248k Mod


Advance through 4 stages of tech. Start with simple machines and work your way through nuclear fission and fusion up to black and white holes, in order to tame the 248k Element. This mod is designed to be playable in already existing worlds since it changes nothing on world generation. Can be played as a standalone mod or in overhaul mode.

Overhaul
10 months ago
1.0 - 1.1
52.1K

g Thermochemical Separator is near useless

1 year, 8 months ago

The Thermochemical Separator has the same recipes as the Electric energy Injector once you've gotten all the research (which is trivial), but consumes MORE energy by default, and it uses heat.
The energy issue means you have to put efficiency modules in it for it to perform similarly to the alternative. This is just a building tax and should not be the case. There's no point in putting speed or gauss modules in it because it's already fast enough, and the only ingredient is water so gauss modules are useless.

The heat issue is worse, though! There's no way to detect how hot something is so you can't throttle your reactor to produce the correct amount of heat for a hydrogen setup using Thermochemical Separators. At best, if your Star Engines are in high enough demand, you can just leave a reactor running at all times to fuel the Separators and have Injectors as backup.
A special building that produces heat and then stops after reaching a high temperature would be much appreciated; too bad this mod isn't updated anymore.

As it stands, I'm just going to use a bunch of Electric energy Injectors. They take up like 10x more room and use around 20% more energy but that's fine.

1 year, 8 months ago

Interesting, that's not my experience of those separators at all. I did take a while to find a layout I liked, but fully supplying a heating wing with 5 refineries and 9 thermochemical separators is working out great for me. Both speed and efficiency modules in play to line the ratios up nicely.

I have a tank/silo after the cooling arm which signals when to activate the fission fuel inserters, which isn't ideal, very long transients, but it's fine especially given how much stuff comes out of a Star Engine.

1 year, 8 months ago
(updated 1 year, 8 months ago)

Wait, why are you putting 9 thermochemical separators onto 5 refineries? With the max rank recipe they should be 1:1.
I tried making a setup just now, since I'm being forced to supply heat to Matter Chargers anyway so I might as well kill two birds with one stone, but the pipes supplying water get in the way of the heat pipes (and the reactor) so it seems very inconvenient.

edit: went with a four-arm setup so the water supply doesn't point towards the reactor cluster.

1 year, 7 months ago

The total craft speeds should ratio 1-1 but that's not the same as number of buildings. The separators having efficiency modules inside help keep the entire 13k protium /s side very healthily inside a 2x2 reactor heat budget. Refineries just get speeds because who cares about refineries?

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