You are Wasting Uranium in Factorio

#shorts #factorio #tutorial #guide

[@carterthaxton]

Ok I’m going to get a little pedantic here. The input inserters have the stack size overridden to only move one item at a time. Excellent, that’s very important for this design. However, the output inserters did not have this setting. That’s fine. If there is ever more than one empty fuel cell, it’ll just move several at once. The problem is this: the input inserter had “= 1” as its enabled condition. That should be changed to “> 0” or “>= 1” to handle this rare corner case. This can realistically happen in various circumstances, including if you manually load fuel into the reactor, run low on fuel, output belts are full, etc.

[@jonathansimmons4475]

You sir have saved someone from having a really unfortunate time.

[@ArachnidAbby]

Alternatively make your factory biggers to make sure you effectively using the reactor to its full capacity. The factory must grow

[@bones7868]

the factory must grow

[@teaser6089]

The Factory Must Grow

[@Jules-i5h]

The factory must G L O W

[@dr.cheeze5382]

​@@Jules-i5h You know it's good for you, because of the natural green glow!

[@lukefreeman828]

Yup. This seems like a waste of 40 tanks to me lol

[@sinborn41214]

if im wasting uranium, then youre wasting beacons

[@NaiyaTheTiger]

Now if only Uranium was rare enough to warrant being efficient with it, and not so abundant that I find myself actively trying to burn through as much as possible, to clear out the ugly ore patches

Try playing Krastorio, possibly with Space Exploration.

[@dungewar]

Ugly? The delicious green rocks are very good for aesthetics!

[@Goodvvine]

Ugly ores? Your base is ugly

[@Patrick-zr8tv]

If only there were a way to turn down the occurrence and richness of certain ore types in the game.

[@Ghorda9]

just build on top of the ore patches.

[@JETZcorp]

So there's two ways to look at this. American engineering vs German engineering. American engineering says that uranium is abundant, while your time and the iron and space used in setting up the storage tanks are more scarce. Therefore the optimum compromise is to run a simpler, cheaper, less efficient setup. German engineering says that consumption waste is not acceptable. Absolutely any length and any expense in effort and complication must be pursued in order to achieve optimum operational efficiency. If you must build a 40km tall obelisk made if pure elemental gold in order to achieve a 1.3% reduction in coal konsumption, you must do it. I think it's safe to say most Factorio players take the German mindset. Most of us are a bit autistic and find beauty in impractical yet perfect working teschnologie.

[@ripecontext]

Couldn’t have said it better myself

[@alexanderjanke1538]

Technologie* Sorry, you are right about german perfection, i am the same opinion haha

[@thepastarat]

@@alexanderjanke1538 Technology* lmao

[@alexanderjanke1538]

@@thepastarat He tried to write the german spelling of the word technology, as his last word, and that is like i wrote it: Technologie lmao

[@Dyllon2012]

True, I was working on a new design this week and threw away one draft because it was only capable of a sustained 450MW instead of 480MW due to steam balance issues (you really want to make sure you never transport more than 1200 fluid per pipe).

[@ripecontext]

When I say "uses power" and "consumes power" in reference to the reactor, I mean fuel... I don't know how that slipped through the entire time I was making this...

[@kierano8390]

btw it takes a single fuel cell to heat up each reactor (which produces zero electricity), therefore this process actually wastes more uranium. it will only be more efficient if you're using less than half of the capacity of the reactors. and if you're reactors do produce more than twice your consuming, just remove the inserter to some of the reactors. I.e, once you turn on a reactor, to be most efficient, you should use all the electricity it produces, and never turn it off.

[@MrJoejoejoebob]

I'm pretty sure reactors just cool down to the lowest heat that the exchangers can take from, so as long as you prime each reactor first they won't need to be heated back up to produce again. This may be a modded thing though, I am not certain.

[@Dylailahma]

Honestly, just waste the power. You have plenty of uranium 235 and 238, even without kovarex. That stuff is need for like 2 or 3 recipes besides fuel cells and half of them are military stuff.

[@ripecontext]

This is very useful for mods like krastorio 2 where nuclear power actually requires a lot more resources to maintain. Vanilla I agree I could take it or leave it. I mostly needed it for my warptorio series I’m currently making because of the limited amount of uranium I can have access to.

[@TheBloofyx]

I'm wasting my life on factorio 😭

[@TheAechBomb]

time spent having fun isn't wasted :3

[@tesseractcubed]

Being pedantic, more fuel is probably wasted by using a 2x2 reactor instead of a 2x6 or a 2x8, due to neighbor bonus and free heat. :/ But to each their own, given the factory must grow.

[@ripecontext]

Lots of people heckling the video, but this is definitely the best point so far. You’re right.

[@wilshireanasurimbor3068]

​@@ripecontext Heckling is good! At least it is for you. The more engagement, the more the algorithm pushes your video, the more views it gets. Its the kind of positive feedback loop that has made the internet what it is - a bunch of thirsty trolls paying the people they hate to make content they disagree with. Not saying this was your intent at all, moreso that if you want to be a content creator you'll probably want to learn to love the all the hate. The more they hate, the more you make. $$$

[@ripecontext]

I’m not particularly worried about engagement on shorts, they make basically no money and translate very little into people watching my videos which are the real cash cows. I just sort of make them because it’s fun and something to do. Constructive criticism i like, but there’s not very much of it. Just lots of people saying that they personally don’t have a use for it, but there are uses for it in say Krastorio 2, or Warptorio 2 or even space exploration where sending fuel costs more resources than just the fuel itself.

[@wilshireanasurimbor3068]

​@@ripecontext Yeah literally Warptorio2 was the reason I looked up how to do this this past weekend :D . There's not much constructive criticism to give on this. Hooking the wire to the output inserter, and reading hand content, are two things most people have never thought to do. Its a useful tool for other applications as well.

[@Dyllon2012]

Increasing much past 2x2 gets to be a nightmare with routing water and steam. Each reactor needs its own water pipe AND its own steam output(s) that you need to route to a ridiculous number of turbines. Another thing is that even if you’re ok with all those pipes, you’re almost certainly going to need electric pumps as well unless you run even more pipes to account for losses due to length. Those pumps really suck for reactors because they make recovering from a blackout/brownout much more difficult. You need to do tricks like having a secondary solar network to power all those pumps.

[@klauzwayne4215]

That only works with a fully saturated fuel belt though. If there isn't a fuel cell ready to be grabbed when the output inserter acts, the reactor will miss out on future fuel and needs to be reset manually.

[@ripecontext]

You could probably use a splitter to make sure there’s also a few in front of the inserted without hogging all of the fuel

[@Queue3612]

​@@ripecontext my solution to this was to put a chest In front of the input inserter limited to one slot and have the fuel belt go under it with a filter inserter so as to only insert fuel cells and miss spent fuel. This also means I have a buffer of 50 cells per reactor incase something happens to my fuel production without me noticing. If I was wanting to keep less cells I could just circuit condition the inserter to only insert if there is less than say 10 fuel cells in the chest so there is a buffer of 10 instead of 50. This method also keeps to a 2 tile gap (inserter then belt) between the reactors and where the heat pipes and converters go. Using a splitter would extend the distance from reactor to converter by a tile.

[@TheAechBomb]

I use requester chests set to 4 cells each for each reactor, that way is always has some ready to grab

[@dallasmailer-kelly1954]

I've found that the iron wasted in unused fuel cells is such a small loss that it would take hundreds if not thousands of hours to make up what you spend on tanks and combinators and uranium is so easy to get once you set up processing it's not really a big deal to waste a little

[@ripecontext]

Every minute not spent setting up new uranium mines is a win for me, especially since this takes about 5 extra minutes when building the reactor when working it this way, and can more than double the lifespan of your uranium patch depending on how much power you’re using. A uranium patch might last 100 hours, but with this that becomes 200.

[@Queue3612]

Wow that is a way simpler method of timing the insertion. I had a system to time 200 seconds and check if steam is below a certain amount using combinators. Waiting for the reactor to dispense a used fuel cell is and only removing that cell when there is too low steam is a WAY simpler and better solution. I'm going to try this later. Big thanks

[@jgrif7891]

Came to this circuit setup during my last playthrough. It's a bit of a pain to start up since you need all the inserters to stay in sync for the best results, but, once it's up and going, you shouldn't have to touch it.

[@deelkar]

I know, I don't care, Kovarex is efficient enough, Steam Tank is UPS drain.

[@AbsoluteHuman]

Doesn't it cost like one pipe segment?

[@lorrdy7640]

​@@AbsoluteHumanyes

[@TheAechBomb]

steam tanks haven't been a UPS drain since like 0.17, I went back and checked the patch notes when I was trying to decide whether or not to implement it

[@maelglorious]

The irony is that that wasted uranium over the time span of a few hours = 1-2 nukes (which due to misclicks, may have lead to more global warming on Nauvis on occasions)

[@explodinggreen]

Fun fact, nuked ground which is then paved with concrete absorbs more pollution than paved ground

[@TheAechBomb]

​@@explodinggreendoesn't the concrete set the absorbtion to 0 regardlessof whether it's nuked or not?

[@tyrantonion6660]

What I love to do is transform the overabundant energy into 5000 °C steam and dilute it later so much that your turbines can handle it.

[@tedg1278]

I remember trying such a simple system and having it break on a number of edge cases as the power consumption neared maximum capacity. I use a timer based system and have not been able make it break. I even use it with a sectional design allowing to build multi GW setups with each section having their own control circuit while the steam is in a single manifold.

[@ripecontext]

The beauty of a system like this is that once you’ve reached the level of power consumption that it has hiccups, you don’t need it any more because your uranium savings are tiny at that point.

[@tedg1278]

@@ripecontext I keep using it well into megabase levels because I turn down the uranium during map generation which makes more spaces for other useful things.

[@mitino680]

Could you do this with accumulators? If the accumulator is at 100% no more fuel gets added and if the charge dropped under 20% the inserters activate. Would this be feasible?

[@TheAechBomb]

not really, the time it takes the reactors to get to full power is much longer than the time it'd take for the accumulators to drain, unless you have entire fields of them

[@90hijacked]

or you could burn coal / fuel cells only when your capacitors drop below a certain level, relying on on nuclear to provide a baseline. what about solar? Scale capacitors to to last the night w/ nuclear alone, scale solar to top up during the day

[@programmer437]

Uranium just isn’t rare enough to warrant complexity. 4 reactors can produce almost 1 GW of power and can be sustained by only a few mining drills.

[@davidemarino4139]

How do I acces to that testing zone?

[@ripecontext]

I believe I used the Editor Extensions mod. You then just open map editor and the testing zone will be one of the available scenarios

[@spartainwarrior6445]

Can this break?

[@loxynova]

I made a system with combinators to do the same thing, Took me 2h to design ^^ 2h lost then...

[@ripecontext]

I spitballed this design initially in my rampant series on this channel, and I also tried to use combinators the first time. I had this whole system with a clock which inserted fuel every 200 seconds for as long as steam level was low, and cleared when it got high enough and all that, but then I realised that this way did the exact same thing with 0 combinators instead of like 12.

[@TheAechBomb]

​@@ripecontextI still use combinators to adjust the system's behaviour (setting high and low limits for the steam tanks)

[@wheelchair-p8p]

i can barely make a research line and i find this while brousing youtube, is youtube saying that im stupid?

[@ripecontext]

It’s KZbin showing you where you will be one day

[@clatcher1483]

Thanks for the tip

[@Goodvvine]

The like/dislike buttons cover the numbers :(

[@brycedonfrancisco2926]

Copy Import Paste

[@zombathinlostleghackercat5233]

Never played this game, don't know what I'm looking at.

[@wilshireanasurimbor3068]

A technically correct solution with no problem to apply it to. TBH, stuff like this turns people off factorio - its a game, let people have fun. I tire of people acting like you have to be a robot to play it correctly.

[@ripecontext]

Playing like a robot is a way to play in its own right, it can be incredibly satisfying for some people to play as optimal as possible. If they don’t want to, they can just ignore this, but it’s there for people who do.

[@danielmarsh1302]

But factorio is the very definition of solutions in search of problems. People send hours making perfectly balanced builds, why is it robotic to make a perfect fly balanced reactor?

[@dick_puncher]

just use solar panels

[@Chris-P.-Bacon-III]

honestly uranium is so ridiculously abundant that spending the time setting this up is like splitting hairs. it's good on the theoretical side to achieve the pinnacle of efficiency, but practically... it's just not something you'll ever have as a bottleneck. and if it *is* your bottleneck... you've got much larger problems to worry about. like for example, i've got 6 reactors in an awful layout running 4 sets of 40 boilers at reduced efficiency, and i've still got two steel chests worth of fuel cells just waiting to be sent over... and the uranium patch is still nowhere near drying out. to top it off, there's several patches still on the map. i could probably leave the game running for 1000s of hours with those patches hooked up and be perfectly fine, not even considering base expansion from running out of iron. there will always be more uranium, and your time is honestly better spent on pushing efficiency in factory production than it is on fuel cell consumption. wasting even 50% of a resource that lasts... nearly forever? not much of a waste. also storing steam without doing something like this is a waste of iron. if you can't use it fast enough to keep the tanks dry, you'll never be able to actually make use of the tanks.

[@Dyllon2012]

Yep, if you end up doing Koravex and recycling, you get about 55% conversion of processed uranium to fuel cells (so about 5% of ore). That means you can run a 2x2 on a 1M ore patch for 416 hours. It’s about 4-5x worse without Koravex, but still a ridiculous amount of time.

[@haveyouseenkyle2853]

When you destroy half a planet for .004 percent efficiency lol

[@permanent8387]

not enough? produce enough!

[@bosstradamus7896]

😂 ❤

[@JTCF]

Doesn't the fuel cell stop being consumed when the reactor can't output any more heat? That happens at 1000C, and it's similar to how furnaces won't consume the rest of the fuel item when not actively working (opposite from how furnaces in Minecraft work, for example). I've been using circuits that regulate the fuel cell input but I'm also a mod dev and the reactor is just a furnace burning uranium cells from that point of view. Maybe there's something else to the reactor other than the neighbor bonus, I'm not sure. Maybe it keeps consuming energy from the "burner" even after filling up the thermal buffer.

[@ripecontext]

Vanilla reactors burn fuel when it is there, regardless of the amount of heat or any other factors.

[@compi3882]

I've actually designed one of these circuits myself. Obviously at a larger scale it's fairly pointless to squeeze out that little bit more fuel, but at a smaller scale, you can make a powerplant which would last 10h last 100h. Which can matter if you're playing Space Exploration for example.

[@lordkaos31]

I mean personally i dont really care about being ultra effecient with my energy system i just want to make enough energy that i can forget it exists for the next 13 hours which is why j love solar since any time i need more energy i can just slap down 50 extra blueprints and call it good.

[@legomonster33]

you dont need 40 tanks because that doesnt take into account the steam storage of the turbines and heat exchangers, or the heat storage of the heat exchangers, reactors, and heat pipes

[@lordhuntington5704]

I know I'm wasting Uranium. I don't really mind tho, I have more than enough after setting up coverax.

[@M_1024]

I just built a nuclear reacto on my save and I realized that it is wasting fuel most of the time so I was wondering how to fix that. Perfect timing!

[@oneonlykiha]

meanwhile here i am with my 20 kovarex enrichment process centrifuges and five steel chests full of uranium fuel cells (its not enough fuel, im making more chests)

[@danielmarsh1302]

I’m gonna jump in here and say I am one who likes to save the fuel. I do this the inventory sensor mod, the input inserter swings when the fuel in the reactor is 0 and some other condition(s) are met

[@GhostStyle007]

The factorio mindset is the other way around, you should adjust your production to fit your power and/or you raw materials, not the other way around

[@colbancassian127]

Not worth the hassle. Uranium fuel is dirt cheap. I'd rather use my autism to perfect circuit conditions on my outposts or defenses.

[@florianwartelle4988]

Whelp, this is gonna be outdated as per FFF 428 :)

[@bobslackey1456]

This assumes that I’ve made it to nuclear power ever.

[@alansnapp2410]

You are wasting the literally infinite resource!

[@tschichpich]

I can see scenarios where this is worse because of the cooling and heating again where you don't have full efficiency. But in general that's a good idea

[@Alex-to5vx]

blasphemy

[@duhastmichgefragt1686]

inpua inseaeaea

[@michaelmcclain6899]

Kovarex goes brrrrrrt Seriously, once you get one kovarex processor running, you have more uranium than you can use sanely. Sanely. I don't clear out forests with nukes or anything like that

[@jackfire3439]

This is never worth it

[@TheAechBomb]

it makes my engineer happy, that's always worth it

[@jackfire3439]

@@TheAechBomb not really using 300 laggy steam tanks to save on a item that is easy to make is just dumb

[@TheAechBomb]

@@jackfire3439 16 tanks for 4 reactors and 4 circuit conditions. if you're worried about fluid UPS, you're either playing on a potato or 800 hours into a save

[@jackfire3439]

@@TheAechBomb 16 huh never seem one done with thay little amount of tanks but first time i watched some one do it they had 800 for a 32 core he made the worst reactions i had ever seen i love making tractors in game

[@jackfire3439]

also his reactions could lag a world by them selfs he sucks he used 4000 pipes for no reason

[@theAmazingJunkman]

either theres something I don’t know or that beacon setup is really inefficient

[@ripecontext]

It’s awfully inefficient by design to use up a load of power so I can show the reactor under load.

[@theAmazingJunkman]

@@ripecontext Gotcha, that’s what I figured

[@Astrotamtv]

You can wire inserters??? Lol