The reactor will have several levels of production, the more active, the more energy it does and the more efficient it is. The nuclear reactor will process the nuclear fuel (Its processing isn't specified yet) and generate heat. The nuclear reactor is just a more powerful way to generate heat. The nuclear reactorĪll the previous changes are usable also with the regular coal boilers and provide more efficient and powerful way to use the heating power. The main advantage is, that heating 95☌ water back to steam requires much less energy compared to heating the 25☌ water you get from the lake. It accepts steam, and cools it down enough to make water out of it again, so it can be used in boilers. Cooling towerĬooling tower mainly looks good and adds the iconic feel of power plant, but it will also have the same purpose in factorio as in real life. This is where the next piece will be used. You can either send it to the regular steam engine to get rid of it, or if you want to be more efficient, you can send it back to the boilers.īut the boilers only accept water, not steam. The steam turbine will just cool the steam down.
The current (basic) steam engine uses the fluid it gets to generate electricity and consumes it. The players could do something like this:Īpart from being much more powerful version of the steam engine, the steam turbine will also work differently. This way, the basic setups will not change that much, as instead of this: In 0.15, it will have extra output for steam at fixed temperature: Steam engines only work on steam, not hot water.Water above 100 degrees is considered steam.To make the other changes reasonable, we had to go back and change how the basic boiler->steam engine power generation works. This is the list of changes and additions we are planning. The plan is to implement the nuclear power in a way, that it is almost always more efficient to make bigger and more complex setup compared to just copy pasting the "standard nuclear power blueprint" over and over. We created the basic specification of the nuclear power this week, so we can start working on it. We will cover them in more details in the next fff, but I expect that the 0.15 will provide a big performance boost. Each of them is usually not that big, but the overall gain starts to be noticeable. Rseding is doing a lot of small optimisations for 0.15. The reason of the performance improvement is, that once decorative isn't regular entity, it doesn't need to be iterated over when doing area based entity search (typically for collision checks) and also the memory fragmentation is not that bad. Not only the save file has been reduced (46Mb to 25 Mb on my map), but the memory footprint and overall performance is better. The decoratives optimisations that were mentioned in the fff-157 are finished and working well. The plan is to have approximately 3 months to implement all the planned changes, so it could be expected around february 2017. There are many things we want to have finished for 0.15, so the estimate isn't precise.