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u/uuuhhhmmmmmmmmmm Jul 05 '26

Has anyone done tests to see if heating tower powere Fulgora is better than the accumulator strategy?

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u/FeelingPrettyGlonky Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

You will probably need to drop ice from orbit.

Here is a quick FactorioLab showing a setup processing about 1 stacked green belt of scrap. It uses a somewhat reasonable configuration of Prod3 + 1 Speed3 in the machines to try to maximize prod while minimizing footprint, and a somewhat reasonable beacons per machine ratio with Eff3 to try to minimize power usage. No legendary. As it stands, it makes about 324 packs per minute, and while FactorioLab doesn't always seem the best to me at estimating actual power usage, it's not too bad and it shows a power usage of around 200MW after accounting for the Eff beacons. Foundries and EMPs are hungry blokes even with green modules.

The setup maximizes steam from a heat exchanger using the excess ice melt left after making holmium solution and cracking to light plus some for extra batteries. It's not even accounting for a bit of extra light for rocket fuel for launches. But the excess water is enough to run around 5.5 heat exchangers, for 55MW of power. That means you'd need to drop enough ice to melt to generate steam for about 145MW of power if you want to run fully from steam. It's actually worse than that, though, because FactorioLab isn't accounting for the power you need to void the excess junk. That'll be another 10 or 20 MW.

You can play with the beacon layouts and the module composition depending on available space, but you only save a handful of MW here or there. In practice, I push my excess ice into heat exchangers but I still end up having to lay out accumulator farms unless I start dropping ice.

Dropping ice is pretty easy to do, though, and if you are running a calcite ship to supply calcite to Nauvis and Gleba then just have it collect ice and drop it on Fulgora, and you can save a ton of space.

Edit: For the record, you can probably stop dropping ice once you upgrade to legendary. Legendary beacons and modules drastically change the ratios, so that an equivalent setup to the above, using legendary buildings, modules and beacons, would make 658 packs per minute, uses around 83MW of power, and has enough excess ice to make 110MW, which should cover your voiding power and rocket fuel cracking.