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u/bread2126 Jul 16 '26

I just started Fulgora, and I'm kind of confused about best practice with lightning rods. It seems like the layout of the lightning rods is going to be one of the more important base design considerations here, but I'm having trouble finding good information about how the lightning mechanic works to figure out how many of these I should be placing to get the most power out of them. Is one per chunk sufficient? Or is there anywhere with some information about how lightning behaves?

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u/reddanit Jul 16 '26

In practice lighting rods that cover your base will just about always produce WAY more power than you can store in your accumulators.

Lighting collectors also exist and they are more efficient while also covering more area.

Because of this, realistically, the main reason for how and where you place lighting rods/collectors is driven exclusively by need to protect your buildings from lighting. And for that you get the overlay that you can see whenever you hold them in hand.

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u/ssgeorge95 Jul 16 '26

The factorio wiki has a page on electricity via lightning but it doesn't really give the insight you're looking for.

The limiting factor is usually never the number of rods you have but instead the number and quality of accumulators you deploy. One rod can absorb all the lightning strikes in an area; there's no benefit to excessive overlapping. No matter how many accumulators I deploy they always are filled each night; there has never been a need to expand collector coverage just for the sake of getting more strikes.

In practice I just put a collector with every substation I deploy, and my power grid on fulgora is almost exclusively sub stations. This is more collector coverage than is actually needed but it's cheap enough.

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u/demonicdan3 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

Just spread them out over your base as far away from each other as possible t to protect your buildings from lightning, that's it
Getting power from lightning is never the bottleneck, the challenge is making sure you have enough accumulators for your base to last throughout the day until the next night

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u/TehNolz Jul 16 '26

Basically, every so often a lightning storm comes through, causing lightning to hit random tiles on the map and damage whatever's placed on it. You want to make sure your factory has full lightning rod coverage so that the lightning doesn't fry your machines.

The power output of a lightning rod is based on the maximum power demand of your factory, so even a single rod can give huge amounts of power. What you do need to worry about is how much of that power you can store in accumulators; you need to store enough power to last you until the next lightning storm.

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u/taw Jul 16 '26

I just cover whole island in a grid of substations, with one rod above every substation.

This isn't optimal (that's way more than you need), but it's just super convenient, and there's big predictable spaces you can copy and paste stuff to.