A Nuclear Age

Been pushing hard at writing pretty much any time I'm not sleeping, working, or eating (which seems to take up far too much of the day as it is.

Did unwind just a little with Satisfactory. Getting to the final deliverables on the Space Elevator is a leap up of at least a magnitude in the amount of automation necessary. But that's the tricky thing about Satisfactory. Once you are able to make enough miners and conveyor belts to get things moving...you run into a power crunch.

So time to get nuclear. This was my previous plant; the "Spider," located in the swamp along with my original aluminum facility:

A bit tangled in there. Also the goal of more than one last-minute dash across the map to figure out why my power plant had stopped generating power again.

So started a much larger facility in the spider-heaven of the Red Bamboo Forest. This was to be a self-contained 100% recycling nuclear power plant capable of running 24 reactors.

Well, sort of self-contained. Nuclear Power is late-game, so takes half the resources the map can deliver just to make the fuel rods. I sited the plant over a uranium node, with coal and limestone close enough to conveyor in. Reactors are water-hungry, though. I even lined the little creek under the building with water extractors:

But that wasn't nearly enough. More water was pumped out of the ground..from deep in a local ravine (where the silicon I also needed was located.)

Ah, the joys of headlift. An expensive Mark II water pump every forty meters...

But there's only so much conveyor belts can do. That, and the building was going to be big enough already once I added fuel reprocessing. So a sulfuric acid section at the massive refinery I'd started building a short rail trip away:

The was also a convenient transship point for quickwire from a new caterium facility built into the hillside above the "spider proof" tunnel for the sulfur trucks running out to the old turbo-fuel plant:

That's still only half the list, though. I needed various iron, steel, and copper products as well, and those weren't quite as close. So a brand new metal products plant almost under the new railway. Unfortunate location; I had cliff, lake, and a really nice bit of flower bed I didn't want to disrupt so I had to try and cram it up under the rail line somehow. Again this is a design feature; Satisfactory is always presenting you with choices for your architecture, tempting you away from just building floating slabs up in the air.

And in the end, at least I had a little more space to work with. Also made full use of a sub-floor for running the rat's-nest of piping. I haven't opened it up to the full 24 reactors, though. Just kicking along with six until I am sure I've worked out all the bugs...

(And as usual the architecture ended up taking back seat. Was going to make a cool control room/observation deck, and I wasted a bunch of time trying to do some cool curves on the rail entrance, but in the final crunch I just shoved machines where they would fit and hooked them up.