Factorio Forums

The idea is to really expand on the systems use of machines that produce a very small amount of pollution (or none if it makes sense). Right now you are stuck with very limited electric machines. My idea would add more machines that make sense to expand the current system without making the polluting machines obsolete.

Electric Boiler - This is a no-brainer. Once you have a good source of electricity (from solar power), it would be nice to switch your steam engines over to environmentally friendly versions. You could even power these separately off your main grid with a few solar panels and accumulators so you don't have to worry about them running out. This would be great as a backup power supply, or even as your main supply if you want to keep space usage to a minimum.

Advanced Steam Boiler - A steam engine with electric boilers built in which uses a high pressure system to produce more electricity than a standard steam engine. This will only be able to run on water and will require more/more advanced materials to build. Larger than a normal steam engine to compensate for extra power and considering it has a built in boiler.

Advanced Solar Panels - A more powerful panel which collects energy faster and can output more energy per tick. Maybe double that of the regular Panels. You don't want these to be too powerful. Same size as the regular panels, just a basic straight upgrade that requires more materials.

Advanced Accumulators - A more powerful accumulator which can store double the energy and output energy at a faster rate. The same size as a basic accumulator but requires more advanced materials to make. Possibly an advanced battery.

Batteries - Batteries are a sore spot for any environment conscious player. It would be nice to have an alternative that doesn't require oil. Maybe some kind of energy storing crystal, that can be charged with electricity just like a regular battery. These crystals could appear as patches of ore, just like iron or copper, and will require to be mined. Advanced batteries could require some advanced circuits and special materials of some kind to allow them to store/output more power.

Plastics - Another environmentally damaging product used to make circuits. Adding silicon into the game as ore patches and mining it as silicates in the soil then processing it into silicon would be a more eco-friendly alternative.

Wood - As it stands trees are useless. Once you have enough iron, basic power poles are useless. Wood used as fuel is terrible. More uses for wood would be nice. Also the ability to plant trees would also be nice, but maybe overpowered. Making charcoal from wood to increase its power as a fuel source could be a less damaging alternative to coal for the early game.

Advanced Laser Turrets - A Laser Turret with two lasers on a single turret. Draws more power that two regular Laser Turrets and costs more to make but costs less in the long run by needing to place less of them around (maybe 50% more material cost than a regular laser turret)

Laser rifle - A personal weapon which works similarly to a laser turret but is portable. Fires a bit faster than a laser turret, so is more like a laser machine gun. Uses energy packs made from Energy Crystals which can be recharged at a recharging station. Energy crystals allow for a different number of shots before needing to recharge depending on the tier of crystal used (say 50, 100 and 150 shots for 3 tiers of crystal). Down side is long reloading time considering reloading won't need to happen often.

Portable Recharger - A portable recharging station you can fit into your Modular Armour or Power Armour to give you much more energy for your laser rifle. This will allow you to fire many shots and it will recharge over time at a decent rate. This means you will no longer need separate Energy Packs as ammo, saving inventory space and not needing to reload pretty much ever if you add solar panels or a portable fusion reactor to your armour.

Laser Cannon - A Tank weapon upgrade that uses a powerful Laser Cannon which works similarly to the regular cannon but requires energy instead of ammunition. This would require either a different type of tank, or for tanks to me modular. Modular Tanks while a separate idea is something that sounds like a great idea to me. Laser Cannon would require a large Energy Crystal Pack to be fitted into a Tank to allow limited uses of the cannon before recharging. Larger, more advanced packs will allow more shots before needing to be recharged(50, 100, 150 shots like the energy packs for the laser rifle sounds like a good number considering the regular cannon can fit up to 100 shells).

Tank Fusion Reactor - To allow Energy Shield and recharge Laser Weapons on a Tank. Will go into more details about tank upgrades in separate post.

Other things are possibly needed to expand and round out the system, but this was off the top of my head. A more future tech and environmentally friendly expansion is what this game needs in my opinion.

Eletric boiler? What the? You want to use electricity to create electricity? Yeah, you could store water for the night, but then again, that's the job of accumulators.

I don't think it's a good idea to make so much suggestions in one post. It's hard to concentrate on one thing at a time.

+1 to electric boiler and end-game variation of a steam engine with more watt/tile.

Nova wrote:Electric boiler? What the? You want to use electricity to create electricity? Yeah, you could store water for the night, but then again, that's the job of accumulators.

I don't think it's a good idea to make so much suggestions in one post. It's hard to concentrate on one thing at a time.

I get that, but I'm thinking up expansions to the game, not single machines. Nothing I can do about that.

Electric Boilers make perfect sense. Electric Boilers exist in real life. Why can't you run an electricity creating system off electricity? Have a small Solar/Accumulator farm disconnected from your main network and it will be enough to power a few electric boilers throughout the night. This stops you from needing to burn nasty coal or solid fuels (or wood but that's practically useless). Why would you want to use fuel powered boilers in a non polluting setup? You're stuck with solar power for now, but you might want a backup system and not having to use carbon fuels is a nicer option. Having options is what makes the game fun, and ultimately replayable.

Also, I would have mentioned a Nuclear Fusion setup in my expansion, but I will take a guess that they are already planning to implement that. Although it's not the most environmentally friendly power source, as long as you have radiation shielding and set it up so it doesn't explode or leak out it would never be a problem environmentally. Would be nice to have that huge super advanced power generation that has the chance of exploding and causing massive destruction/creating tons of pollution.

Electric boilers would pretty much give you the ability to infinitely multiply energy without any disadvantage (besides perhaps the setup cost). All you would need is some energy to start it up and perhaps a single burner boiler or solar panel to act as a back up in case of power outage, and there you go, infinite free energy. Granted, you can already do that with solar farms, but this only makes the problem worse.

I think pollution should be made a more involved gameplay mechanism instead of eliminating it like this. Perhaps give players a more efficient but polluting option and a less efficient but green option, and maybe even some optional very useful things that generate a lot of pollution (airplanes?) After all, pollution is what makes biters attack you and the game loses a lot when the threat of being attacked is gone.

No, you put more energy into the electric boilers than you can get out of the steam engines.

As Nova said, i'd only consider it "not cheating" if it was lossy, like the boiler takes in 1MJ of energy to heat water that would produce 500kJ of energy out,

and the only use is to heat water during the day to store the energy for later

I don't think you guys understand why electric boilers aren't a bad idea. It doesn't matter that boilers are powered by electricity which then give you electricity. If your system goes down you're screwed. That's why you'd have to have as separate solar array just to power the boilers. It requires you to add more solar power in on a separate network. It's not cheating. You get technically infinite power from fuel powered boilers. You never run out of coal because there is infinite coal in the game. So technically that's cheating to by that logic. The water you pump out of the lakes is actually infinite. You never use up any water from the lake, you always have maximum pressure and the pump requires no electricity to run. So complaining about this is a non-issue. Sure, you could never get power if the pump required power since it's the first tier of power generation , but it doesn't make it any less cheaty if we're using that logic. Electric Boilers aren't any different because who cares about the fact that you feed coal into them automatically then never worry about them again, unless you play for so long that the entire coal patch you're using runs out. Then you just have to move on to the next coal patch and run the boilers care-free for another 20, 30 or even 40 hours of playtime.

Not to mention using electricity to make electricity makes perfect sense anyway. Real World power plants are hooked into the power grid both ways. They need power to be able to create power. All their machines run on electricity. This is why electric boilers make perfect sense.

I still don't see how electric boilers would be a good idea. Normal boilers consume resources, require effort to keep running and produce pollution. Yes, if your power need are not great and you have a large coal patch, it will last you a long time, but you still need to estimate if it can last, especially if you want to expand your factory (a 100 MW factory eats through coal fields rather quickly). You can avoid the fuel shortage by using oil to produce fuel, but that's even more polluting and the system can be rather finicky. Both cases already have you using electricity to get more electricity, either through the use of electric miners or pumpjacks and refineries.

Electric boilers, on the other hand, give you infinite energy without disadvantages. The only danger is the system overloading and losing electricity during a spike, but a single solar panel and accumulator on its own electric grid is enough to fully counter that. As soon as the boiler gets any electricity, it would heat water which produces more electricity, and so on until the entire powerplant is running again. No pollution, no need to go out and secure more resources to keep it running.

This is the same reason why I consider the solar-accumulator combo harmful to the game, only without the need to spend a lot of resources and create huge arrays of solar panels.

Nova wrote:No, you put more energy into the electric boilers than you can get out of the steam engines.

Would anyone really use it if it was a net loss, though? At best, I can see it be like trains and belts, with people saying "nice, but the basic method is better".

It would be nice to be able to make everything that requires power to be modded to use either Burner or Electric, and when it comes around, liquid fuel. There's still quite a lot of entity definitions that are hardcoded to be one way or the other.

Electric boilers might not make a whole lot of sense to be in the base game for most people, but it should still be able to be coded in for those who would like them.

Rahjital wrote: Would anyone really use it if it was a net loss, though?

1 liquid tank with 100C˚water is equal to 42 accumulators.

bobingabout wrote:It would be nice to be able to make everything that requires power to be modded to use either Burner or Electric, and when it comes around, liquid fuel. There's still quite a lot of entity definitions that are hardcoded to be one way or the other.

Electric boilers might not make a whole lot of sense to be in the base game for most people, but it should still be able to be coded in for those who would like them.

Indeed, this would be a wonderful thing to have, more modding flexibility is always a good thing. I would say it deserves its own suggestion, though.

User_Name wrote:1 liquid tank with 100C˚water is equal to 42 accumulators.

Yeah, I already use them that way (though the most I managed to get there was 2.3k water. I need to make it automatically turn off when there's no shortage...), but would people find it useful if the boilers are so inefficient? The savings on accus would have to be invested into more solar panels. I guess it would be a good thing if you are short on oil... but would there be any other uses I don't see?

Rahjital wrote:would people find it useful if the boilers are so inefficient?

Electric boiler should have ~100% efficiency, like it's real-life counterpart.
Losses occur in the steam engine.

Conventional solar/accu farm:
-expensive
-occupy a lot of space

Solar+electric Boiler+steam engine
-less efficient
-cheap
-less space
-need water
-is an upgrade to your existing early game power plant, not a replacement

Electric boiler should have lowest priority in the electric network. It should not consume power from accumulators and steam engines.

Electric boilers aren't quite that efficient. I've said this in another thread, I'll copy that here:
Basically, you're converting energy from one thing to use with another. At a loss. Always.

The second law of thermodynamics says, essentially, that you cannot have over-unity. You can't take out more than you put it. No perpetual energy. I think you see that already, but just in case.


I think a better idea would be simply more efficient steam systems. Believe it or not, right now, 90%+ of electricity generation in the real world is through steam power. It's one of the most efficient ways of producing power - external combustion systems. An upgrade to steam engines is efficient boilers and efficient use of that steam, ie, steam turbines. The less pollution you produce, the more efficient your system is, like I stated in the above.

To add to that, making a closed-loop system with condensers rather than offshore pumps will net you even more efficiency. Think of a steam locomotive - all the heat energy they produce moves their pistons.... and then escapes into the atmosphere. You heat 100% of the water, use 10%, then 90% of the heated water just disappears. With a closed-loop system, you use the same water and have to heat it less, using less potential energy.