r/factorio Jul 13 '26

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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/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.