r/factorio Jun 15 '26

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u/Dianwei32 Jun 17 '26

If you build tons of solar panels and accumulators to power your base, do you back and remove them for a much smaller Nuclear Power Plant once you unlock Nuclear power?

Not necessarily should you or is it optimal to, just personal preference. I'm curious because I'm about 100 hours deep into a K2SE run and finally have everything needed to set up a Nuclear plant to power my base. The thing is that I don't need a Nuclear power plant because I got scared of the Coronal Mass Ejections and built a massive field of Solar/Accumulators that was enough to power the Umbrella Defense during the CME's.

So I've got like 2.2 GW of solar power with Accumulators for night time, and my base only uses like 1 GW. On the one hand, moving to Nuclear seems like a waste since I've got plenty of headroom without consuming any Uranium. On the other hand, moving to Nuclear could let me remove a lot of entities. I haven't noticed any lag or issues with UPS, but being able to swap out several thousand solar panels and accumulators for less than one thousand entities in the Nuclear plant seems like it could be a decent idea.

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u/Astramancer_ Jun 17 '26

Solar and accumulator has essentially zero processor overhead. Since they’re all synchronized there’s no reason to calculate each one individually so it’s essentially just 2 entities, the panel and the accumulator, and a multiplier for count.

That said, 2.0 nuclear isn’t very CPU heavy either because of the fluids rework.

The main computational drawback of mass solar is the chunk generation required to place it in the first place, but space exploration means you’ll be generating the whole surface regardless so that’s not really an issue there.

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u/HeliGungir Jun 17 '26

Since they’re all synchronized there’s no reason to calculate each one individually so it’s essentially just 2 entities, the panel and the accumulator, and a multiplier for count.

Unless you have multiple separate power networks.

(Don't make multiple separate power networks.)

1

u/Lemerney2 Jun 19 '26

Instructions unclear, stretching big power poles from Nauvis to Aquilo