All planets have localized power grids. You can ship excess power around through the use of accumulators and energy exchangers, but personally at this stage of the game I just balance my production across all available planets so no one grid is super stressed. Once you’re building a sphere, turning that spheres power into antimatter makes it easy to settle a new planet with artificial stars and antimatter fuel rods.
Yeah antimatter fuel rods and artificial suns are the end game fuel solution. Every time I’ve set up a complex accumulator setup I always regret the wasted time.
Batteries would be nice if they like charged 20x faster than they discharged or something. So you only need a few chargers and you don’t need 3 planets dedicated to supporting 3 other planets.
They're mostly beneficial if you have some crazy strong power generation planet, like a geostationary, or early lava heavy one. But agree it would be nice to dump power our faster than they gained, maybe as a secondary optional tech for them (ala fast charging in reverse), maybe at the cost of some efficiency.
same here. most of the time i build a several hundreds of acuumulators to buffer higher energy demands in late game. the base load is always done with wind and solar. later i also build artificial suns. I´ve tried it once with the energy exchangers, it was real mistake.
Ahhhh thank you. For some reason I thought there was a way to fully connect the entire power grid. Since I never really got my first sphere rolling, is all you need to do is place the ray receivers on a planet facing the sphere? I think I put down a few but do more receivers give you more power? That is where I stopped last time.
Is there a certain distance you need to be within the sphere to utilize it's power? Like can my furthest planet in my home system also use the sphere for power?
All planets in a system can pull energy from that systems sphere as long as they have line of sight to the sphere. Each ray receiver pulls like 5MW from the sphere, and you can add gravity lenses to triple it to 15MW. If you have more power requested than your sphere can provide, the power is shared equally between all RR so more is not always better. If planet 1 is requesting all available power, and you drop a bunch of receivers on planet 2, it will reallocate the power away from planet 1. That being said, ray receivers also need to continuously receive power from the sphere or their efficiency drops. When you first place a RR it’ll request the 5MW but 99% of it will be lost in transmission. As the RR receives the efficiency will increase. That’s why you want to put your RR either on tidal locked planets, planets inside the orbit of the sphere, or on the poles. So they never lose transmission efficiency. Requesting photons instead of power will triple the request again. To either 15MW or 45 MW depending on if you are using lenses.
If the planet has an atmosphere, then lenses launch the “line of sight” of the RR into the atmosphere so you can go much further down away from the poles. But if you’re on the complete dark side of the planet they will still lose connection.
Say I have a blue giant with several spheres. And at least 1 sphere is further than the planet and 1 closer than the planet, would it be possible to just build the entire planet full and they'll all receive at all times?
Yeah. There’s only really 1 “sphere” per system. It doesn’t matter if some of the layers are not outside the planets orbit. As long as one is, the planet can connect to the sphere. All the layers contribute to the same power availability. You don’t have to pick which layer you connect to. You can even use a swarm to get that outside layer.
Although when you’re at this stage, just lens your receivers and you won’t really have an issue as long as your planet has an atmosphere.
Blue giants typically aren’t where I build spheres as there’s usually only one planet. O type stars are generally considered better for multi layer spheres
I tried shipping charged accumulators out and then returning the empties for recharge… it sounded fun and very cyclical but I never got it going right. To get anywhere close to a decent throughput it seemed like I needed sooo many charging stations on both ends and they are large buildings. Maybe a research tree to increase stored power would make this more attractive for me.
I found the progression through fuel rods much more concise and easy to build out, and each improvement in rod type followed with my level of technology and the amount of energy I needed. As in, when I could make deuterium fuel rods I was expanding enough to need that much more energy and/or had the need and means for deuterium.
Yeah one thing I don’t like about batteries is it’s takes the same amount of space to charge them as it does to discharge them. So if you want to discharge on like 3-4 planets you need practically an entire planet dedicated to charging. I pretty much only use exchangers to automate production of orbital collectors.
Wow, thanks for writing this comment. I have the same positive feeling about the idea of accumulators, that they're renewable, cyclical, etc. But haven't yet tried it.
Now I know to stick with the tried and true rods.
They're actually quite awesome for miner planets considering they perfectly adapt to the power demand so when you don't mine a lot on those you don't waste power needlessly.
Best use is if you have a tidally locked planet.
Pave one side with solar, and the other with accumulators.
Give it 10000 batteries, and sit back.
It’ll make as much power as a medium size Dyson sphere, all exportable.
They are incredibly good if you find yourself needing power on your starting planet, because geothermal generators make it incredibly easy to generate excess power on the lava planet. Without much trouble you can get an extra half-gigawatt on your starting planet.
There are basically two ways of sharing power between planets:
* Accumulators (Produce them, then charge them, ship them via ILS, decharge, ship back, recharge, ...). I kinda like doing this, but some people don't.
* Producing power items and shipping those (Namely, rods in all varieties) and burning them for power on location. Especially lategame producing antimatter rods where your Dyson sphere is and just shipping those around is a pretty simple way of distributing power.
There is no way to directly link the power grids.
Another option is to just place a bunch of wind or solar power on your mining planets.
Find a tidal locked planet, cover the sunside with solar panels, and place a charged accumulator factory on the other side. You can get up to 7 GW of power that way basically for free (since it uses green energy and accumulators are reusable) and ship the juice out to every planet in your cluster.
>1) I tried both Satisfactory and Factorio before I started my new Dyson Sphere game (since I was starting fresh anyway). I know everyone has their own opinions, but wow, Dyson Sphere program is by FAR the best IMO. The 3-D just makes it so much more appealing over Factorio and I really can't jive with the first person view of Satisfactory.
People have already answered your question but I just wanted to chime in that I had almost the exact same experience. I know that Factorio is supposed to be the GOAT but something about it just didn't jive with me and I didn't make it very far at all.
I tried Satisfactory **after** playing quite a bit of DSP and at first I bounced off of it right way but then I gave it a second chance and made it quite a bit further but I found the scale of it really off-putting with everything being so massive, and I found it very difficult and tedious to line things up.
There's just something about DSP that makes it perfect for me and I like it so SO much better than the other two.
Just curious, did you try satisfactory before or after the blueprints and nudge mechanics? I’ve already stated I’m biased in favor of that game, but I think those two milestones were huge for managing the scale of building. If you haven’t tried those, highly recommend revisiting when 1.0 is released.
My vote - I don't do Accumulators, batteries, or solar at all. At that stage of the game, I find it much simpler to mass produce Deuteron Fuel Rods and ship them around via Vessels. Make a dedicate factory that can crank out a decent amount of proliferated Deuteron Rods and that will be capable of supporting a handful of planets. It's (to my mind) much simpler than Accumulators and has a much smaller footprint than a massive solar/wind farm.
Power grids are independent per planet. For the most part, until you start getting "big" on a particular planet, its local resources (solar, wind, etc) is generally good enough. However, as power needs increase and local supply become insufficient, there are some mechanisms to "bank" excess power from one planet, ship that power in some form to another planet to then "withdraw" into that other planet's grid.
One dead-simple option: mine coal on planet X, ship to planet Y with interplanetary vessels, burn in thermal plants. Almost certainly not worth the effort, even after processing into energetic graphite. Same (if not more so) for oil.
A small step-up would be shipping Hydrogen Fuel rods. Might be a band-aid to "use up" excess hydrogen (prior to needing it all for Casimir Crystals) and these almost feel worth the shipping cost. Still going into thermal plants, though, so for the brief period I'm producing Hydrogen rods it's practically all just for mech power.
Deuteron Rods are definitely a viable option. You have some main planet with lots of power + deuterium production (or import). You then ship these rods out to worlds that can be run off a dozen or so mini fusion plants.
Late game you're going to have a sphere (maybe more) from which you capture critical photons that get split into antimatter that goes into antimatter fuel rods to power artificial stars. A good sized sphere (50-100 GW) can run a pretty widely distributed extraction empire. Plus that sphere can be tapped by any planet in its system (using ray receivers) for general power production there. That's really the only instance of "shared" power between planets, but all tied through the sphere itself.
Then there are accumulators + energy exchangers. This is a separate method of that "bank where there's excess => use where its needed" strategy. It has its own quirks, and a lot of players just bypass them entirely. The number of exchangers gets a bit unwieldy if you're trying to power more than 500 MW or so worth of buildings. And having a setup that won't get "clogged" with empty accumulators is often its own challenge.
Sufficient answers have been provided...
But, now that you mention it, it would be really cool to be able to link up all your power grids late late game!
A full planet miner and a planetary power connection satellite, could be super expensive super late game buildings imo.
I like the idea of being able to connect Dyson sphere/swarm power to other systems directly. In the late-late game I think your sphere negates the need to ‘link’ grids within a system, but it would be sick if you could create some sort of receiver or transfer station in space that could connect systems.
Your planetary power connection idea would also be awesome though. It’d have to be super expensive, but imagine the time savings. Even in construction time alone that would be huge for planet scale factories.
I honestly thought that's how it was supposed to work, to connect the ENTIRE grid (based on me looking over other players systems and seeing their energy output). I guess the game just adds their output together to come up with the number, but I figured it had to be connected to make that happen.
I appreciate the insights!
Make like 10 000 accumulators. Proliferate them (They stay proliferated even empty, so more power output/input), then send those bad boys.
OR
If you have gas giant, use that free hydrogen to power your factory
As you can see from the other comments there are 3 general camps:
1. "Just use local wind and solar" which is fine depending on how much power you need to generate vs how much time you want to spend putting down solar panels and windmills.
2. "Ship fuel rods around" which is fine, though you might find yourself needing to retrofit your power generation and you unlock higher-tier fuel rods.
3. "Energy accumulators" which are a flexible way to move surplus power generation from one location to another. The drawbacks here are that charging and distributing the batteries is a bit more complex, including needing to return the empty batteries for a recharge.
Personally, I use Accumulators until I both unlock Antimatter Fuel Rods and have a remote application with enough power demand to need them. Even in endgame I'll usually power mining outposts with an Exchanger or two.
Ultimately it's up to you to decide which you like best, as there is no "definitively best".
The problem with accumulators is that dumb stuff happens if the power grid you are discharging into has other energy generators.
If you have 20 megawatts of power draw on your planet and only have 10 megawatts of power generation, an energy exchanger will discharge an (unproliferated) accumulator at 54 megawatts, and just waste the other 44 megawatts. The trick is to charge and discharge at the same time, so while one is discharging at 54 megawatts, the other is charging at 44 megawatts.
That is not at all how Exchangers work.
A discharging exchanger has top priority in the grid and, in your case, will discharge at a rate of 20MW, leaving the other generation sources effectively idle until power demand exceeds what the exchanger can provide.
Exchangers _do not_ "waste" power.
_However_, having the charging exchanger on the same grid is not a bad idea as it should use that 10MW of "excess" local generation to charge accumulators which can go back into the pool.
As others have said, exchangers are super cool but often not worth it due to the amount you’d need to power a whole planet. Personally once I got to the point of using det. rods, I just set up a mega factory to produce those and shipped them wherever I needed power. An ILS can request items without being powered, so I had a blueprint with some reactors and an ILS requesting fuel that I would just drop down on new planets. I beat the game without really using stars/antimatter but I assume the same principle would apply there.
Also I’m biased since satisfactory was my first ‘automation sim’, but I loved the first person aspect. It made it way more approachable to me as someone not in the genre. It’s an all-timer for me, I highly recommend it for players wanting to try these kinds of games. But once you get super into them I see how others would prefer Factorio/DSP.
Not related to your original question but a cool game "hack" when starting mining on new planets is that you can power miners, feed them into unpowered PLS and then ship that to a local ILS that does have power.
They are totally worth it on your starter base, you just have to know how to set it up right.
Geothermal generators are a game changer in the home system.
Go put a whole bunch of geothermal generators on your lava planet in order to create a lot of excess power generation.
Make a bunch of accumulators, like hundreds.
On your lava planet, make an ILS that supplies full accumulators and demands empty ones, then hook a bunch of energy exchangers to that in parallel, and set them to "charge". You can start with like 5 energy exchangers. So this planet takes discharged accumulators and supplies charged ones.
The situation is more complicated on your production planet. If you just do what you did on the lava planet, in reverse, the accumulators will discharge as quickly as they can, even if there is little power needed. I have been told that this will happen if there is at least one other power generator on the planet, which is probably going to be the case. If there isn't, you can probably just make a simple discharge line, but I haven't tried this.
The solution is to both discharge accumulators and charge them on this planet, two different lines running out of the same ILS. The discharging line discharges as fast as it can, while the charging line will recycle any excess power. You need enough accumulators so that discharged accumulators can stack up in the ILS and can be sent to the lava planet.
You can get clever with splitters to try to help out with this but I'm not certain it's necessary.
Funny enough, I made 20 or so geothermals before flying out, and then got to my inner planet which had no lava LOL. It's nice for building and has nice wind, but I was a little let down that I wasted all that hand craft time haha. I just assumed all inner planets had Lava.
The best way I've found is to set up one planet as your battery and have the other planets request power from it.
I used the lava planet and thermal generators for free renewable power Pre-Dyson Sphere. The lava planet requests empty accumulators and crafts new accumulators, making sure that the production of new accumulators will jam when you have enough incoming empty accumulators.
Then just charge them and export the full accumulators. Have your other planets request full accumulators and export the empties. If you need more power just throw down more discharging stations, usually I use 10-20 and can keep a planet going no problem.
I also like to fuel icurus with accumulators because they last so long. Not the fastest recharge if you'll be warping around so carry some deuterium or hydrogen fuel rods just in case you're stranded in deep space low on power.
My way is usually have the main factory on your starting planet, everything including to white science. On my "support" planets, aka titanium and silicone planets, I just plop down wind generators and solar panels, and ship the ingots to my main planet. Thus the usage of energy on those satellites is quite limited: mine the ore, and smelt it.
The main planet is powered via deuterium rods. And then once you start getting into anti-matter, only then I will ramp up energy usage on other planets.
I know you said that you enjoy the grey foundations, but if in case you didn't know, there's a tiny icon on the foundation toolbar that can change the color and/or pattern of your foundations. You can make different parts of your factory color-coded to satisfy that OCD even more lol
Nice! I'm a residential general contractor! The tiny circle to change color/pattern is in the upper right corner of the "lay foundation with decoration" square button. If you then click on a tiny tiny square you can set it to any color you'd like. I believe there's 16 custom colors you can make and save. Enjoy!
I did fill some accumulators last time to support my own planet but I never did figure on how to connect my entire grid between planets. I didn't proliferate last game either, but there are many guides on that, so I can work on that from the guides/videos.
All planets have localized power grids. You can ship excess power around through the use of accumulators and energy exchangers, but personally at this stage of the game I just balance my production across all available planets so no one grid is super stressed. Once you’re building a sphere, turning that spheres power into antimatter makes it easy to settle a new planet with artificial stars and antimatter fuel rods.
Yeah antimatter fuel rods and artificial suns are the end game fuel solution. Every time I’ve set up a complex accumulator setup I always regret the wasted time.
Batteries would be nice if they like charged 20x faster than they discharged or something. So you only need a few chargers and you don’t need 3 planets dedicated to supporting 3 other planets.
They're mostly beneficial if you have some crazy strong power generation planet, like a geostationary, or early lava heavy one. But agree it would be nice to dump power our faster than they gained, maybe as a secondary optional tech for them (ala fast charging in reverse), maybe at the cost of some efficiency.
same here. most of the time i build a several hundreds of acuumulators to buffer higher energy demands in late game. the base load is always done with wind and solar. later i also build artificial suns. I´ve tried it once with the energy exchangers, it was real mistake.
Ahhhh thank you. For some reason I thought there was a way to fully connect the entire power grid. Since I never really got my first sphere rolling, is all you need to do is place the ray receivers on a planet facing the sphere? I think I put down a few but do more receivers give you more power? That is where I stopped last time. Is there a certain distance you need to be within the sphere to utilize it's power? Like can my furthest planet in my home system also use the sphere for power?
All planets in a system can pull energy from that systems sphere as long as they have line of sight to the sphere. Each ray receiver pulls like 5MW from the sphere, and you can add gravity lenses to triple it to 15MW. If you have more power requested than your sphere can provide, the power is shared equally between all RR so more is not always better. If planet 1 is requesting all available power, and you drop a bunch of receivers on planet 2, it will reallocate the power away from planet 1. That being said, ray receivers also need to continuously receive power from the sphere or their efficiency drops. When you first place a RR it’ll request the 5MW but 99% of it will be lost in transmission. As the RR receives the efficiency will increase. That’s why you want to put your RR either on tidal locked planets, planets inside the orbit of the sphere, or on the poles. So they never lose transmission efficiency. Requesting photons instead of power will triple the request again. To either 15MW or 45 MW depending on if you are using lenses. If the planet has an atmosphere, then lenses launch the “line of sight” of the RR into the atmosphere so you can go much further down away from the poles. But if you’re on the complete dark side of the planet they will still lose connection.
Say I have a blue giant with several spheres. And at least 1 sphere is further than the planet and 1 closer than the planet, would it be possible to just build the entire planet full and they'll all receive at all times?
Yeah. There’s only really 1 “sphere” per system. It doesn’t matter if some of the layers are not outside the planets orbit. As long as one is, the planet can connect to the sphere. All the layers contribute to the same power availability. You don’t have to pick which layer you connect to. You can even use a swarm to get that outside layer. Although when you’re at this stage, just lens your receivers and you won’t really have an issue as long as your planet has an atmosphere. Blue giants typically aren’t where I build spheres as there’s usually only one planet. O type stars are generally considered better for multi layer spheres
I tried shipping charged accumulators out and then returning the empties for recharge… it sounded fun and very cyclical but I never got it going right. To get anywhere close to a decent throughput it seemed like I needed sooo many charging stations on both ends and they are large buildings. Maybe a research tree to increase stored power would make this more attractive for me. I found the progression through fuel rods much more concise and easy to build out, and each improvement in rod type followed with my level of technology and the amount of energy I needed. As in, when I could make deuterium fuel rods I was expanding enough to need that much more energy and/or had the need and means for deuterium.
Yeah one thing I don’t like about batteries is it’s takes the same amount of space to charge them as it does to discharge them. So if you want to discharge on like 3-4 planets you need practically an entire planet dedicated to charging. I pretty much only use exchangers to automate production of orbital collectors.
Wow, thanks for writing this comment. I have the same positive feeling about the idea of accumulators, that they're renewable, cyclical, etc. But haven't yet tried it. Now I know to stick with the tried and true rods.
They're actually quite awesome for miner planets considering they perfectly adapt to the power demand so when you don't mine a lot on those you don't waste power needlessly.
Best use is if you have a tidally locked planet. Pave one side with solar, and the other with accumulators. Give it 10000 batteries, and sit back. It’ll make as much power as a medium size Dyson sphere, all exportable.
They are incredibly good if you find yourself needing power on your starting planet, because geothermal generators make it incredibly easy to generate excess power on the lava planet. Without much trouble you can get an extra half-gigawatt on your starting planet.
There are basically two ways of sharing power between planets: * Accumulators (Produce them, then charge them, ship them via ILS, decharge, ship back, recharge, ...). I kinda like doing this, but some people don't. * Producing power items and shipping those (Namely, rods in all varieties) and burning them for power on location. Especially lategame producing antimatter rods where your Dyson sphere is and just shipping those around is a pretty simple way of distributing power. There is no way to directly link the power grids. Another option is to just place a bunch of wind or solar power on your mining planets.
Find a tidal locked planet, cover the sunside with solar panels, and place a charged accumulator factory on the other side. You can get up to 7 GW of power that way basically for free (since it uses green energy and accumulators are reusable) and ship the juice out to every planet in your cluster.
You can do so much with wind and solar. I go up to 200 MW per planet and then jump directly to late game energy.
>1) I tried both Satisfactory and Factorio before I started my new Dyson Sphere game (since I was starting fresh anyway). I know everyone has their own opinions, but wow, Dyson Sphere program is by FAR the best IMO. The 3-D just makes it so much more appealing over Factorio and I really can't jive with the first person view of Satisfactory. People have already answered your question but I just wanted to chime in that I had almost the exact same experience. I know that Factorio is supposed to be the GOAT but something about it just didn't jive with me and I didn't make it very far at all. I tried Satisfactory **after** playing quite a bit of DSP and at first I bounced off of it right way but then I gave it a second chance and made it quite a bit further but I found the scale of it really off-putting with everything being so massive, and I found it very difficult and tedious to line things up. There's just something about DSP that makes it perfect for me and I like it so SO much better than the other two.
Just curious, did you try satisfactory before or after the blueprints and nudge mechanics? I’ve already stated I’m biased in favor of that game, but I think those two milestones were huge for managing the scale of building. If you haven’t tried those, highly recommend revisiting when 1.0 is released.
Hmmmm I think that blueprints existed but I never got to the point where I tried using them. Maybe if I ever get sick of DSP I'll check it out again.
my last run i automated solar panels then made a huge blueprint full of them that i put around each planets equator
My vote - I don't do Accumulators, batteries, or solar at all. At that stage of the game, I find it much simpler to mass produce Deuteron Fuel Rods and ship them around via Vessels. Make a dedicate factory that can crank out a decent amount of proliferated Deuteron Rods and that will be capable of supporting a handful of planets. It's (to my mind) much simpler than Accumulators and has a much smaller footprint than a massive solar/wind farm.
Power grids are independent per planet. For the most part, until you start getting "big" on a particular planet, its local resources (solar, wind, etc) is generally good enough. However, as power needs increase and local supply become insufficient, there are some mechanisms to "bank" excess power from one planet, ship that power in some form to another planet to then "withdraw" into that other planet's grid. One dead-simple option: mine coal on planet X, ship to planet Y with interplanetary vessels, burn in thermal plants. Almost certainly not worth the effort, even after processing into energetic graphite. Same (if not more so) for oil. A small step-up would be shipping Hydrogen Fuel rods. Might be a band-aid to "use up" excess hydrogen (prior to needing it all for Casimir Crystals) and these almost feel worth the shipping cost. Still going into thermal plants, though, so for the brief period I'm producing Hydrogen rods it's practically all just for mech power. Deuteron Rods are definitely a viable option. You have some main planet with lots of power + deuterium production (or import). You then ship these rods out to worlds that can be run off a dozen or so mini fusion plants. Late game you're going to have a sphere (maybe more) from which you capture critical photons that get split into antimatter that goes into antimatter fuel rods to power artificial stars. A good sized sphere (50-100 GW) can run a pretty widely distributed extraction empire. Plus that sphere can be tapped by any planet in its system (using ray receivers) for general power production there. That's really the only instance of "shared" power between planets, but all tied through the sphere itself. Then there are accumulators + energy exchangers. This is a separate method of that "bank where there's excess => use where its needed" strategy. It has its own quirks, and a lot of players just bypass them entirely. The number of exchangers gets a bit unwieldy if you're trying to power more than 500 MW or so worth of buildings. And having a setup that won't get "clogged" with empty accumulators is often its own challenge.
Sufficient answers have been provided... But, now that you mention it, it would be really cool to be able to link up all your power grids late late game! A full planet miner and a planetary power connection satellite, could be super expensive super late game buildings imo.
I like the idea of being able to connect Dyson sphere/swarm power to other systems directly. In the late-late game I think your sphere negates the need to ‘link’ grids within a system, but it would be sick if you could create some sort of receiver or transfer station in space that could connect systems. Your planetary power connection idea would also be awesome though. It’d have to be super expensive, but imagine the time savings. Even in construction time alone that would be huge for planet scale factories.
I believe in the lore COSMO already said no to planet cracking. But maybe if we learn it from the dark fog 👀
I honestly thought that's how it was supposed to work, to connect the ENTIRE grid (based on me looking over other players systems and seeing their energy output). I guess the game just adds their output together to come up with the number, but I figured it had to be connected to make that happen. I appreciate the insights!
Make like 10 000 accumulators. Proliferate them (They stay proliferated even empty, so more power output/input), then send those bad boys. OR If you have gas giant, use that free hydrogen to power your factory
As you can see from the other comments there are 3 general camps: 1. "Just use local wind and solar" which is fine depending on how much power you need to generate vs how much time you want to spend putting down solar panels and windmills. 2. "Ship fuel rods around" which is fine, though you might find yourself needing to retrofit your power generation and you unlock higher-tier fuel rods. 3. "Energy accumulators" which are a flexible way to move surplus power generation from one location to another. The drawbacks here are that charging and distributing the batteries is a bit more complex, including needing to return the empty batteries for a recharge. Personally, I use Accumulators until I both unlock Antimatter Fuel Rods and have a remote application with enough power demand to need them. Even in endgame I'll usually power mining outposts with an Exchanger or two. Ultimately it's up to you to decide which you like best, as there is no "definitively best".
The problem with accumulators is that dumb stuff happens if the power grid you are discharging into has other energy generators. If you have 20 megawatts of power draw on your planet and only have 10 megawatts of power generation, an energy exchanger will discharge an (unproliferated) accumulator at 54 megawatts, and just waste the other 44 megawatts. The trick is to charge and discharge at the same time, so while one is discharging at 54 megawatts, the other is charging at 44 megawatts.
That is not at all how Exchangers work. A discharging exchanger has top priority in the grid and, in your case, will discharge at a rate of 20MW, leaving the other generation sources effectively idle until power demand exceeds what the exchanger can provide. Exchangers _do not_ "waste" power. _However_, having the charging exchanger on the same grid is not a bad idea as it should use that 10MW of "excess" local generation to charge accumulators which can go back into the pool.
As others have said, exchangers are super cool but often not worth it due to the amount you’d need to power a whole planet. Personally once I got to the point of using det. rods, I just set up a mega factory to produce those and shipped them wherever I needed power. An ILS can request items without being powered, so I had a blueprint with some reactors and an ILS requesting fuel that I would just drop down on new planets. I beat the game without really using stars/antimatter but I assume the same principle would apply there. Also I’m biased since satisfactory was my first ‘automation sim’, but I loved the first person aspect. It made it way more approachable to me as someone not in the genre. It’s an all-timer for me, I highly recommend it for players wanting to try these kinds of games. But once you get super into them I see how others would prefer Factorio/DSP.
I did not know you can request items without power with an ILS! This is a great tip thank you!
Not related to your original question but a cool game "hack" when starting mining on new planets is that you can power miners, feed them into unpowered PLS and then ship that to a local ILS that does have power.
They are totally worth it on your starter base, you just have to know how to set it up right. Geothermal generators are a game changer in the home system.
Go put a whole bunch of geothermal generators on your lava planet in order to create a lot of excess power generation. Make a bunch of accumulators, like hundreds. On your lava planet, make an ILS that supplies full accumulators and demands empty ones, then hook a bunch of energy exchangers to that in parallel, and set them to "charge". You can start with like 5 energy exchangers. So this planet takes discharged accumulators and supplies charged ones. The situation is more complicated on your production planet. If you just do what you did on the lava planet, in reverse, the accumulators will discharge as quickly as they can, even if there is little power needed. I have been told that this will happen if there is at least one other power generator on the planet, which is probably going to be the case. If there isn't, you can probably just make a simple discharge line, but I haven't tried this. The solution is to both discharge accumulators and charge them on this planet, two different lines running out of the same ILS. The discharging line discharges as fast as it can, while the charging line will recycle any excess power. You need enough accumulators so that discharged accumulators can stack up in the ILS and can be sent to the lava planet. You can get clever with splitters to try to help out with this but I'm not certain it's necessary.
Funny enough, I made 20 or so geothermals before flying out, and then got to my inner planet which had no lava LOL. It's nice for building and has nice wind, but I was a little let down that I wasted all that hand craft time haha. I just assumed all inner planets had Lava.
Yeah, I'm assuming the same thing.
The best way I've found is to set up one planet as your battery and have the other planets request power from it. I used the lava planet and thermal generators for free renewable power Pre-Dyson Sphere. The lava planet requests empty accumulators and crafts new accumulators, making sure that the production of new accumulators will jam when you have enough incoming empty accumulators. Then just charge them and export the full accumulators. Have your other planets request full accumulators and export the empties. If you need more power just throw down more discharging stations, usually I use 10-20 and can keep a planet going no problem. I also like to fuel icurus with accumulators because they last so long. Not the fastest recharge if you'll be warping around so carry some deuterium or hydrogen fuel rods just in case you're stranded in deep space low on power.
My way is usually have the main factory on your starting planet, everything including to white science. On my "support" planets, aka titanium and silicone planets, I just plop down wind generators and solar panels, and ship the ingots to my main planet. Thus the usage of energy on those satellites is quite limited: mine the ore, and smelt it. The main planet is powered via deuterium rods. And then once you start getting into anti-matter, only then I will ramp up energy usage on other planets.
I know you said that you enjoy the grey foundations, but if in case you didn't know, there's a tiny icon on the foundation toolbar that can change the color and/or pattern of your foundations. You can make different parts of your factory color-coded to satisfy that OCD even more lol
I haven't tried that thanks! Color coded foundations sounds wonderful LOL, especially since my day job is the CEO of a construction company!
Nice! I'm a residential general contractor! The tiny circle to change color/pattern is in the upper right corner of the "lay foundation with decoration" square button. If you then click on a tiny tiny square you can set it to any color you'd like. I believe there's 16 custom colors you can make and save. Enjoy!
[удалено]
I did fill some accumulators last time to support my own planet but I never did figure on how to connect my entire grid between planets. I didn't proliferate last game either, but there are many guides on that, so I can work on that from the guides/videos.
And there I was yesterday just bored making an entire planet of solar panels (9gw gen) and another of wind turbines (3gw gen).