I mentioned I wanted to boost output by 10x. Well, let’s just say that math puts that in a different context.

My original layout had 10 nuclear plants burning 100% of the time with uranium rods, and I was able to “sink” the waste through plutonium rods. Each plant runs at 2500W, but depending on the fuel may burn for more on a single rod. Uranium is 0.2 per minute, Plutonium is 0.1 per minute, and Ficsite is 1 per minute. The last one is essentially a sink for plutonium waste. An expensive sink mind you.

I was doing the maths on this and frankly, the material requirements were making my eyes bleed. Math is simple, you want 10x the power, well, you need 10x the Nuclear Plants. The ratio is 4:2:1 for Uranium:Plutonium:Ficsite in terms of rod burning. 100 plants = 60:30:15. The most basic element needed here is Uranium, and I would need 1200 per minute. The entire map has 2100 per minute available. So yeah, let’s scale back a bit to half that. 600/minute means a single node, and a 2 car train.

Uranium

Since I already had the production chain to get 10 uranium plants working, it should be a simple matter of tripling everything I have, right? Tripling production isn’t hard, you just add more buildings. I needed to shift some stuff around and truly make a bus-type structure, but it worked out. 5 Blenders turned into 15. The one “hard part” was getting enough Concrete. My prior choice to ship limestone was not going to work, so I built a dedicated Wet Concrete (Limestone+Water) plant to pump out 800/minute. A few other miners had to be boosted to 250%, and all my belts upgraded to at least Mk5.

Plutonium

Plutonium Rods are also a simple matter of triple production, and shifting a few buildings around. The challenge here is that the entire portion of the plant is radioactive, and moving things may mean holding onto radioactive material (and bugging out, requiring a relog). Still, it’s a relatively simple matter to grow the plant. I did need to add 15 Nuclear Plants, and use a Smart Splitter to ensure the rods were sunk until I was ready to turn the whole thing on.

By this point I had 45 Nuclear Plants, which was a huge investment in terms of complex materials (450 Supercomputers + 1125 Heavy Modular Frames). Again, Dimensional Depots to the rescue!

Ficsite

Right, this part is fairly insane in terms of requirements. Simply put, you cannot do Space Parts and Fiscite Rods at the same time. The material requirements are just too high. You need 15 Singularity Cells per minute, which is 1.5 Nuclear Pasta per minute + a ton of other things. It seems simple, but recall that up until Tier 9, your entire planet factory is likely only producing 1 pasta per minute. So fine, I needed to upgrade a few things to produce cells at 20/minute to account for transport time. And transport was… drones because I needed such a small amount.

Drones need fuel. The “simplest” fuel for drones are batteries, which I had yet to construct. This meant creating a battery plant on the east side of the map (near Bauxite, Copper and Coal), with plastic shipped in. That plant took nearly an entire session to complete, but looks impressive. Drones themselves are a bit finicky in structure – you build a dock and connect it to another one. So each “factory” needs a battery dock, and then needs a separate dock for each material transported. My battery plant had 1 dock that fed the map. My main factory + nuclear factory each had 2, one for batteries, one for cells. Problem solved!

Next up, SAM ore. 1400 raw ore, or 350 reanimated ore is not a simple matter as the nodes are spread out across the map. I thought about trains to ship stuff around, and plain out decided to go old school and belt my way to success. It’s a 4:1 ratio for ore, so a factory on each node to convert was simple enough and Mk5 belts are practically free at this point (Aluminum Ingot plan for the win!).

With the raw materials all sorted out, it’s a relatively simple matter to chain out the next steps.

• Reanimated SAM + Aluminum Ingots = Fiscite Ingots = Ficsite Trigons
• Singularity Cells + Plutonium Waste + Dark Matter = Fisconium
• Photonic Matter + Electro Rods + Trigons + Ficsonium = Ficsonium Rods

Pump those into 7.5 Nuclear Plants and Bob’s your uncle!

Final result = 52.5 plants running at 2500MW – 131GW of power! Plus a massive power boost from the Alien Power Augmenters. I feel like He-Man.

Rocket Fuel

One thing I should have mentioned. Rocket Fuel (with alternate recipes) requires 1 Refiner (Heavy Oil Residue), 1 Blender (Diluted Fuel) and another Blender (Nitro Rocket Fuel). Base materials are Crude Oil, Water, Nitrogen Gas, Coal, and Sulfur. 6 of those setups (a Mk2 Pipe with 600 water) = 900 Rocket Fuel, over 216 Fuel Generators. Apply 250% boost (burns 2.5x faster) and you need 86.5 Generators, quite achievable. Grand total = 54GW. I expect this to be nerfed as it’s way too powerful. It’s also miles better and simpler to build than a battery plant.

Lessons Learned

• Dimensional Depots are the only way to make this work. I would have quit 10 times over knowing the trek to base was entirely due to piss-poor inventory sizing. I cannot understate how important it is to have this maxed, and setup (with triple boxes on Iron Plates + Concrete).
• Use storage buffers in all your production lines, at every step. It takes next to no space, and allows you time to tinker without breaking the entire production chain.
• Create a blueprint for Smelters, Constructors, Assemblers, Manufacturers, Refineries and Blenders that has all the inputs and outputs configured with splitters/mergers and Mk5 belts+ Mk2 pipes. Inputs go one direction, outputs another. For items with multiple inputs, you can stack splitters and use vertical belts to feed the machine. e.g. Manufacturers have 4 inputs. First is 1 high, second is 2 high and so on. Saves tons and tons of space.
• Belts should be under the floor at all times for the power plant factory. You do not want to run belts on the same level as your machines. 2 small concrete pillars are ample height between floors.
• I prefer to apply color to pipes (and floor holes) to let me know what’s in them. Water (blue), Nitrogen (grey), Sulfur (yellow), Excited Matter (white), Dark Matter (purple). Helps a LOT when under the floor.
• Floor plans should have 4 sections. Material inputs (including trains + drones). Regular material construction. Radioactive material construction (hazmat suit + masks). And finally, the actual Nuclear Power Plants. Keep them separated, and allow space for growth.
• Take breaks. Good golly take breaks.