decrease it. This is quite a simplification; see https://wiki.factorio.com/Module for more details.

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Re: Energy production

Post by starlinvf »

Another issue to consider is that Speed and Production only have real net reductions to pollution or energy cost/per item when used together. Or more specifically, it lowers the total production cost per Item... which indirectly lowers all the demands associated with intermediary and raw material processing.

Boilers, however, throw a huge monkey wrench into any practical attempt at energy/pollution control for a factory. Basically any gains from Prod/Spd combo is essentially lost to Boiler pollution from the extra Electricity demand. Same with Electric Furnaces over Steel. But Solar is also also really resource intensive to setup for high capacity (over 10MW) production, between the panels, accumulators and raw tile space needed.

If you're trying for pollution control, the easiest way to go about it is focusing your research into Solar, Inserter Bonuses (to get the +1 non-stack bonus), Eff Modules, and Nuclear- and to minimize your production space and expansion as much as possible.


Try to keep steam power under 10MW.... 5MW is ideal, but at some point you might need the extra capacity, so I build that anyway. Solar and Eff modules are the first 2 things I work on. It gets stupidly hard to produce anything past blue lab on that power budget without Eff modules.... so thats a convenient marker to know when you need Eff modules. Theres also no real benefit to using Eff2 over Eff1, as the Blue Circuit are too expensive to research and produce to make it worth while. 3 Eff1 in every mining drill cuts your total power demand by almost 30% on its own. With Eff1 in everything (at AM2s), I believe the total power reduction is roughly 50% overall. Once you get there, you can realistically run a factory up to purple lab on pure solar power.

Also if you can, try to build your Steam power (or at least your boilers) and Smelters in chunks surrounded by trees. This dramatically contains the spread of pollution until you get everything on to Nuclear power.

Second.... Don't bother using Electric Furnaces until you have Nuclear power. Even with Eff modules, their overall electricity demand adds up too fast to be a replacement for Steel Furnaces without a butt ton of solar power. If you want to trade off, using Electric Furnaces for remote steel production (where its too much pain to run coal), can be viable..... unless its for making rails (for purple). I run into this problem every time; even 2 AM2s need over a dozen furnaces pumping out steel to keep them going at full speed...... and purples need a LOT of rails.


Third, Unlock Uranium Processing as soon as reasonably possible, and start ...... processing uranium. You're gonna need to do a lot for this next step. And the time required to means you're gonna wanna start this early.

Forth (or 2.5), have Purple Science production up, and research what you need for Kovarex Enrichment. Once you have 43 U-235 need for enrichment, Start doing it. Once you have this done, you basically have nigh-unlimited nuclear fuel. Note that if you want to start Nuclear power before enrichment is established, every U-245 used for a fuel cell adds around 30 minutes (divided by number of centrifuges) to the time it takes to get it going. Either way, I would highly recommend looking up Blue Prints for a No-waste Turbine setup, since Nuclear fuel burns regardless of power consumption, AND Build a Circuit breaker on your Steam plant to disconnect it from the power grid on-demand.

This creates a huge decision on what you want to do. Since uranium processing takes a ton of time to do, and anything involving (or beyond) purple research takes a ton of energy to make all the packs in parallel, you'll probably be spending a lot of time waiting on it before being able to retool your factory for electric smelting and yellow packs. However, its entirely possible to clear out the remaining research for Blue and Grey packs on just Solar power.

You can also spend that wait time getting train systems setup to other ore patches, since theres a really good chance you're close to (or already have) used up everything in short range of the starting area by the time you got purple packs going. With Eff modules, you can run most drilling operations with a single solar field and accumulator bank.

I usually use this (see link) for the panels, plus a sub-station sized accumulator bank, with mixed gun and laser turrets. It needs an open field though... and you'll want to avoid cutting down trees if you can help it, since that keeps the drilling pollution from spreading (and thus attracting attention). Thats good enough for keeping small attacks at bay. But if they start escalating, you have to consider rolling out something more sophisticated; which adds more logistics problems; or abandon the site and come back later with more fire power. At this point in the game, you're either ahead or behind their evolution progress..... and you're gonna feel the cumulative effect of your play speed (and efficiency) as you try to find more raw resources to cart in for late game.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... =658756067

I play the low pollution runs almost exclusively. And while its slow, the required thinking and careful trade off considerations to avoid Zapp Biterigans is about as close to the soul-crushingly oppressive paranoia, tiny margin of error, and health damaging stress levels of a Death World play-through... without having to experience the soul-crushingly oppressive paranoia, tiny margin of error, and health damaging stress levels of a Death World play-through.

netmand
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Re: Energy production

Post by netmand »

factoriobiker wrote: ↑
Thu Sep 03, 2020 3:41 pm
what elements in my base gives max pollution? steamers for electricity?
boilers do belch a lot of pollution.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution#Polluters

(I could go for a bucket of steamers right now)

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Re: Energy production

Post by Yoyobuae »

starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:08 pm
Another issue to consider is that Speed and Production only have real net reductions to pollution or energy cost/per item when used together. Or more specifically, it lowers the total production cost per Item... which indirectly lowers all the demands associated with intermediary and raw material processing.
In my search for ultimate energy efficiency (not considering pollution), I could not find any configuration of productivity/speed modules which resulted in a reduction of energy cost/item when compared to using efficiency module 1 everywhere. The only exception was rocket production. But in all my other tests involving science packs and various other intermediates the result was always the same: Using productivity/speed modules with or without beacons always resulted in increasing the total energy cost to achieve the same results when compared to only using efficiency modules (with no beacons).

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Re: Energy production

Post by mrvn »

Yoyobuae wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:56 pm
starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:08 pm
Another issue to consider is that Speed and Production only have real net reductions to pollution or energy cost/per item when used together. Or more specifically, it lowers the total production cost per Item... which indirectly lowers all the demands associated with intermediary and raw material processing.
In my search for ultimate energy efficiency (not considering pollution), I could not find any configuration of productivity/speed modules which resulted in a reduction of energy cost/item when compared to using efficiency module 1 everywhere. The only exception was rocket production. But in all my other tests involving science packs and various other intermediates the result was always the same: Using productivity/speed modules with or without beacons always resulted in increasing the total energy cost to achieve the same results when compared to only using efficiency modules (with no beacons).
Energy cost is irelevant. What is the accumulated pollution? That means the pollution from boilers for the extra electricity, miners, furnaces, assemblers. With productivity modules you need fewer raw resources but more electricty. You trade miners, furnaces and assembler for boilers. The question then is if you save more pollution from the reduction in miners, furnaces and assemblers than you add with the extra boilers.


I would first go and kill all the alien nests around the base as far as pollution spreads. The further out you move your wall of laser turrets the less aliens will attack it. And try to keep as many trees as possible. Placing your wall at natural choke points between lakes or cliffs can also greatly reduce the number of laser turrets needed for the wall and therefore save energy to keep the laser turrets charged.

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Re: Energy production

Post by Yoyobuae »

mrvn wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:26 pm
Energy cost is irelevant
I was doing some runs in which the energy cost was very relevant.

starlinvf
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Re: Energy production

Post by starlinvf »

Yoyobuae wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:56 pm
starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:08 pm
Another issue to consider is that Speed and Production only have real net reductions to pollution or energy cost/per item when used together. Or more specifically, it lowers the total production cost per Item... which indirectly lowers all the demands associated with intermediary and raw material processing.
In my search for ultimate energy efficiency (not considering pollution), I could not find any configuration of productivity/speed modules which resulted in a reduction of energy cost/item when compared to using efficiency module 1 everywhere. The only exception was rocket production. But in all my other tests involving science packs and various other intermediates the result was always the same: Using productivity/speed modules with or without beacons always resulted in increasing the total energy cost to achieve the same results when compared to only using efficiency modules (with no beacons).

(EDIT): Only just realized you were talking Energy only...... I guess just disregard most of what I said.


Thats at per machine level. When you account for a whole production line, the savings of the module combo are cumulative. Theres two factors that result in 3 types of savings....of which I won't do the math because not so good with the maths ..... so heres a link to a table someone else did.

viewtopic.php?t=41475



1. Raw Material cost. There is what production modules are made for. If you have 4 Prd3s in a machine, it produces 40% more output per craft cycle (overall). When looked at in reverse, this is a 40% material savings per item. So 40% less green circuits for Blue processors (which is a HUGE deal), which also means 40% copper and iron from making the green circuits-- taking that total cost down to 24 copper (down from 40) and 15 iron (down from 24). Less plates means less ore needed. However production modules also slow crafting speed by 15% each (4 Prd3s = -60% crafting speed). Now on its own this doesn't make sense..... yet.

2. Machines output pollution as function of operational time. So when you see the 10/m pollution on Elec Drills, thats actually 0.1666 pollution per second WHEN ITS RUNNING. Same goes for AMs, Chemical processing, literally everything that output pollution. So if its only running 50% of the time, its putting out 50% less pollution per minute. Thats a factor to consider with tile absorption rates, but a bit beyond this current topic. Now heres the catch. It doesn't matter how many products the thing spits out, that pollution rate is fixed rate over time. So Prd modules are a double whammy when it comes to pollution. They increase the base pollution and electricity (which we know scales the pollution value of the machine), but ALSO make the machine run longer per item. So you're almost quintupling the pollution rate between the longer craft times and modified pollution value of the machine. Thats where Speed modules come into play.

Speed and Productivity modules have this unique interplay due in how the modifiers are cumulative, rather then multiplicative like they "should be". So +50% and +50% = +100%, where it in pretty much any other game of this type would see the math as = +75%. And you can see that in the second chart of the link I put. So what ends up happening is the Spd Modules directly counter the slow down the Production modules, but at the cost of Electricity. While Electricity has a production cost (and thus pollution cost), that becomes almost negligible under Solar and Nuclear, since the actual electricity generation is zero pollution, and fuel processing (or construction cost in the case of solar) per Gj of energy is very small compared to Boilers over their life time. So with the pollution of Electricity production being barely notable, we're left dealing with ~10x increase in pollution on the machine from the electricity scaling.... but a 7.5 times increase in crafting throughput per second. Or ~1.3 pollution per item (if I"m still doing the math right).

3. If you combine the fact that each machine using 60% of the normal material cost for 30% more pollution per min, this it might look like more pollution at first. However.... that material savings cost is Multiplicative. So at every step you have this prod/spd combo going, you need 40% less AMs to maintain the desired throughput for that next output item. When you get down to the raw material level, you could realistically be cutting out half your smelters and drills you would otherwise need for the same item number of final products. Now in terms of Pollution per minute, overall you're breaking even or in the red (if you're going full speed). But in terms of pollution per Craft, I think it was less then half (or even lower) as long as you're not on steam power, because the production time per item is a lot shorter. Plus the side benefit of a smaller factory to defend.


So Prd/Spd has the highest impact in very expensive recipes, like Rockets, Purple and Yellow science, Blue Circuits, Low density structures.... basically anything with a double digit input count, or 3+ steps above Iron/Copper plates. However, this savings gets much worse the closer to raw materials you get. So like Smelting, Wires, Gears, Blue pack and below are not worth putting the production bonuses on. So on that low end, you tend to see more all Spd modules to increase throughput (for less AMs).


So for a Pollution reduction approach, you can mix spd and eff modules on the low end (smelting and mining, and low end products) to increase in total throughput for a given pollution rate, or just use all eff1 to drop them to 40%/20% energy/pollution cost. Overall, Eff1s work best for this, because Eff2/3 are too expensive to craft in the amounts needed to handle something as big as smelting and mining... basically its the only diminishing returns of using them. But Speed and Prod Modules are more efficient per level (individually), so you do get increasingly better results with the higher versions.

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Re: Energy production

Post by Yoyobuae »

starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 9:47 pm
When you account for a whole production line, the savings of the module combo are cumulative. Theres two factors that result in 3 types of savings....of which I won't do the math because not so good with the maths ..... so heres a link to a table someone else did.
Just to clarify: I created a script that runs in-game and simulates an entire production line and keeps track of the total electric energy usage of all machines. Then I ran this script to perform several tests and compared the results of each run.

I tested several setups using modules and beacons. Even for really expensive products like RCUs or Utility Science packs or Labs, productivity modules never resulted in a net reduction of total energy usage compared to efficiency modules. The one exception was the rocket silo, where its more energy efficient to use productivity modules (and even a pair of speed beacons) than using efficiency modules.

Unluckily I didn't test pollution generation. I would need to modify my script quite a bit to perform such tests.

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Re: Energy production

Post by starlinvf »

Yoyobuae wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 9:34 pm
mrvn wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:26 pm
Energy cost is irelevant
I was doing some runs in which the energy cost was very relevant.

What were the conditions?

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Re: Energy production

Post by Yoyobuae »

starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 10:14 pm
What were the conditions?
All power had to come from wood.

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Re: Energy production

Post by starlinvf »

Yoyobuae wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 10:20 pm
starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 10:14 pm
What were the conditions?
All power had to come from wood.
Ahh. So Dwarf Fortress Hard mode.

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Re: Energy production

Post by Yoyobuae »

starlinvf wrote: ↑
Fri Sep 04, 2020 10:55 pm
Ahh. So Dwarf Fortress Hard mode.
It's an interesting challenge. "Just build more" stops being the solution to all problems.

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