Opinion on Fuel cubes?

[wooaa]

I got the game a few weeks ago and have played a bit, but for the life of me I cant find a good use for the fuel cubes. While they do have a much higher energy density than coal, it seems like the oil could be used for something much more useful, like plastic. While I could see how a train with 150 cubes could run for a good long time, it seems like a box and inserter with coal in one of the stations would do the same and not cost any hyper valuable oil ( really I never seem to have enough to churn out the plastic i need). So, what do you think about fuel cubes? any interesting uses you have discovered for them?

[DaveMcW]

I used to ignore them, but in version 0.12 they are required for rocket launches.

[nobodx]

i use them mainly to keep my oil-levels balanced (if you need more oil, try speed modules in the pumpjacks)

[lancar]

They're good car and tank fuels. That's pretty much what I use them for.
And the rocket, ofc.

[Nasabot]

Only useful for rocket, because it can be substituted(coal) too easily.

My suggestion is to implement better uses for coal, like:

-make coal useful for energy production (my suggestion: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =6&t=17499), but ofc there might be different ideas

-change steal production so you need iron + coal. This is actually realistic. Id change steel furnances, so that they are the only furnaces which can produce steel.(or they are the only furnances which get a MASSIV bonus while producing steel)

-higher coal cost in recipes

-new material which requires a lot of coal (carbon-?)


If coal was a valueable and scarce resource and there iwould be infinite energy by solar power, fuel cubes would be very useful.

[NotABiter]

I'm currently playing a map that has plenty of oil patches, so I used an entire oil patch just for my backup power supply. In the below image, pumpjacks are at the top, refineries and chemical plants pumping out solid fuel are below that, and then below that I have a solid fuel buffer which consists of 36 steel chests full of solid fuel. That's over 2 TJ of stored energy. My backup power supply is only 120 MW, so that's enough fuel on hand to keep it running at 100% for over 2 hours. (The storage tanks full of oil on the input side of the refineries might also count as buffer, but I haven't run the numbers to verify if my refinery setup can actually keep up with the boilers if the steam engines are running at full tilt.)

Below the buffer, and to the left of the buffer, and to the right of buffer - lots of crazy pipe-work to move enough water to keep 240 steam engines satisfied. And even with one pipe for every 10 steam engines (24 pipes total), I had to use three pumps on each set of 10 steam engines to pull enough water. (Apparently 2 pumps would have been enough if I had used a more pump-optimal configuration, but that would have been less space-optimal and a bit uglier.)

Yeah, I could have used coal. (In fact you can see a completely unused coal field in the upper-left part of the image.) But oil lasts forever - especially for a backup power supply which will rarely if ever see actual use. I.e., even if the wells dropped to 0.1/s, that's probably still more than enough to produce more solid fuel than is needed when the backup power supply is idling, meaning it would still build up solid fuel in the buffer over time. When the coal field runs out, that's it, it's gone forever. (And then I have to find a new source, and that and fighting aliens are the two worst parts of this game, so I'd rather not.)

[Tev]

I tried supplying defence perimeter turrets (third line, after 2 lasers) with burner inserters which are fed with solid fuel (half lane cubes half ammo).

And as was said, for tank/car fuel. For locomotives as well. Basically anywhere where I can use long lasting fuel source and depletion would be very bad. And because of that I don't have to care about big coal supplies, and burn all excess that plastic can't consume (which saves me space and resources for solar farms).

[wooaa]

Cool. So it looks like fuel cubes can be usefull for supplying far off stations and as a very dense energy buffer.
I will try adding a few speed mods to my pupjacks to see if that helps reduse my oil problems.

[Lee_newsum]

One more think you may like to for a new map is to NOT have solar farms(NO Solar Panel) this will add some think new to this game as macking Electricity use fuel so fuel cubes/block are best for that, as coal is a most have for Plastic Bars. next Steel Furnace or Electric Furnace?
Steel Furnace use fuel; make more
Electric Furnace use Electricity => so more Steam engine => more fuel

and all the fuel useed is more Pollution and all the fun that adds.

[lancar]

One more think you may like to for a new map is to NOT have solar farms(NO Solar Panel) this will add some think new to this game as macking Electricity use fuel so fuel cubes/block are best for that, as coal is a most have for Plastic Bars. next Steel Furnace or Electric Furnace?
Steel Furnace use fuel; make more
Electric Furnace use Electricity => so more Steam engine => more fuel

and all the fuel useed is more Pollution and all the fun that adds.

On my latest map, I played with no laser turrets and no solars.
It made for a pretty different experience, I have to say. Energy is a constant issue, and both outpost and train systems need a whole new support infrastructure. Also, land mines become actually useful!

[Jonathan88]

I'm currently playing a map that has plenty of oil patches, so I used an entire oil patch just for my backup power supply. In the below image, pumpjacks are at the top, refineries and chemical plants pumping out solid fuel are below that, and then below that I have a solid fuel buffer which consists of 36 steel chests full of solid fuel. That's over 2 TJ of stored energy. My backup power supply is only 120 MW, so that's enough fuel on hand to keep it running at 100% for over 2 hours. (The storage tanks full of oil on the input side of the refineries might also count as buffer, but I haven't run the numbers to verify if my refinery setup can actually keep up with the boilers if the steam engines are running at full tilt.)

Below the buffer, and to the left of the buffer, and to the right of buffer - lots of crazy pipe-work to move enough water to keep 240 steam engines satisfied. And even with one pipe for every 10 steam engines (24 pipes total), I had to use three pumps on each set of 10 steam engines to pull enough water. (Apparently 2 pumps would have been enough if I had used a more pump-optimal configuration, but that would have been less space-optimal and a bit uglier.)

Wow! Very impressive steam engine set up! I love the pattern of pipes!

[nobodx]

On my latest map, I played with no laser turrets and no solars.
It made for a pretty different experience, I have to say. Energy is a constant issue, and both outpost and train systems need a whole new support infrastructure. Also, land mines become actually useful!

Once I learned, that mines are treated like "normal" buildings, meaning builder bots re-/place them, I surrounded my entire base with a multiple layer minefield.

[kyborek]

I was thinking exactly the same with solid fuel before. But mainly because i could not handle fluids properly.


Yesterday i played multiplayer with my friend and we had slightly more aliens than expected and terrible luck on starting coal (only 4 to 5 electric miners fit there) and coal expansion was quite deep into aliens area.

So yeah for starting emergency scenario solid fuel saved our asses because the coal production was not high enough to keep boilers running and that made the energy go below max which slowed coal mining even more which in turn reduced the power even more...

Before we got into stalemate and had to disconnect some of our machines we quickly put up oil processing and solid fuel and it was really worth it. So yeah maybe on easy maps you don't need solid fuel but using it should be really convenient as you don't need to make coal expansions because pumps last forever.