As such, factorio steam engine performance previous steam engine designs are no longer applicable. Each row's engine count is maximized to utilize the full throughput of a fast belt. To overcome the water pressure issues required to make such long rows work, I had to introduce several new designs never needed before - carrying water beyond the initial boilers with underground pipes, and compacting pipes as close as possible to the boilers, with help of offshore pumps on landfilled ground. The underground pipes carrying water are essential for this design to work, since as row length is so long, one must distribute water pressure beyond just the initial boilers. The compacted pipes provide two benefits - it greatly shortens the distance the underground pipes need to carry water to, from the expected 30th boiler or so to just the 15th. As the shore between the engines and water is 3 tiles wide, up to 3 express belts may be used. This is equivalent to 4. I have also kept the high emphasis on resource efficiency and low tech requirements with fast belt tech being the highest needed present in previous designs and discussions, so power pole usage continues to be only a minimal number of small poles. However, depending on your situation, you may find that having a slight, temporary burst of power from having more engines may be more favorable by default, such as when shore length is severely limited and you must prioritize maximizing burst over sustainable power production. As such, any 1:2 steam engine setup, including this one, will eventually run out of steam. For the sake of keeping this design future-proof though, I have decided to keep it at 118 engines, for when the bug eventually gets fixed. The bug report for this issue may be found. Suggestions on further improvement are always welcome. Continued thanks to: -for originally convincing me of the importance of having low resource costs and tech requirements in a design, and increasing stackability. Previous versions may be found below, for your reference: Version 1. Compatible up to: Factorio 0. Originally, I rearranged them into groups of 3 rows to reduce medium poles and pipes needed. Since then, the setup has underwent several major upgrades, and is now arranged in double rows of 15 steam engines per row. Picture below: Shown above is what 6 rows of steam engines looks like. Each engine row consists of 21 boilers and 15 steam engines instead of the traditional 14 and 10, by using three offshore pumps for every 2 rows, instead of two, which uses all available shore perimeter instead of having a tile between each offshore pump. This optimization was made viable with the addition of land fillers in 0. Based on Aru's calculations, normal belts can supply coal up to 105 steam engines running on full load, so if you want to use more than 7 rows of engines, you must upgrade the normal belts to fast or express, depending on your needs. All inserters, with exception of 5 burner inserters every 2 rows, have been replaced by basic inserters. The burner inserters allow the setup to automatically resume from power outage usually from running out of coal without any need to manually power them back up, since burner inserters can feed themselves coal. Aru's quadratic equation that determines the minimum number of burner inserters required to resume steam engine production without extra delay may be found on page 5 factorio steam engine performance this thread. For those who used my old coal detector and water battery setup during Factorio v0. With the features that came in 0. Also, offshore pumps can now be linked to circuitry, eliminating the need to use small pumps as controllable valves, and since water batteries are now replaced by coal chest batteries, there is no need for controllable water valves anymore in such a design. Suggestions on further improvement are always welcome. Special thanks to: -for the idea of using small pumps as controllable valves, essential for water batteries to work -for explanation of small pump mechanics, pointing out the need for 2 small pumps per engine row instead of 1 -for the improved belt feeding system, lowering required tech, reducing resource costs, and increasing stackability -for the solution to speeding up response time on the coal detector. Not sure what you mean by the 15 engine thing though. The small pumps shut off when there's no coal left, blocking the cold water from the offshore pumps from entering, and then the hot water tanks take over completely. When it does, no pump is being used at all. I think the 3 small pumps can only power 15 steam engines at 100% capacity factorio steam engine performance ~50%because a small pump has only half the water throughput of an offshore pump. The maximum possible pipe throughput can be found here:. So you might have to add a second small pump to each line of steam engines. See example below: Ah, I see what you mean. You meant each small pump would only supply about half of each row, which is 5, and 15 is 3 half rows of 5 each. Funny that using multiple small pumps didn't occur to me when I actually read that same thread you linked just a day ago heh. But yeah, thanks for spotting the mistake. Also, just 2 hours ago, I spotted yet another way to compact the steam engine setup even factorio steam engine performance than I already did, from 57 tiles long to 55. Update incoming xD Edit: From tests, not even 4 small pumps can supply enough water to 10 steam engines outputting at max rate for some reason. Don't know why and haven't really looked either, but the expanded variant is unfinished again until a solution is found. I totally overlooked that having 2 radars and 6 pumps instead of 1 and 3 increases the consumption from 390 to 780. No wonder adding more pumps increased boiler usage by 2-3 each, because adding more pumps redistributed more power to them from the radars, not increased water throughput. And now I have a good idea on how to fix this. Having 100% production probably isn't the solution, as 2 boilers would seriously factorio steam engine performance down the response time, and 3 boilers and 2 steam engines would make the detector larger than it ever should be. Pretty sure using an accumulator powering the radar to control power priority is the best way to do this. Thanks for helping again - added you to credits. Update: Yep, accumulators are the way to go. And so I found, a side effect of using storage tanks as batteries is that it takes forever for power output to completely stop thanks to water tanks draining slower and slower as it depletes, which makes fast inserters on the main belt viable. Yeah, it's definitely necessary for priority control, and it doesn't actually store any energy. When working, it is actually always empty. The radar always uses all power from the accumulator, but with lower priority than the small pumps. Normally without the accumulator setup, the coal supply in the detector's boiler takes much longer to run out since it's only powering like 6 small pumps and even longer as they start to slow down as wellbut with the additional setup, it both consumes coal faster to improve response time greatly as well as do so with low priority, so if there isn't enough power to go around for both the small pumps and radar, small pumps always get the power first. As said though, the low alert build is quite optional. Link to the thumbnail and original version at and. In it, the bottom small pole is disconnected from all except accumulator and radar, and the top small pole is connected to the 2 medium poles 1 tile right and several tiles above it. The other 4 medium poles are connected to the main power grid. Thanks for the shots of the polls As for the leaving in of the other layout, I've left that there factorio steam engine performance people can choose which layout they would like to use. I figured if you give a variety of builds that have the same general purpose it would give a bit more appeal to the thread. It's like a variety of foods, you can eat the same thing every day, or you can get a variety of different foods which sounds more appealing, something along those lines No, you missed my point. Then you added how there's 2 builds so people can choose what they like, between the 2 builds instead of after them. Just illogical order Read above quote of mine, the wording was meant for the first version of the description, not the corrected one. It is technically the same build, just yours is more space and resource efficient One thing I would like to try and do is get a variety of builds that do the same thing, that way people can play around and find which layout they would like to use. Cause one thing I noticed is there are more than one layout for just about everyone of them, especially furnace layouts. This is my compact one, low tech only small power poles, yellow belts and splittersonly two pipe gaps in each row of engines, and I think a single yellow belt should be able to support 10 rows 100 enginesso no need to use red belts. There is no need for space between rows, it tiles upward as far as you want, and I guess you could go up to something like 31 adjacent rows with blue belt 310 engines. Also, the poles at the top can factorio steam engine performance be moved down to reduce vertical size by one. Right now they're positioned for an additional row. It can be repeated upward, or downward if you shift the bottom poles down. I also made the poles as sparse as I could, yet still patterned. Image is native resolution if you open it 2325 x 595. I couldn't figure out how to get this on imgur but Skellitor301 did. Here's what it looks like with pumps added for totally outdated don't do thiswhere pumps can be powered by both main grid and by the isolated backup part; it's 3 tiles longer 4 if you count engines sticking out, but it also loses the poles on the right :.
