This is quick guide for you if you have a problem with power!
Power Tips
Note: Credit goes to XceptOne
Well, coal is the way to go early on, when playing a map with plenty coal resources, like Terra. It’s also not a longterm solution.
What coal actually is, is being easy to implement as your first automated power souce, while the map provides a large buffer of fuel, which will run out eventually. You are meant to expand to other power sources before you run out of fuel.
Never run coal generators without being automated with a smart battery. With a smart battery, you’ll only consume the fuel needed to meet your demands. WIthout it, a generator will just run until it’s out of fuel, even when batteries are full. This leads to a lot of wasted fuel and is often the number one reason new players run out of coal early on.
- Just connect a smart battery to all the generators via automation cable and don’t build a fuel consuming power plant before you’ve reasearched these components (and heavy watt wires + transformers)
What comes after coal:
You will find that things get easier, once you have a variety of different power sources available, that can all be tapped into at the same time.
The next two power sources can be used to augment your early coal generators. They’ll probably not be able to sustain your base on their own, but can either produce additional power or reduce your coal consumption, so it takes longer to go through it.
The first is looking for a natural gas vent. One vent can run a bit more than one generator continuously. So using two generators and a smart battery seems fine. Make sure the gas generators start up before the coal generators do. This way the coal generators only act as a backup, in case the gas generators connot cope (which will happen a lot). You can do that by setting the gas generators’ smart batteries’ low setting to something higher than on the coal generators’ smart battery, provided they are connected to the same electrical network.
Also make sure you have a lot of storage space for overflow natural gas (to use it while the vent is dormant and doesn’t produce anything).
The other next thing is building electrolyzers to produce oxygen for your base and hydrogen to run some hydrogen generators.
When playing the DLC, solar power is another option thats implementable relatively early. Without the DLC that’s more of a lategame thing.
There are also hydrogen vents, but they are very hot.
The next major power source, that will be able to replace coal power, is usually producing petroleum and using that as fuel.
Alternatively there is ethanol, but it’s not that easy to produce a lot of it and the process is very power intensive.
Ultimately none of the available power sources are strictly needed on their own. Later you may find that you have a largish number of small power sources, like some h2-generators here, some nat-gas there, a bit of solar, some power reclamation via a steam turbine or two, maybe even geothermal power via volcanoes and steam turbines, that together they’ll easily match your bases power requirements without even needing to tap into large scale power producers like coal or petroleum.
My last point. Coal isn’t meant to be long term sustainable. It is hard to produce in mass and when you try to do, you’ll run out of minerals eventually. What little you can produce in a hatch farm is basically meant to be used in kilns, the rest stored to run a backup coal power plant for some limited time in case of some emergency (like replacing your main power plant). But then again, hatch ranches, of course, add to the lifetime of your coal power plant, just don’t count on them to be able to sustain you forever.
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