With all the base materials on the bus, you should build assembly lines for all of the most commonly used items. You can start by making one line of assemblies with a belt of iron, gears, green circuits and copper running along the line. Now place the assemblies in a way that allows normal and long-handed inserters to grab items from all the available belts to produce all the basic building items like inserters themselves. Leave space in between the assemblies for chests to collect the items in.
The crafted items should each get a chest of their own. Use the red “X” in a chest to limit the amount of items that will be crafted.
Now to be clear: the point of an assembly line like this is not to have enough throughput of materials to craft everything at once. The first couple of assemblies will probably use up all the material on the belt. But once the allocated amount of stacks in each chest is reached, those assemblies will turn off and material will get to the next ones on the line. The idea is that while you’re gone building or fighting biters or whatever it is you do, your assembly lines will keep producing items to fill the chests. By the time you’re back in the base, you will be able to grab all the items from the chests that you desire. No more handcrafting or waiting for assemblies to produce the items you want!
This is why some people in the community like to call assembly lines like this “shopping mall”. Because if you run out of things it’s the number one place to re-stock on everything you need! *flashy neon signs*
If you still don’t want one belt of iron to provide materials for a really long assembly line, you can make several lines next to each other. I usually do a line for inserters, power poles and then miscellaneous items. You can share some of the belts with items that are less in demand.
Another note on getting gears on half of a belt. Most items need iron gears and you could produce them localy for each and every item like so:
But you can also put them on a beltline or even half a belt! You can start your assembly line with one or two machines turning iron plates into gears. If the incoming iron line is on the “near” side of the belt (i.e. the side of the belt closer to the assembly) you can grab this iron, turn it into gears and the output inserters will place the gears on the “far” end of the belt:
The miscellaneous line should include items like miners, assemblies, maybe lamps, repair packs, etc. Later on, as you advance through the tech tree you will be able to craft new items. You can just add these to the end of your assembly line. You might also need to introduce more belts of need items (like steel, red circuits, etc.), therefore you should leave enough room between the assembly lines.
These lines can get really long though, if you don't watch it. So you might want to split it off into two parallel lines. This one for example is a little on the long side:
It also really helps to know what tech you will get later on. It would be annoying to have assembly machines level one and two at the beginning of the line, only to research level three ones later and not having enough room to fit them into the line next to the other ones. Experienced players have an advantage, because they can plan ahead for these kind of things.
Now for some tricks you can use to grab from far away belts, by using some undergrounds and long-handed inserters! This will grab from all three lines of belt:
Long-handed inserters are slower and there are other inserters with better stack size. So you could also use some belt spaghetti to get a far away line closer to avoid using long-handed inserters:
The only items I don’t put on a simple assembly line are belts. Because belts (especially the higher level ones) need ridiculous amounts of gears you will need a large array of gear assemblies. There is a really neat layout that I’ve got from the wonderful YouTube channel of “Katherine of Sky” (She posts a lot of great videos about Factorio (and other games), both playthroughs as well as tutorials, and I can invariably recommend ALL of them).
The Belt array uses a lot of gear assemblies at the beginning and feeds a line of gears running through the middle of the assemblies. The layout works really well and I will include the blueprint for it after the cut.
With your Mall area set up, you will never have to handcraft anything ever again! So the next step is to get a proper science production running!
[Note: Because there were a lot of things to cover, this is post 3 of 3 regarding nuclear power. You can find the previous parts under my tag "guide:nuclear power".]
With your enrichment facilities up and running, you should eventually get enough excess U235 to produce fuel cells. But turning them into power is a little more complicated than just putting those in a power plant, I'm afraid!
First of all, let's take a look at the power plant itself. If you hover your cursor over it, you will see the little info window below your minimap. The important bits are "energy consumption", "temperature" and "neighbour bonus". I will get to the last one later.
Unlike what you might think, an energy consumption of 40 megawatts is actually how much power the plant can produce (it just means it will burn up 40 MW worth of fuel cells to do that).
Once fuelled with a cell, the plant will slowly rise in temperature, It can reach a maximum of 1000°C. This heat is what you actually use to produce power, just like in real life. To transport the heat you can use heatpipes. These pipes slowly cool down the further away from the power plant they are, this will become a problem later, I will get back to that.
Next you can connect your heat pipes to the heat exchanger. To function, the exchanger will need a temperature of roughly 500°C or more. Water piped to the heat exchanger will then be turned into steam. Now just hook a steam turbine up to the steam and you will start producing energy!
But before we do that, let's get the ratios right: A power plant will produce 40 MW, remember? Now if you take a look at the exchanger and the turbines, you will see that the exchanger can produce 10 MW, so one plant can power 4 heat exchangers.
Meanwhile one turbine can produce 5.8 MW of energy. So let's do some math (sorry): 40 / 5,8 = 6,8. Let's round up and build 7 turbines per power plant. Don't let the steam go right into the turbines, though! Because of the uneven ratios, let the steam run through some pipes first so they can spread evenly between the turbines. Put down some poles to cover your turbines like you do with the coal powered steam engines, connect them with your power network and you're producing power, baby!
Now let's get back to the power plant. The last point on the plant's info was "neighbour bonus". This is where things get interesting again! If you put two power plants next to each other, both of them will get e +100% productivity bonus! This means each plant now produces 80 MW of power! That's a total of 160 MW, meaning you need 16 heat exchangers and can power 27,5 turbines! So if you add another plant, don't just double your layout, you can quadruple it! Oh yeah!
At this point you're probably thinking "wait, so if I just keep adding more power plants..." and yup, that's exactly what we're doing! You can also add another row of power plants behind the first row, they will share their heat with each other, you don't need to connect heat pipes to each and every one. You can't effectively do another row though, because you need the space for some inserters and logistics chests to bring fuel cells to and take the used ones away from the plant.
The middle ones now have power plants on three sides, which means a bonus of +300% productivity, for a total of 160 MW per plant!
If you have a two rows of power plants, for each two more you add you will get a bonus of 320 MW (two new plants at +200% plus the two that used to be on the edge now get another +100% each).
The only thing holding you back at this point is water: one pump can only transport a limited amount of water. You will need about one pump for every 20 turbines you have.
And then you can just keep going and going:
R H P T
1 4 1 7
2 16 2 28
4 48 5 83
6 80 7 138
8 112 10 193
etc.
(Legend: R = "reactor" = power plant, H = heat exchanger, P = pump, T = turbines)
Stop your maniacal laughter! Because if you think you can just keep going like this, well, you're going to be in for an unpleasant surprise!
Remember how heat pipes cool down over distances? If you just keep adding more and more turbines at the end of the line, your pipes will fall below the magical 500°C line and you're going to run out of steam!
Ah, but don't worry, I've got your back. Heat pipes might cool down, but you know what doesn't? Steam!
Steam doesn't have a temperature, it acts similar to liquids in the game. Once you've made the steam, it won't turn back into water. So you need to redesign the layout for your turbines.
The layout shown above is good to get you started. But if you want to make sure your design is expandable, you need something like this:
This layout puts the exchangers as close as possible to the power plant itself to make sure you don't waste any heat. Then you can simply pipe the steam away to power your turbines someplace else. I prefer to build long lines of heat exchangers and then turbines. That way, if you build another plant, you can simply add another row or two of exchangers and turbines when you need them.
(Or you could do the math and add the exact number of exchangers and turbines you need, but at this point you're probably waaaay into the late game and couldn't care less about one or two excess turbines. I know I don't.)
Like I mentioned earlier, the exchangers use up a lot of water. Each row is designed to be supplied by one pump (1 pump to 12 heat exchangers to 20 turbines). So if you want several rows of turbines, you're going to need lots of water. So before you even start building your power plants, you should make sure to pick a spot with readily available water nearby!
I can also advise you to put the water supply at the end of your rows, because otherwise you will have lots of pipes on the power plant-end of your rows and as we've learned distance is not your friend when using nuclear power!
If you follow these tips you will avoid all the trial and error I had to go through to figure out a proper layout for nuclear power production. It might seem a little complicated at first, but once the turbines are up and running you're going to produce a ton of power!
I hope find this guide helpful to get into nuclear power production. It's really worth the effort!
Now you probably want some blueprints, hmm? Oh, okay. There's a string for a blueprint book with the "beginner's" layout as well as some of the "expandable" layouts, after the cut:
Blue String by Tess Thompson is a fast and fun read. Ble String did not live up to the awesomeness of Blue Midnight but it was still good. Can a fling be fanned into a loving relationship? Can you trust someone that you don't really know well? Who is murdering people in this small town and why? Just some of the questions and mysteries in Blue String. Entertaining and I would recommend it.
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