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GotLag's electric furnaces mod includes some electric boilers. They use 900 kW of electricity (one steam engine's worth of output) to produce steam, without coal. It's very lossy, yes, but in theory you could, once started, have two steam engines (run from a single electric boiler) produce 900 kW of net electricity. Unless I'm misunderstanding, hence the question. My intention was to stick an electric boiler config down right next to a patch of coal miners as part of a separate circuit. The coal mined then goes on to feed the rest of my power facilities, so that when I hit the capacity of the main power circuit, the coal keeps coming and the entire base doesn't spiral into a no-power situation as badly as in a single circuit solution. However, the electric boilers don't appear to actually generate steam very well and mostly sit at 15C. So instead I've simply branched some of the coal to a standard boiler on the second circuit using the priority function of the 16.x splitters. It's obviously doable without the splitter, as the only requirement is the separate power circuit, as you've pointed out.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:00
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Nullkigan posted:GotLag's electric furnaces mod includes some electric boilers. They use 900 kW of electricity (one steam engine's worth of output) to produce steam, without coal. It's very lossy, yes, but in theory you could, once started, have two steam engines (run from a single electric boiler) produce 900 kW of net electricity. Unless I'm misunderstanding, hence the question. If you are that worried about coal not getting in your boilers, use burner inserters. They will keep themselves fed with coal, and then never lose power when electricity starts dropping. The only thing to watch out for is when first dropping the inserter. They start with just enough power to grab a moving piece of coal on a yellow belt. Any faster than yellow, and they run out of power trying to grab it. So either manually insert some coal, or make sure your belt is saturated when placing new power facilities.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:45
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Helps early game to set output priorities on your coal belt splitters so that you'll only ever hit fuel shortage brownouts if your smelteries are also completely fuel starved first.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:48
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A boiler will consume 900kW and produce one steam engines worth of steam, (I kind of wish they weren't 100% efficient but thats a separate thing) . The water entering the boilers will only ever be 15C, and i've never had an issue with them outputting steam less than 165C even if they're getting inadequate power. Is the power grid for the miners from your electrically fed boilers tied into your coal fired boiler grid? This whole system doesn't make practical sense to me at all but the game mechanics mean it would function, so I can't see where you're getting a bug preventing that. Pictures of your setup might help? I built replicated it in game to see what you could be doing wrong. This setup seems to be exactly what you're talking about, just next to each other, rather than physically separated. Technically to power that coal patch it would take 8 electric boilers and steam engines but this is merely demonstration. 
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Feb 11, 2018 18:07
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Orvin posted:If you are that worried about coal not getting in your boilers, use burner inserters. They will keep themselves fed with coal, and then never lose power when electricity starts dropping. The only thing to watch out for is when first dropping the inserter. They start with just enough power to grab a moving piece of coal on a yellow belt. Any faster than yellow, and they run out of power trying to grab it. So either manually insert some coal, or make sure your belt is saturated when placing new power facilities. This doesn't solve the main problem with browning out: the fact that the mines themselves produce less, so less gets to the boilers, which then themselves produce less until you've blacked out. This is why he wants the mines on their own circuit.
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Feb 11, 2018 18:40
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What you can do is use a power switch to isolate your boilers and coal miners from the rest of the grid, and use an accumulator to physically disconnect everything else in your factory if the power drops below X%. For bonus points, use an RS-NOR latch of some kind to reconnect the power when it's above 90%, and disconnect when it's below 10%, so you don't get  power flickering.
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Feb 11, 2018 18:44
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Yeah, mines on their own circuit is an easy concept, and I've done buffered coal systems before to warn me in advance of power outages, switches to cut off stone outposts when power demand is high, etc. I just wanted to make the game start even easier for lazy weekend play by using the Electric Boilers from GotLag's mod. Basically like that what M_Gargantua posted, except the electric boilers themselves are also powered by the steam engines they supply. Obviously you have to provide some energy to get the system started (in my case I just linked it to the rest of the power grid for a while), but the electric boilers just aren't heating up the water into steam afterwards. If you do one electric boiler to two steam engines, once you've got them up to speed one steam engine (providing 900 kW) should supply the boiler, leaving the second as spare capacity. So I must be missing something in how the mod's electric boiler is supposed to operate - maybe it produces less steam than a standard boiler, or produces it at the old rate of 60 fluid/s instead of 1500 or whatever it is now.
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Feb 11, 2018 18:50
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Nullkigan posted:Yeah, mines on their own circuit is an easy concept, and I've done buffered coal systems before to warn me in advance of power outages, switches to cut off stone outposts when power demand is high, etc. I just wanted to make the game start even easier for lazy weekend play by using the Electric Boilers from GotLag's mod. Yeah, Like I said a single electric boiler only produces 900kW, which is one steam engine. You just described a perpetual motion machine which doesn't work, there is your problem. You need one boiler burning coal and wood hooked up to two steam engines to generate the power for one electric boiler powering one steam engine.
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Feb 11, 2018 20:15
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To escape this cycleM_Gargantua posted:As soon as I get accumulators I make switched steam generator racks.
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Feb 11, 2018 20:18
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Ah, I did not realise that the input = the output for the electric boilers. The tooltip only showed the demand. It does make sense to not allow perpetual motion. I guess you can use them as a sort of bizzaro-capacitor in that brief moment before you get the real tech after solar, or maybe to retain your original power layout and eat up capacity after going nuclear given the way fuel cells are used up, but otherwise they're funcionally useless...
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Feb 11, 2018 21:08
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Nullkigan posted:Ah, I did not realise that the input = the output for the electric boilers. The tooltip only showed the demand. It does make sense to not allow perpetual motion. Before accumulators you can just use tanks of steam in line before your steam engines. One storage tank of steam will run an steam engine for 12 minutes. Something like 150 accumulators worth of power. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 21:15
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The electric boiler's there if you have electricity and want some steam for whatever purpose, eg coal liquefaction.
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Feb 11, 2018 23:05
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Me: I’m going to install all these mods that make the game ten thousand times as complex. Me, 30 minutes later: I’m deleting them all except for quality of life mods and that one that redoes resource spawning.
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Feb 11, 2018 23:17
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Rahh. Trying to design a four reactor with steam storage setup. I am really close to having the it working. The moderated fuel insertion based on steam storage and empty fuel cells is easy enough, and similar to what was on my two reactor.  The main problem is steam pressure when operating with the reactors off. Hooking up pumps to force steam out of the tanks when necessary is easy enough, and solves pressure issues while working off of steam. The problem is, said pumps completely block flow into the tanks while they are switched off, meaning the tanks don't fill when the reactors are running. I can put a second pump in the reverse direction , but that starves the turbines until the tanks are full. Definitely undesirable. I really just need some sort of non-pumping valve, or the option to make pumps let liquid flow in the reverse direction at normal pipe rates while the pump is off. I am sure somebody has probably figured this out. I realize the solution is probably rejiggering the design so that the flow path is heat-exchanger->tank->pump->steam turbine without any other inter-connectivity. That would solve the problem of lack of backflow, as the pumps could just operate continuously. In my design above, the heat exchangers, pumps, and turbines are all connected to each other, as the straight non-interconnected wouldn't have the necessary pipe throughput. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 06:26
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Luigi Thirty posted:Me: I’m going to install all these mods that make the game ten thousand times as complex. I have played the game entirely unmodded since the beginning so I am now having trouble trying to wade through what is out there. I would love some suggestions on both QoL and crazy complexity mod lists. I have seen a few pop up in this thread but hard to find them. It is frustrating that so much context is needed to properly understand the volume of mods and their many historical quirks.
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Feb 12, 2018 06:47
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I saw electric boilers in my brief foray into angelbob mods, where they make sense because there are a lot of recipes that require steam, but where you may not want to have to run belts of fuel for that purpose alone. I can't imagine any practical use for them in vanilla though. I guess you could use them for coal liquefaction, except you're already bringing in coal for that, so you may as well just burn it too
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Feb 12, 2018 06:56
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archangelwar posted:I have played the game entirely unmodded since the beginning so I am now having trouble trying to wade through what is out there. I would love some suggestions on both QoL and crazy complexity mod lists. I have seen a few pop up in this thread but hard to find them. It is frustrating that so much context is needed to properly understand the volume of mods and their many historical quirks. The only mods I'm using at the moment are one that adds little indicator lights to buildings showing if they're input or output-limited and one that rejiggers the map generation so you start close to a field of each type but after that the fields are really spread out, encouraging exploration and building efficient train lines. I also discovered bus lines 40 hours into the game so I'm starting a new factory 
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Feb 12, 2018 07:31
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Honestly with nuclear up to about 6 reactors you can get away with just having 2 turbines per heat exchanger. It's 5.8MW per turbine and 10MW per exchanger, so you'll still be able to extract all the work out of the reactor, and the turbines will be a little under capacity. Combine with inline steam storage (so HX-Tank-Turbine-Turbine) and the extra turbine capacity / stored steam can be used to recharge accumulators faster after an outage. And it makes much much much easier layouts. It's not until 8 reactors and up you're going to need to trim the turbine count down to closer to the ideal ratio, if only to be able to fit enough in without exceeding heat pipe limits. Regarding limiting cell input, I've become a fan of just making a simple clock. A cell burns for 200 seconds, which is 12000 ticks. Set your inserters to insert when the clock signal > somewhere around 11980. Any lower and they tend to want to do two cycles, higher and they might not catch in time - there's a decent range that works. Then set it up so the clock resets whenever the steam > trigger value. This should be a little higher than usual, since it will have to count for 200 seconds before the clock fires off again, but one tank per 2 turbines (as in above setup) gives you enough room on both ends so you don't waste steam and don't run out of power.
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Feb 12, 2018 09:58
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archangelwar posted:I have played the game entirely unmodded since the beginning so I am now having trouble trying to wade through what is out there. I would love some suggestions on both QoL and crazy complexity mod lists. I have seen a few pop up in this thread but hard to find them. It is frustrating that so much context is needed to properly understand the volume of mods and their many historical quirks. QoL mods that don't change how the game itself is played: Bottleneck - the one Luigi mentioned. Adds a small indicator to every crafting machine (assemblers, smelters, etc) to show its status. Green means it's currently producing. Red means it's waiting for materials. Yellow means its output is full. Very handy for getting an overview of where your production bottlenecks are. Resource Spawner Overhaul - Significantly improves the game's resource spawning algorithm. Generally your starting area will have smaller but more dense fields of ore, but you'll have to travel quite a bit to find the next ones. I hope you like trains. Related: radarplus for rso - Improves the radar to work better with the larger distances required by using Resource Spawner Overhaul. Auto Deconstruct - Automatically marks miners that have no more materials to mine for deconstruction so you can see which ones are depleted, and if you have construction bots in range they will deconstruct it. Long Reach - Lets you interact anywhere you can see on the screen without having to move close to it. Drastically cuts down on the amount of running you have to do. Might feel a little bit cheaty though. Squeak Through - Makes the collision box of many items smaller so you can move between them even if they're built side by side. Makes things like pipes and fields of miners/assemblers much easier to walk through. Vehicle Snap - Makes the car and tank snap to the closest 22,5° angle while you drive forward and aren't actively turning. Makes driving long distances, especially along paved roads, much easier. Rampant - Improves the biter AI and makes it more interesting. They won't just throw themselves blindly into your wall of turrets any more, but pull back and try to find other routes and exploit vulnerabilities in your defense. Honk - A must have. Makes trains honk when stopping and starting.  Content mods. I'm not (yet) a fan of the crazy complex mods like AngelBobs, so these are mostly just cool stuff or QoL content: Afraid of the Dark - Gives the player an always on flashlight and adds some more items to deal with the night, most importantly a much better floodlight. Electric Furnaces - What it says on the tin. Adds electric stone and steel furnaces, and two upgraded electric furnaces. Running electric furnaces is less efficient than feeding them coal, but makes the logistics much easier especially if your main coal deposit is off in the rear end end of nowhere. Warehousing - Adds basically giant 3x3 and 6x6 chests with proportional storage capacity. Great for loading and unloading trains or just as massive buffers. Vanilla Loaders - A loader is an alternative to an inserter that feeds items in/out of a machine or container. Goes well together with Warehousing. It will provide a fully compressed belt from a container. There are several loader mods, but I like this one because it looks the most stock-like. They're also 2x1 which is a slight drawback to offset how good they are. Nanobots - Gives access to early, consumable construction bots. Not as good as the later personal roboport, but a huge boost to your early game productivity.
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Feb 12, 2018 12:15
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Roflex posted:Regarding limiting cell input, I've become a fan of just making a simple clock. A cell burns for 200 seconds, which is 12000 ticks. Set your inserters to insert when the clock signal > somewhere around 11980. Any lower and they tend to want to do two cycles, higher and they might not catch in time - there's a decent range that works. Then set it up so the clock resets whenever the steam > trigger value. This should be a little higher than usual, since it will have to count for 200 seconds before the clock fires off again, but one tank per 2 turbines (as in above setup) gives you enough room on both ends so you don't waste steam and don't run out of power. Hmm, I might try the clock method. My current loading method is to unload the reactors into steel chests. The steel chests are all wired to a decider, which outputs a signal if the number of empty fuel cells in them is equal to the number of reactors. If it is, I know the reactors are empty. A second decider is wired to all of the steam tanks, and outputs a signal if the steam is below some predetermined value. Those signals are ANDed together with a combinator. If the combinator outputs its signal, I execute the reload. That means activating the inserters to insert fresh cells, and activating the inserters to remove the spent cells out of the steel chests. The output of the steel chest decider can also be used to active pumps if necessary. If that signal is true, I know I am running off of stored steam. I suppose the potential problem with my method is the small delay in loading fuel cells. The arms have to move the spent cells to the chests, and while that is happening the reactors will always be empty. If you are below capacity that won't be a problem at all, but I suppose that at full capacity that split second could make a difference. I didn't notice any power spikes in the graph during creator mode testing though. I see the clock as potentially replacing the steel chest logic, or at least smoothing it out. If I could make the decision to reload a second or so before the old cells run out, it should in theory be a more resilient design. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 15:43
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I wish you could just toggle the day/night cycle.
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Feb 12, 2018 16:08
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You can, but like all console commands it counts as a cheat and disables achievements.pre:/c game.player.surface.always_day=true
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Feb 12, 2018 16:14
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Collateral Damage posted:Just search for the name in the "Install Mods" screen in-game Thank you for this, I’m in the same boat as the original poster and this is a great summary
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Feb 12, 2018 16:15
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I found a nuclear blueprint that I've been using because it's good enough with 4 reactors and steam storage. The way it detects when to insert new fuel is pretty clever. The inserters that remove spent fuel from the reactors are wired to a storage tank, when the tank gets below a certain level they activate and pull the spent fuel out. One of those also sends a pulse signal to inserters that insert new fuel, so that when spent fuel is removed, the new fuel is inserted.
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Feb 12, 2018 18:12
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Definitely should function. From your description I don't think it will sync the reactors if they get loaded unevenly, unless there is additional logic involved. It also will have a small window where the reactors are always empty. The steel chest design I was using still has the window problem, but it doesn't have a sync problem. I was thinking of trying timer based approach that also syncs by resetting the timer when all n empty fuel cells have hit an output chest. It would be timed to load just before the old fuel cells are exhausted. I think it would need a resettable timer going into an SR latch. It shouldn't need to be primed with an initial set of fuel cells either, so long as the inserters and circuitry start with some sort of external power source.
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Feb 12, 2018 20:44
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I stopped giving a poo poo about nuclear fuel consumption once I realized that each reactor only consumes ~400 ore per hour. My 8 reactor glowing city block consumes ~3200 ore per hour. The nearby 1.5M patch should last me for at least 400 hours before I have to bother building another mine, although probably sooner due to building more reactors and/or "Behold, the bringer of light" This being Factorio, here's the math: 10 Fuel Cells = 1 U-235 + 19 U-238 1 U-235 = 3 U-238 (Kovarex) = 30 Uranium Ore 19 U-238 = 190 Uranium Ore 10 Fuel Cells = 220 Uranium Ore 1 Fuel Cell = 200 seconds of power for 1 Reactor 2000 (10 * 200) seconds of power = 220 Uranium Ore 0.55 hours of power = 220 Uranium Ore 1 hour of power = 396 Uranium Ore 1.5M Uranium Ore / 396 = 3787.88 hours of power So ~473 hours at 8 reactors. This is not counting the fact that you should be recycling those 10 spent fuel cells back into 6 U-238, making the entire process 27% cheaper, AND the regular ore processing will occasionally crap out a U-235, making that batch of 10 cells 9% cheaper.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:01
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You are 100% right of course. Keeping the reactor powered should be trivial. It is more about the fun of trying to come up with an optimal design. I've been using this plant design as a vehicle to learn more about circuit networks as well. I've played a lot, but only used them very minimally. Plus, more 235 means more throwing nukes around with reckless abandon, wasting 100x the fuel my reactors will ever use. Need to kill biters/trees/other players/myself somehow. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 21:12
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You don't even need to do Kovarex to fuel a reactor -- the default output of a centrifuge produces plenty of U235 for fuel rods for a reactor. Kovarex processing is strictly for weapons and train fuel.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:19
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Filthy Monkey posted:It is more about the fun of trying to come up with an optimal design. True, true. My circuit network fun has been turning on an American flag made out of ~300 lamps and playing the national anthem (converted from MIDI) every time a rocket launches 
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Feb 12, 2018 21:20
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That sounds pretty badass. Have a picture and/or video?
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Feb 12, 2018 21:23
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Filthy Monkey posted:Definitely should function. From your description I don't think it will sync the reactors if they get loaded unevenly, unless there is additional logic involved. It also will have a small window where the reactors are always empty. The steel chest design I was using still has the window problem, but it doesn't have a sync problem. I think you're worried too much about reactors being empty for what should be less than half a second out of 200 seconds. Reactors, heat pipes, and heat exchangers all store heat, plus you have steam storage. Unless you're above literally 99.5% of your reactor's capacity, you're not going to lose any power. Reactors themselves store a LOT of heat - so much that when playing on a server where reactors exploded if they hit 1000 degrees, we'd just plop extra reactors down without fuel to serve as heatsinks in emergencies.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:27
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Hey, GotLag, are you able to update FLAN for 0.16? I'm playing AngelBobs and I want to more easily balance which recipes I'm using based on what I'm currently running surplus, which means communicating across the entire factory. As a feature request, would it be too much trouble to add a channel variable to separate various wireless networks for different purposes without using multiplexing?
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Feb 12, 2018 21:43
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After having this game on my radar for years, I finally took the plunge. Jumped right into sandbox co-op with my gf. It's really cool, but I have some very basic questions. 1. How do I control which side of the conveyor belt my items go onto? 2. How do I destroy items I don't want anymore? 3. I see some posts talking about making conveyor belts smart about what types of goods go where. How do I do this? 4. When do I need to worry about turrets and walls?
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Feb 12, 2018 22:28
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Psawhn posted:Hey, GotLag, are you able to update FLAN for 0.16? I'm playing AngelBobs and I want to more easily balance which recipes I'm using based on what I'm currently running surplus, which means communicating across the entire factory. Performance was total rear end, which I assume is the reason why every other wireless mod has been abandoned as well. Edit: As for channels, the problem is how to implement that UI-wise. The signal selection was just a constant combinator's GUI. Roflex posted:Regarding limiting cell input, I've become a fan of just making a simple clock. A cell burns for 200 seconds, which is 12000 ticks. Set your inserters to insert when the clock signal > somewhere around 11980. Any lower and they tend to want to do two cycles, higher and they might not catch in time - there's a decent range that works. Then set it up so the clock resets whenever the steam > trigger value. This should be a little higher than usual, since it will have to count for 200 seconds before the clock fires off again, but one tank per 2 turbines (as in above setup) gives you enough room on both ends so you don't waste steam and don't run out of power. Wouldn't it just be easier to wire up the extraction inserter and set it read contents, and set the fuel inserter to put one in when the extractor is holding a spent cell? GotLag fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 22:37
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Megasabin posted:After having this game on my radar for years, I finally took the plunge. Jumped right into sandbox co-op with my gf. It's really cool, but I have some very basic questions. 1) inserters always place to the far side of a belt driving past them. Learn to manipulate this. 2) build a cheap wooden box, put stuff in box you don't want, shoot box with shotgun, grenades or normal gun (hold C while mousing over to force-fire) 3) if you're playing the latest experimental build you can click on SPLITTERS and bring up a UI for how you want them to act 4) When biters start attacking. Check your pollution cloud on the map screen, if biters nests are inside that cloud they'll use any pollution they absorb to point-buy bugs to attack your base. Edit: Thank you, I meant to write splitters, not inserters there \/\/\/ Alkydere fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 22:38
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Alkydere posted:3) if you're playing the latest experimental build you can click on inserters and bring up a UI for how you want them to act *Splitters
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Feb 12, 2018 22:41
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Megasabin posted:After having this game on my radar for years, I finally took the plunge. Jumped right into sandbox co-op with my gf. It's really cool, but I have some very basic questions. 1. Inserters insert onto the far side of the belt. For taking from a belt it doesnt matter, but the inserters prefer the near side. 2. Make a box, put everything in the box, then shoot it with guns. Most items are useful for other things, so unless it's personal items like guns and armor, keep it. 3. Don't worry about this starting out. Complicated solutions like this are usually just goon ocd rather than needed. It's done via early tech which'll allow you to produce green and red wires that attach to most things, but I'd suggest to not worry about it until you get the hang of the general mechanics. 4. Depends on the biter settings. Starting out I'd suggest going with default settings with peaceful mode on. This means biters spawn normally only never attack unless you attack first. Normally they attack when they can smell pollution and attack the source. You can see your pollution map in an overlay in the map scrren. efb
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Feb 12, 2018 22:42
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Filthy Monkey posted:Man, I am enjoying buffer chests and priority splitters. I like using them to recycle trashed materials back into the factory, rather than having them clog some storage chest. People are probably all already doing this, but I am proud of myself for figuring it out. I just remembered I read this a few days ago on mobile, wanted to say thanks for this. I wasn't quite sure how to utilize buffer chests, but this is a perfect example.
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Feb 12, 2018 22:47
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Megasabin posted:1. How do I control which side of the conveyor belt my items go onto? Along with the inserter logic other posters have said, you can also run belts into the side of other belts. Say you've got a belt going like this: code:code:
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Feb 12, 2018 23:17
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Collateral Damage posted:Just search for the name in the "Install Mods" screen in-game Thanks for this! I will take a look. Does anyone have any advice about AngelBob's? More specifically thoughts around whether the increased complexity is fun or tedious and if there are parts I should avoid? It seems like there are a lot of mod pieces and some are better than others but it is hard to find good info.
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Feb 13, 2018 06:09
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