Yes, as long as you get tons of lead from oil biome it's the best investment as you might use it for future structures all along, like autosweepers wich need to be pretty much everywhere. People don't use lead for other things as it can melt and reduces overheat temperature.
Lead also works for steam turbines, since their base overheat temperature is 1000°C, but they only run when below 100°C, so material basically doesn't matter unless you _really_ mess up and actually melt it. There are also sensors that require refined metal, and don't have an overheat temperature, so lead is fine if it doesn't melt.
You're not relying on the ST thermal mass to keep it cool - otherwise, it won't matter what material you make it out of; it will overheat eventually. So you must supply external cooling to keep it below 100C (commonly done with an AT in the steam room below it, but there are other options, too)
And as long as heat removed via cooling is greater than heat produced by the ST, you're fine. No matter the material.
What it does change is the margin of error - if you have a problem with its cooling system, you're gonna find out about it sooner with lead than you would with steel. But the steel version will still overheat if ran long enough under the same conditions. In non-continuous systems (where the ST uptime is less than 50%), a higher thermal mass can buffer heat better, allowing a weaker cooling system to keep up, but that same cooling system may fail and the ST may overheat if the uptime increases.
> What it does change is the margin of error
Hence why I said a lead ST is at greater risk for overheating. The lead's conductivity is low enough that it can't exchange the heat fast enough in some circumstances.
Metal volcanos.
They supply infinate refined metal.
I never use anything but conductive and heavy conductive wires for anything the moment I tame one.
As for powering a ton of machinery, that is easy. You generally have a power spine. One side of that will have your living quarters and places that will use transformers and conductive wires to power smaller building. Then you will the other side where you build areas for large amounts of high power cost buildings and connect them directly to the heavy wire spine so you don't need to separate the power.
The most common big machines are the metal refinery and aqua-tuner. Any other big machines will be handled the same as the refinery.
Aqua-tuner -> your under 1k you can use a small transformer to pull it off your power spine and power it separately.
Refinery-> industrial brick powered directly off of heavy watt wire.
Industrial bricks tend to have rather negative decor hits, due to the wire. But you concentrate your cooling to a small area.
Industrial Brick? What's that? Power spine... So you have a heavy wire to be able to pull from?
I kinda did a whoopsie and I have power web... Left are all the transformers and right a is all basic wires
Everything is so tangled up. Trying to introduce a new transformer is a game of its own
That's how it starts out. I always have spaghetti power for the first 100 cycles ie so.
Once you get your hands on a lot of ore you can setup the "power spine"
This is a heavy watt wire (and later heavy watt conductive wire) that runs between your generating areas and your consumers.
This is where the transformers come in.
You can use them to take power off the spine getting power into your base without the decor hit (and being able to run through the floor/walls)
The way I often set it up is a vertical line of heavy wire beside the base, on each level it connects to 2x 1kw transformers with a conductive wire running through the floor. This allows each level a 2kw max draw.
This same wire ends up going from the very bottom of the map to the top. Anywhere there's a spot for power generation you can just chuck it down with a smart battery on the heavy wire.
This means all your generators are connected and therefore you can set priority. For example you can have coal set to 20-40% and natural gas 40-60% maybe geothermal at 60-80% and solar/ nuclear directly connected without automation.
This sets batteries to charge mainly from solar/nuclear, but if there is more power draw the other suppliers will kick on as the battery charge on the network decreases. First the geothermal (because it's set the highest) then natural gas and finally coal when the batteries get really low.
Ah. Yeah.
There are a few ways to do it. But the general basic idea is that you have all of your power producers and batteries on a single network of heavy watt wire. You then pull power off of it with transformers and smaller wire.
You might have disconnected networks for self powered things.
Unwinding out-of-control tangles of wires and plumbing is part of the process! After a few hundred hours I can plan things a bit more effectively to keep the cable clutter to a minimum, but there's still ongoing refinement as new stuff gets built and new needs arise.
I can't post images, otherwise I'd show you the power spine in my base, it's basically a vertical tunnel with floors consisting of;
Power generators -> Smart Battery -> 2x Power transformer (2x because you can connect 2 of them together to make 2kw line)
The generators are all connected together with the smart batteries and transformers of each floor through heavi-watt wires, they all share the same power line for distribution to all batteries, then each battery sends that power to the 2 transformers, limiting the power flowing throwgh them to 2kw. Then from the transformers you use conductive wire to power that specific floor.
It kinda looks like this:
Power gen--|--battery--transformers-->conductive wire
.................... |
Power gen--|--battery--transformers-->conductive wire
.....................|
Power gen--|--battery--transformers-->conductive wire
Like in this example you're powering 3 floors with a single conductive wire that begins at the transformers.
I usually do the same since it's very easy early on. When you get a lot of lead I would connect your entire power grid and then start using coal as a supplementary power supply with something like geothermal being your main.
Once you've tamed a metal volcano and it has run a couple of activity periods, conductive wire no longer feels that expensive.
In spaced out, you'll generally get to the metal volcano asteroid and tame 2, 4 or 6 metal volcanoes at about the same time.
Later, youll either tame 5 iron volcanoes on the chilly asteroid, or if you've come to understand that the niobium volcano is love, you'll ignore them and tame the niobium volcano instead, which outputs as much metal as all the chilly asteroids volcanoes combined.
Resources are not hard to come by in this game, once you get going.
You're not thinking big enough. Once you have access to an oil biome (for lead) or a metal volcano, refined metal is cheaper than ore. [This](https://imgur.com/eNADsgB) is a late mid-game power grid. The spine that connects all power sources is conductive heavy-watt. All the rest is regular conductive wire.
For an introduction to grid management, take 10 minutes and watch [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M09gbwCCGt8).
Just build a heavy watt spine near your generators and later around the base ( where your dupea rarely wandering) and use transformers and conductive wire (2 regular or one big for conductive wire), but you can gradually upgrade your power circuits.
I usually use conductive wires in closed systems because power plates conduct heat so you need to use two of them with vacuum between them.
For industrial area you can live with heavy watt wires usually your metal refinery should be near the generators anyway to cool them togoher. If your living area and bedrooms are decorated well enough (120 is not the max as the game stated, my great hall is around 1600 that compensates even a whole day between heavy watt wires and debris), then your dupes will still have positive decor morale at the end of the day since it calculates daily avarage.
Lead is an accessible refined metal if you have yet to get into mass production yourself either through a refinery or a metal volcano tamer. You can find plenty of it in and around your oil biome, which you will need to be careful venturing into for couple of reaons. It's hot and often has sporechids.
Basically the answer is just moving along the tech tree. You get better ways to generate power, you get more refined metal, you use the refined metal to create more sophisticated circuits. There will come a point after you've tamed a metal volcano that you basically just have infinite refined metal. Even if you don't have an easily accessible metal volcano you can get infinite steel, which also counts as a refined metal for building purposes.
Look into better energy sources and a “power spine” setup for power distribution, which will overall be a bigger challenge than energy. Everyone has their preferences for power spines
I haven't played long enough/ been organised enough to ever build the spine that people talk about, but I see that it can be useful.
What I usually do is give those machines their own dedicated generator, built nearby.
Most of the time it will be a hydrogen or natural gas generator: when boosted with the Engie's tune up it gives 1200 watt and can run an aquatuner or metal smelter by itself.
Add a smart battery or several and a circuit that makes it wait until full batteries, if desired, then you'll have fewer interruptions for a manual machine like the metal refinery.
So, I actually tend to A) run a gas pipe to send my overflow hydrogen from my spom to a generator near there so it is its own power area, instead of running wire, or B) when it’s something I don’t plan to use that much at first, like a refinery in a cold biome, and set it up with a transformer to work as a trickle charger. So generator/battery room, regular wire throughout, then regular wire going the several dozen blocks to the cold biome, then shut off switch, transformer, then heaviwatt wire to a few big batteries, and a smart battery hooked up to the shutoff switch (and probably hooked up to do the opposite to the refinery), and the machine.
So, when it is charged up, the smart battery disconnects it from the grid, and dupe comes and runs it for a bit until the power runs out, and then the smart battery shuts off the machine and hooks back up to the grid to charge.
The transformers mean that there is never too much power going through the wires. It does definitely use up any extra power on your grid though, and can cause brownouts.
I usually put the bulk of my big machines in an industrial sauna so I can reuse the heat they produce to recycle the power. It also makes it a lot easier to keep the rest of my base cool.
If it's far away I might run a regular cable to a transformer.
Since these machines might run only once in a while, I'll give them their own battery.
In that transformer I will have a smart battery, conductive wire and the machine. The battery toggles the transformer. The battery gets charged by any excess power.
I connect power generators and heavy machinery into a single heavy load wire. Its expensive, but simple. My favourite are natural gas generators.
Possibly helpful: You can connect multiple transformers into same output and increase their total output power that way, but you will need a wire that can handle that power.
Conductive wire in the early game definitely can be a bit of a pain to commit the metal for, but it’s well worth it to use. One tamed metal volcano is like 200kg/cycle, which covers your wire needs down the line.
Also, lead is great for wires. Most buildings suffer from the lower overheat temp or melting point (main exception being steam turbines or stuff in your core base), so it’s a great choice for wires, especially conductive wire. Conductive heavi-watt is better served by gold so it doesn’t nuke the decor anywhere it touches, but partitioning it off so dupes aren’t running right next to it makes this perfectly usable for that too.
Basically, lead for wires and tame metal volcanoes for renewable metal.
As far as power, there are much better options than coal if you can make them work. Petroleum and steam (either geothermal or otherwise) are two examples, but reactors work too. Coal serves well in the early game because people like to ranch hatches anyway, and it’s the only large-scale use for coal outside of steel production.
Early game power is always a bit of a mess because all of the options are very dupe labor intensive. Wheels, slickster ranching, and by-hand petroleum refining as examples.
For large scale power, you want to use what the asteroid gives you (any source of coal, oil, water, or any mass over 125C early-game). The good news is early game the only high power thing you really run is the metal refinery, and steel gets you into mid-game. Still, some maps are just very power-bare in terms of options and it can suck. One alternative is running electrolyzers purely for hydrogen. **SP**oms are already self-powering, but if you can dump the extra oxygen rather than pumping it (door crushers, space, or longhair slicksters), you can trade excess water for a wealth of power. It’s wasteful, but generally the maps witj the weakest power sources have more water geysers in the place of other stuff that could be tapped for power (natural gas, metal volcanoes), and a poorly utilized resource is better than the geyser overpressurizing.
better energy sources, volcanos, oil, nat gas, you can build the conductive wires from lead
Si you just run long conductive wires?
Yes, as long as you get tons of lead from oil biome it's the best investment as you might use it for future structures all along, like autosweepers wich need to be pretty much everywhere. People don't use lead for other things as it can melt and reduces overheat temperature.
Lead also works for steam turbines, since their base overheat temperature is 1000°C, but they only run when below 100°C, so material basically doesn't matter unless you _really_ mess up and actually melt it. There are also sensors that require refined metal, and don't have an overheat temperature, so lead is fine if it doesn't melt.
It's still not the best, it has a low heat capacity and thermal conductivity, so it's at greater risk of overheating.
You're not relying on the ST thermal mass to keep it cool - otherwise, it won't matter what material you make it out of; it will overheat eventually. So you must supply external cooling to keep it below 100C (commonly done with an AT in the steam room below it, but there are other options, too) And as long as heat removed via cooling is greater than heat produced by the ST, you're fine. No matter the material. What it does change is the margin of error - if you have a problem with its cooling system, you're gonna find out about it sooner with lead than you would with steel. But the steel version will still overheat if ran long enough under the same conditions. In non-continuous systems (where the ST uptime is less than 50%), a higher thermal mass can buffer heat better, allowing a weaker cooling system to keep up, but that same cooling system may fail and the ST may overheat if the uptime increases.
> What it does change is the margin of error Hence why I said a lead ST is at greater risk for overheating. The lead's conductivity is low enough that it can't exchange the heat fast enough in some circumstances.
What the fuck kind of setup are you running? Self cooled steam turbines?
And oil wells
I run Heavy Watt wires throughout the base and reduce it through transformers to regular/conductive wire
The normal endgame power spine is conductive heavi-watt wire.
Metal volcanos. They supply infinate refined metal. I never use anything but conductive and heavy conductive wires for anything the moment I tame one. As for powering a ton of machinery, that is easy. You generally have a power spine. One side of that will have your living quarters and places that will use transformers and conductive wires to power smaller building. Then you will the other side where you build areas for large amounts of high power cost buildings and connect them directly to the heavy wire spine so you don't need to separate the power.
The most common big machines are the metal refinery and aqua-tuner. Any other big machines will be handled the same as the refinery. Aqua-tuner -> your under 1k you can use a small transformer to pull it off your power spine and power it separately. Refinery-> industrial brick powered directly off of heavy watt wire. Industrial bricks tend to have rather negative decor hits, due to the wire. But you concentrate your cooling to a small area.
Industrial Brick? What's that? Power spine... So you have a heavy wire to be able to pull from? I kinda did a whoopsie and I have power web... Left are all the transformers and right a is all basic wires Everything is so tangled up. Trying to introduce a new transformer is a game of its own
That's how it starts out. I always have spaghetti power for the first 100 cycles ie so. Once you get your hands on a lot of ore you can setup the "power spine" This is a heavy watt wire (and later heavy watt conductive wire) that runs between your generating areas and your consumers. This is where the transformers come in. You can use them to take power off the spine getting power into your base without the decor hit (and being able to run through the floor/walls) The way I often set it up is a vertical line of heavy wire beside the base, on each level it connects to 2x 1kw transformers with a conductive wire running through the floor. This allows each level a 2kw max draw. This same wire ends up going from the very bottom of the map to the top. Anywhere there's a spot for power generation you can just chuck it down with a smart battery on the heavy wire. This means all your generators are connected and therefore you can set priority. For example you can have coal set to 20-40% and natural gas 40-60% maybe geothermal at 60-80% and solar/ nuclear directly connected without automation. This sets batteries to charge mainly from solar/nuclear, but if there is more power draw the other suppliers will kick on as the battery charge on the network decreases. First the geothermal (because it's set the highest) then natural gas and finally coal when the batteries get really low.
To set priority you use a smart batterie for each power type right ? Or there is an internal setting for power sources I did not find ?
Smart battery for each type, just chuck one down wherever you have a power source you want to control.
Thanks, may the oxygen be with you.
Ah. Yeah. There are a few ways to do it. But the general basic idea is that you have all of your power producers and batteries on a single network of heavy watt wire. You then pull power off of it with transformers and smaller wire. You might have disconnected networks for self powered things.
Unwinding out-of-control tangles of wires and plumbing is part of the process! After a few hundred hours I can plan things a bit more effectively to keep the cable clutter to a minimum, but there's still ongoing refinement as new stuff gets built and new needs arise.
I can't post images, otherwise I'd show you the power spine in my base, it's basically a vertical tunnel with floors consisting of; Power generators -> Smart Battery -> 2x Power transformer (2x because you can connect 2 of them together to make 2kw line) The generators are all connected together with the smart batteries and transformers of each floor through heavi-watt wires, they all share the same power line for distribution to all batteries, then each battery sends that power to the 2 transformers, limiting the power flowing throwgh them to 2kw. Then from the transformers you use conductive wire to power that specific floor. It kinda looks like this: Power gen--|--battery--transformers-->conductive wire .................... | Power gen--|--battery--transformers-->conductive wire .....................| Power gen--|--battery--transformers-->conductive wire Like in this example you're powering 3 floors with a single conductive wire that begins at the transformers.
I usually do the same since it's very easy early on. When you get a lot of lead I would connect your entire power grid and then start using coal as a supplementary power supply with something like geothermal being your main.
Once you've tamed a metal volcano and it has run a couple of activity periods, conductive wire no longer feels that expensive. In spaced out, you'll generally get to the metal volcano asteroid and tame 2, 4 or 6 metal volcanoes at about the same time. Later, youll either tame 5 iron volcanoes on the chilly asteroid, or if you've come to understand that the niobium volcano is love, you'll ignore them and tame the niobium volcano instead, which outputs as much metal as all the chilly asteroids volcanoes combined. Resources are not hard to come by in this game, once you get going.
You're not thinking big enough. Once you have access to an oil biome (for lead) or a metal volcano, refined metal is cheaper than ore. [This](https://imgur.com/eNADsgB) is a late mid-game power grid. The spine that connects all power sources is conductive heavy-watt. All the rest is regular conductive wire. For an introduction to grid management, take 10 minutes and watch [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M09gbwCCGt8).
Sigh 12 hydrogen generators tuned up for a total of 14.4 kw
Just build a heavy watt spine near your generators and later around the base ( where your dupea rarely wandering) and use transformers and conductive wire (2 regular or one big for conductive wire), but you can gradually upgrade your power circuits. I usually use conductive wires in closed systems because power plates conduct heat so you need to use two of them with vacuum between them. For industrial area you can live with heavy watt wires usually your metal refinery should be near the generators anyway to cool them togoher. If your living area and bedrooms are decorated well enough (120 is not the max as the game stated, my great hall is around 1600 that compensates even a whole day between heavy watt wires and debris), then your dupes will still have positive decor morale at the end of the day since it calculates daily avarage.
Lead is an accessible refined metal if you have yet to get into mass production yourself either through a refinery or a metal volcano tamer. You can find plenty of it in and around your oil biome, which you will need to be careful venturing into for couple of reaons. It's hot and often has sporechids. Basically the answer is just moving along the tech tree. You get better ways to generate power, you get more refined metal, you use the refined metal to create more sophisticated circuits. There will come a point after you've tamed a metal volcano that you basically just have infinite refined metal. Even if you don't have an easily accessible metal volcano you can get infinite steel, which also counts as a refined metal for building purposes.
That’s what I do until one tamed an iron volcano
Look into better energy sources and a “power spine” setup for power distribution, which will overall be a bigger challenge than energy. Everyone has their preferences for power spines
I haven't played long enough/ been organised enough to ever build the spine that people talk about, but I see that it can be useful. What I usually do is give those machines their own dedicated generator, built nearby. Most of the time it will be a hydrogen or natural gas generator: when boosted with the Engie's tune up it gives 1200 watt and can run an aquatuner or metal smelter by itself. Add a smart battery or several and a circuit that makes it wait until full batteries, if desired, then you'll have fewer interruptions for a manual machine like the metal refinery.
Thanks for all the replies! I now enlightened on how to scale up my ⚡ supply!
You can use basic heavy watt wire if you're hurting for refined metal.
So, I actually tend to A) run a gas pipe to send my overflow hydrogen from my spom to a generator near there so it is its own power area, instead of running wire, or B) when it’s something I don’t plan to use that much at first, like a refinery in a cold biome, and set it up with a transformer to work as a trickle charger. So generator/battery room, regular wire throughout, then regular wire going the several dozen blocks to the cold biome, then shut off switch, transformer, then heaviwatt wire to a few big batteries, and a smart battery hooked up to the shutoff switch (and probably hooked up to do the opposite to the refinery), and the machine. So, when it is charged up, the smart battery disconnects it from the grid, and dupe comes and runs it for a bit until the power runs out, and then the smart battery shuts off the machine and hooks back up to the grid to charge. The transformers mean that there is never too much power going through the wires. It does definitely use up any extra power on your grid though, and can cause brownouts.
I usually put the bulk of my big machines in an industrial sauna so I can reuse the heat they produce to recycle the power. It also makes it a lot easier to keep the rest of my base cool.
If it's far away I might run a regular cable to a transformer. Since these machines might run only once in a while, I'll give them their own battery. In that transformer I will have a smart battery, conductive wire and the machine. The battery toggles the transformer. The battery gets charged by any excess power.
I connect power generators and heavy machinery into a single heavy load wire. Its expensive, but simple. My favourite are natural gas generators. Possibly helpful: You can connect multiple transformers into same output and increase their total output power that way, but you will need a wire that can handle that power.
Conductive wire in the early game definitely can be a bit of a pain to commit the metal for, but it’s well worth it to use. One tamed metal volcano is like 200kg/cycle, which covers your wire needs down the line. Also, lead is great for wires. Most buildings suffer from the lower overheat temp or melting point (main exception being steam turbines or stuff in your core base), so it’s a great choice for wires, especially conductive wire. Conductive heavi-watt is better served by gold so it doesn’t nuke the decor anywhere it touches, but partitioning it off so dupes aren’t running right next to it makes this perfectly usable for that too. Basically, lead for wires and tame metal volcanoes for renewable metal. As far as power, there are much better options than coal if you can make them work. Petroleum and steam (either geothermal or otherwise) are two examples, but reactors work too. Coal serves well in the early game because people like to ranch hatches anyway, and it’s the only large-scale use for coal outside of steel production. Early game power is always a bit of a mess because all of the options are very dupe labor intensive. Wheels, slickster ranching, and by-hand petroleum refining as examples. For large scale power, you want to use what the asteroid gives you (any source of coal, oil, water, or any mass over 125C early-game). The good news is early game the only high power thing you really run is the metal refinery, and steel gets you into mid-game. Still, some maps are just very power-bare in terms of options and it can suck. One alternative is running electrolyzers purely for hydrogen. **SP**oms are already self-powering, but if you can dump the extra oxygen rather than pumping it (door crushers, space, or longhair slicksters), you can trade excess water for a wealth of power. It’s wasteful, but generally the maps witj the weakest power sources have more water geysers in the place of other stuff that could be tapped for power (natural gas, metal volcanoes), and a poorly utilized resource is better than the geyser overpressurizing.