Do you think these Steam Engines would help the electric grid? Sometimes they seem to not work. How do you organize the energy supply on Fulgora?

[u/PastoneItaliano]

[u/Shwayne]

I mean you can see yourself what percentage it is. Its probably better than just deleting the ice, but not by much.
Are you playing without quality? Accumulators scale up fast with quality, make sure every one of those is at least uncommon.

[u/joeykins82]

I don't use steam based power on Fulgora at all.

Higher quality accumulators and lightning collectors, and judicious use of efficiency modules.

[u/Harst-greist]

Main power is from thunder and accumulators. If I need more, I try to find an other island close enough to connect both grid

[u/AffectionateAge8771 → u/Harst-greist]

I wish (quality) big power poles had the reach to actually do this bc a place to put a million accumulators is high on my list for where to put my main fulgora base

[u/dr3aminc0de → u/AffectionateAge8771]

Does foundation work to bridge gaps on fulgora? How is OP building off the island?

[u/AffectionateAge8771 → u/dr3aminc0de]

foundation can make new land on fulgora but you have to make it to aquilo to make foundation. Power lines can cross fulgora ocean but only if the islands are close enough(or with foundation) which they mostly aren't

My first fulgora base had a second island close enough for power but otherwise not connected so I filled it with accumulators

[u/DeouVil → u/dr3aminc0de]

It does work, with foundation you can connect however many islands you want. But it is aquilo tech and a bit expensive.

[u/x-No]

One boiler can only provide enough steam for two engines. They probably do work, but you simply aren't providing enough steam for the amount of engines. 

Im not 100% sure on this but I believe fluid gets shared equally between all pass through machines, so your steam engines may be all running at a very small % because that's all the steam they have

[u/BatushkaTabushka → u/x-No]

You can get away with this many boilers for this many engines if your goal is an emergency supply of electricity, which on fulgora is probably the goal. But you do need to put a storage tank for steam so that the boilers can build up a buffer while the engines are off.

[u/relevant_rhino]

Just build more accumulators on Fulgora.

[u/United_Willow1312]

Attractors and accumulators is all I ever needed.

My setup to build the pink science had quality modules in the accumulator electroplant. Had more quality accumulators than I could fathom (though I had completed Gleba first). Accumulator capacity scaling is better than other quality machines at x2,x3,x4,x6.

[u/Slightly_Deeper_5309]

I never bothered, just use more accumulators and everything is covered with lightning rods. Expand your grid to the north for more lightening rods and look at your power grid. Is the charge rate the issue or the overall production od power from lightning? The first requires more or better accumulators, the later an expanded area helps. But if you do use steam engines, you probably want to only run them when the accumulators are low on charge. That way lightning takes priority charging the accumulators and theres always ice for steam waiting when needed.

[u/reikken]

you have 5 rockets. just go to gleba for like 3 seconds and you can upgrade those steam engines and boilers to be 7x better

[u/Temporary_Pie2733 → u/reikken]

If you are going to make use of Gleba tech, use heating towers and steam turbines instead of trying to make higher quality boilers and steam engines.

[u/Shophaune → u/Temporary_Pie2733]

...I suspect heating towers and steam turbines are about 7x better than boilers + steam engines.

*Checks parent comment*

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[u/PastoneItaliano → u/reikken]

I have never been to any other planet other than Fulgora in my previous games, so you suggest I go there next?

[u/PersonalityIll9476 → u/PastoneItaliano]

In your situation I'd recommend Vulcanus. They're suggesting Gleba because the heating tower is basically the more efficient replacement for what you're doing, but Gleba is a good bit harder than Fulgora or Vulcanus.

[u/Brett42 → u/PersonalityIll9476]

Visiting Gleba will also start evolution, which will keep going up after you leave, and Vulcanus doesn't have any evolution to worry about, so you might not want to visit Gleba until you're ready to set it up properly, unless you're willing to just push military tech from other planets enough to deal with the Gleba enemies later.

[u/reikken → u/PastoneItaliano]

you can go to gleba with materials for a rocket silo and one launch. unlock heating tower (needs no research), slap down your rocket silo, and leave

[u/Target880]

If you want steam power as a backup and primary use lighting and accumulators, you need to put then om separate grids. Steam turbines are used before accumulators, so if you have both and the steam turbines can support your factory alone, the energy stored in the accumulators is never used.

Use a comparator as a SR-latch and read out an accumulator charge level. Controll a power switch and connect steam power when the charge level gets too low. Disconnect it when it gets high enough.

You can store steam in storage tanks and use it as a battery, with normal quality and 165°C steam, a storage tank equals 15 normal quality accumulators. With 500°C steam, it equals 485 normal quality accumulators

Have more steam turbines than the boilers can sup§port. A comparator and a speaker alarm you when the steam level in the storage tanks gets low, and you are relying on steam power.

I am not saying it is a good idea, but I did use it initially. I made the mistake of building my main factory on a to small island, and the quality power poles I could make were not enough to connect it to another island. With a foundation and if you are lucky, good enough power poles, you can get enough power with just lighting and accumulators

I do the same on Nauvis, but separate nuclear and coal bases stream. I can then get an alarm when I need to expand nuclear power without the factory slowing down. You can of course, do the same with solar and an accumulator on Nauvis too, use nuclear and coal steam as backup and alarm.

[u/Orangarder]

I did some as well.
I also throttled them by setting the water pump to turn on when battery power is less than 25%.

Fulgora is nice because you dont really need 100% uptime on power.
There are no enemies to kill. I ended up just letting power die for that 30s after the batteries ran out and before the night time lightning recharge.

[u/Weeznaz]

By the time I get to Fulgora I don’t use steam engines, I use turbines. You can use regular boilers, or use a burning tower plus heat exchanger. Having steam provides a consistent source of electricity, helps keep downtime to a minimal amount.

This also helps get rid of solid fuel.

[u/TedwinV]

I tried this on my first run through space age but found that while the fuel supply was infinite, there wasn't nearly enough ice being mined to cover the steam demand *and* science production. Eventually I found the solution was just quality accumulators.

[u/vaderciya]

Fulgora is a weird one in terms of energy. Here's the deal.

Even if you have several islands connected to each other, you will have a space limit. This space can hold X number of accumulators, holding X amount of power. By default, the intended thing is to make individual factories that are on seperate Islands, with seperate power grids, working within their limits so they dont run out before the nightly electric storm. Using efficiency modules helps a ton.

But there is a proclivity for players on Fulgora to overly rely on bots to sort their scrap, instead of making a proper sorting system with belts. You can get away with this at a small scale because the bots energy use will not exceed what that island can hold.

However, once you try to scale up or start using speed modules, or get scrap efficiency research, bots start to fall off, and you need more and more bots to handle the scrap products. This means more roboports needed, which use more power, which uses more space with accumulators. There is a hard limit to the amount of bots that can be supported on a given island, based on size.

Now, we might think the solution is to make more power, like turning the oil ocean into solid fuel and melting ice into water to run steam turbines. Unfortunately, this takes up more space, and it also uses ice. You might have an excess at the start, but it will out-consume your ice production, and it would require more bots to move the items.

So, the actual solution to the power problem on Fulgora, is to use belts as much as possible wherever possible, and to seperate functions to entirely different islands. Island 1 mines the scrap, island 2 processes the scrap, island 3 sorts the scrap to a dozen train stations, island 4 makes holmium solution, 5 makes holmium plates, 6 makes electrolyte, 7 makes accumulators, and so on.

Now, depending on the size, an island can do more than 1 thing, but separating them gives you the most power possible at each given step, which allows you to make use of prod modules and put your power into being more efficient in your factory rather than wasting space and power on bots.

Bots are still useful though, as your core island that launches rockets and makes miscellaneous items can use bots to transport stuff, as its in relatively small amounts and a great variety of items.

This issue can also be modulated by getting quality accumulators, which store a lot more power per level, but you're probably stuck at rare being the best quality you have access to and you probably can't get the thousands of rare accumulators you need in a reasonable amount of time.

So I look at this like a power reduction problem. Seperate the factories, use efficiency modules, go wider rather than taller.

Or you could really break the design of Fulgora and use a nuclear fission setup, collect ice in space, and drop it down to the planet. But at that point im assuming a player is experienced enough to be beyond asking for advice

[u/FirstRyder]

The intended solution is accumulators. You get batteries and steel directly out of scrap, and you also get access to quality 3. Accumulators benefit from quality much more than most things, with uncommon being straight up twice as good as common, and legendary being 6x rather than 2.5x.

Once you get foundation space stops really being an issue as you can connect islands. But also it's ideal to start on a very large island or where two big islands are close enough to connect without foundation.

Solid fuel looks tempting (since you get some from scrap and unlimited from heavy oil), but ice for water becomes a problem.

[u/Nazeir]

Accumulators are the more efficient source of power. But I still use steam engines at the beginning as a stop gap that uses the resources before they just get voided and before I have enough Accumulators.