Friday Facts #173 - Nuclear stuff is almost done

[OkariDraconis]

At risk of Flame - I think the complexity of Nuclear Power is perfect for Vanilla

In Short:
Nuclear Power is/will be the most complex power setup a player can have
Let a mod-er make it more complex / realistic

In Long:
Looking at everything, it is by Far the most Complex Power Setup in the Game.

Steam Power is pretty easy to make...but requires a steady supply of coal, but that coal is easy to make...logicticaly speaking, does't real get that complex, and expansion is pretty easy.
Solar Power & Accums, more complex to make, but don't really require maintenance, and they are pretty much just build and forget.

Nuclear power ... Needs Refinements, a supply line, etc... Additionally if you want more power, it takes a lot more thought into expansion, You have to not only consider The design of adding another reactor, but how much you need to expand your refinement capabilities by, and you raw intake.

I think they (the devs) should just make sure its open enough for mod-ers to make it more complex.

[Project Dark Fox]

I'm more curious if being around the refined Uranium 235 or 238 will cause you to take radiation damage if you're not in Modular Armor or better.

[Ausprit]

Kovarex, since you like having an API for Starcraft to have AI battles, maybe you could be convinced to expose such an AI for Factorio?
Automating the process of automating the lauch of a rocket seems meta in a very nice way!

[Marconos]

Good updates, looking forward to it.

Few hopefully simple questions on reactor setups. If I have 9 reactors, 3 x 3 grid with 1 stuck in the middle. Is that valid or does each reactor require to have heat pipes attached? Is there a max distance on heat pipes? Can one heat pipe connect to multiple reactors or does each reactor output need to be unique? Is there a limit to the number of reactors you can have? If I have 2 rows of 10 reactors (20 of them) are they 2000% more efficient or does it only take into account those that are directly touching it?

[Vasekdvor]

Hmn velmi pěkný, je tady někde nějaký český fórum kde se dá kecat česky. Né že bych tu angličtinu neovládal ale když hru dělají čeští vyývojáři ?

Jen tak mimochodem, napadlo mne udělat dočasné vypínání budov tlačítkem (tak jak je to například v SimCity)?
Pokud to tam již je tak jsem si toho zatim nevšiml.

Díky za odpověď.

[Requia]

So how much energy per unit of ore do we get out of this?

One of my big hopes was a realistic ratio of uranium to coal (how much varies by assumptions about the ore grades but at least 10000:1). Not clear if I'm getting my wish or not.

[Stripes]

From the gameplay perspective, decrease in complexity for Nuclear Power is an rational choice:

Both Boiler and Solar power generation methods are, to be blunt, primitive and require very little investment in terms of planning.

As such, introduction of relatively realistic Nuclear Power (similar to GotLag mod on very same topic) creates an rather jarring transition in complexity - from very simple to difficult directly.

Still sad to see it go

[Master]

Well im a bit sad that there is no risk of a meltdown...
Hope that there will be some new goals/achievment added, e.g. some insane power production

[aober93]

Yea i like the ore yield research, and the nuclear stuff i dont know much about. But the idea of appending and merging buildings is great. Should be in for assemblers and smelters too.

[JJosh]

This feels too simplified, but I understand not wanting to make it too complex. It'd be really nice to have there be an option to make it more complex but more efficient with the less complex, less efficient option being there for anyone who wants it. Something like reactors that don't get too hot to melt down but also don't produce as much heat as a reactor that could be made to run much hotter, but needed circuitry or something to automate cooling. You could also keep the current steam system with the last engine in a line of engines just venting the steam out the other end, but still implement the option to pipe that steam into a cooling tower, to inject condensed water into a closed loop. As someone already said, it's a little lame to just find the widest/longest lake, and cut it in half all the time. It'd be really cool to be able to put my steam power anywhere I wanted, as long as I frontloaded it with water first. Feels like the best of both worlds to me, and in my opinion is in the spirit of the game anyway. There's already some examples of being able to do things the "easy" way, and with some knowledge and planning, can be done much more efficiently with the "easy" way still working fine.

I don't know. I felt like this was an end game solution to power production, but it doesn't really feel like too much more than "Steam MK2, where you burn coal MK2" at this point. I'm still happy for the alternative to a sea of solar panels, but this is a bit of a letdown, in my opinion.

As for the mining drill productivity tech, seems like a good idea. I personally don't think it matters too much what it costs or whether it's "worth it" or not, as I would think you've already researched everything else and it's just a sink for factories 100's of hours old with science production systems that have nothing to do. People were already using a mod that gave infinite research that didn't give you any bonuses at all already, and a return such as drill productivity seems nice and fitting for that stage of the game.

[OvermindDL1]

Where can you pull the heat out of the reactor, the images imply 8 boilers per reactor physical 'building', or when you have 2 reactor hooked up can you pull 16 boilers worth of heat out of just one building? What is the through-put of the heat pipes, just 8 boilers worth or can you connect, say, 64 boilers to a single heat pipe (with either a single connection to a reactor or are you forced to a hook-up per reactor building entity)?

[hansinator]

good news.. but... wait.. no iconic cooling towers

[ssilk]

Kovarex, since you like having an API for Starcraft to have AI battles, maybe you could be convinced to expose such an AI for Factorio?
Automating the process of automating the lauch of a rocket seems meta in a very nice way!

I fully understand, why he don't want to do it for Factorio... you need to do something different in your free time...

Kovarex about getting drawn into Factorio: Sometimes I sit at 3 o’clock in the morning over Factorio and think “Oh, so late, I need to go to work this morning…" and then “Oh, this IS work!”.
-- Written down as anecdote when I was in Prague in May 2015...

[kanvil]

Good updates, looking forward to it.

Few hopefully simple questions on reactor setups. If I have 9 reactors, 3 x 3 grid with 1 stuck in the middle. Is that valid or does each reactor require to have heat pipes attached? Is there a max distance on heat pipes? Can one heat pipe connect to multiple reactors or does each reactor output need to be unique? Is there a limit to the number of reactors you can have? If I have 2 rows of 10 reactors (20 of them) are they 2000% more efficient or does it only take into account those that are directly touching it?

From the screenshots, you need at least 2 tiles on the edge of each reactor to get fuel in, spent fuel out, and for the heat pipe. This means that a 3x3 grid wouldn't work. It also appears that diagonal doesn't count for "adjacent". So assuming that you only need one tile of edge contact to be adjacent, the best any single reactor can have is 5 adjacent reactors for 6x heat production.

Taking this further, it also seems that the best 2x2 configuration would offset one pair so that two of the reactors have all 3 of the others adjacent, giving you 14x production over a single reactor, instead of 12x for the square configuration.

The best large scale configuration may be to have two long rows of reactors, offset to provide overlap between the rows. This would give most of the reactors 5x production while still making access for fuel and heat convenient.

[Rhamphoryncus]

The best large scale configuration may be to have two long rows of reactors, offset to provide overlap between the rows. This would give most of the reactors 5x production while still making access for fuel and heat convenient.

That was my conclusion, although offset would be ugly so I'm hoping you need full sides touching for the bonus.

[Karamel]

By the time you reach endgame, you have basically endless free power from solar farms. Turbines would help fill the gap between coal power plant running out of space for expansion and mass production of panels and accumulators, which in turn would provide a need for greater fuel efficiency solved by researching and utilizing cooling towers.

IMO it's the reactors which should be postponed. At the very least they need to be available around the same time as solar panels, because otherwise they're superfluous.

[kanvil]

Where can you pull the heat out of the reactor, the images imply 8 boilers per reactor physical 'building', or when you have 2 reactor hooked up can you pull 16 boilers worth of heat out of just one building? What is the through-put of the heat pipes, just 8 boilers worth or can you connect, say, 64 boilers to a single heat pipe (with either a single connection to a reactor or are you forced to a hook-up per reactor building entity)?

From the screenshots, it appears that heat can be pulled from any edge tile of the reactor. For a single reactor, you can power 4 boilers. If you have 4 reactors in a 2x2 arrangement, you get 3x heat from each reactor, giving a total of 12x the heat you'd get from a single one, so you need 48 boilers.

Assuming I'm right about how the bonus works, the optimal configuration of 4 reactors would give you 14x power, so you'd need 56 boilers.

We don't know if there's any power loss for long heat pipes, although he's previously implied that there could be. We also don't have any solid information about the max number of boilers you can supply with a single pipe, although the screenshots don't ever show more than 4 for one pipe.

[Nemoricus]

Count me among the people disappointed that steam and water cooling towers are being axed from nuclear power. It was an aspect of design and management that I was looking forward to play with.

Also, I like the idea of reactors needing careful management, lest they cause damage. A 1x1 nuclear reactor may be fairly tame, but if you're working your way up to 2x2, 3x3, and bigger, I think that you should have to start worrying about how to safely manage the reactor. That it just loses efficiency if you don't manage it well seems...underwhelming.

I'm also dissatisfied with the miner productivity research. Aside from disliking infinite research on principle, I would prefer to see true infinite resource sources of low productivity and frequency. Why? Because even with productivity research, I still have to tear down mining outposts when I run out and go build new ones. That's just time-consuming, not interesting. With infinite resource points, though, you can focus your attention on managing the logistics of moving raw materials within your factory, which is more interesting, especially as you expand to feed your factory's growing demand.

[kanvil]

The best large scale configuration may be to have two long rows of reactors, offset to provide overlap between the rows. This would give most of the reactors 5x production while still making access for fuel and heat convenient.

That was my conclusion, although offset would be ugly so I'm hoping you need full sides touching for the bonus.

It occurs to me that a sparse-hexagonal tiling may be possible using bots to move fuel to the interior of the array, giving largely 6x production from most of the reactors. I haven't yet figured out the best way to get heat out...

[Vinnie_NL]

I like to see that the nuclear system is almost finished. But I feel a bit letdown because it will be simplified, like others have expressed. I understand that it shouldn't be too complex for everyone, so there would be an option to make a low efficiency reactor with low risk or high efficiency with more risk if the safety controls with combinator logic isn't properly setup. That's what the whole game for me is about. Your first factory designs are not that efficient but they work, and then you find out that to optimize production you need to learn stuff you didn't know before, like using combinators. First I also didn't know how to use trains, and because I needed to increase production I got into it and designed an extensive railroad network, and it's still not finished of course, because now I want to start using the smarter trains mod to get some sort of dynamic train network.

I'm hoping the nuclear power will be extended later. I understand it is also extra work so it delays the release of 0.15 so that's a good reason to postpone it. But please don't leave it out because it would be too complicated for Factorio players, as long as there will be a low risk alternative for them. I like to stay positive, so thanks for the news, and for the game as it is now because it's awesome already