Advanced Power Infrastructure
Advanced Power Infrastructure expands Factorio 2.1 power progression with additional tiers for boilers, steam engines, steam turbines, heat exchangers, heat pipes, nuclear reactors, fusion power, solar panels, and accumulators.
Space Age is optional. The mod loads and plays on base Factorio 2.1, and Space Age adds the holmium, foundation, solar, accumulator, and fusion tiers on top.
Nuclear heat is the centrepiece
Nuclear power here does not behave the way vanilla nuclear does, and the differences are the point of the mod rather than a side effect of adding tiers.
Distance costs temperature. Heat cools as it travels along a heat pipe, and cools faster the harder the run is working. A reactor cannot feed an arbitrarily long arm at full strength, so where you put exchangers matters as much as how many you build.
Heat pipe tier is a requirement, not an option. Each tier carries heat only up to its matching reactor's ceiling, so a single leftover lower-tier heat pipe throttles an entire run. Tiers are tinted and every heat pipe states its carrying temperature, throughput, and loss per tile in its tooltip.
Heat exchangers taper rather than cutting out. Every tier works from 300 degrees up to its own optimal, producing cooler steam instead of none, so a row that dips below optimal loses part of its output rather than all of it.
The reactor neighbour bonus is paid per heat connection. A reactor has three connections a side. Two placed flush line up all three and are worth the full bonus; sliding one along the shared edge earns a partial bonus rather than nothing, so a reactor row can be threaded around terrain.
A pipe carries only so much heat at once, and the margin tightens with tier — a limit on how wide a run can be, where temperature loss limits how long.
Opening a reactor shows a panel with its base output, adjacent reactors, aligned connections, bonus, live output, and core temperature. Little of this is visible in a tooltip otherwise, so there is a guide covering how the heat chain behaves and how to lay it out:
https://github.com/Calvinxc1/advanced-power-infrastructure/blob/main/docs/nuclear-heat-guide.md
Without Space Age
The ladders stop where Space Age materials begin: boilers and steam engines at rubber-lined, steam turbines and heat exchangers at reinforced, heat pipes and nuclear reactors at mk2. Solar panels, accumulators, and fusion are Space Age only, since every tier of those is built from holmium, lithium, quantum processors, or Space Age's own fusion buildings.
The surviving reinforced tiers substitute refined concrete and low-density structure for tungsten plate and carbon fiber, and are gated on production and utility science instead of metallurgic and agricultural science.
Scope and companions
Advanced Power Infrastructure covers generation and storage only. Electric grid infrastructure is handled by the optional Advanced Energy Grid companion, and pipes, pumps, and general fluid infrastructure by the optional Advanced Fluid Infrastructure companion. Each mod works on its own; the staged progression is designed with all three installed.
Changes to base game entities
The mod adjusts several base game prototypes deliberately, so that vanilla machines are tier 1 of a ladder rather than stranded beside it:
- The vanilla heat exchanger and heat pipe take this mod's tier 1 values, including the heat pipe's carrying ceiling and per-tile loss. Anything else built on base game heat pipes, Space Age heating towers included, is affected by the same change.
- The vanilla steam turbine produces 5.56 MW rather than 5.82 MW, so one heat exchanger feeds exactly 1.8 turbines at every tier.
- Every reactor tier, vanilla included, has the engine's own neighbour bonus switched off, because the mod pays a per-connection bonus in its place.
Status
This is an early 0.x public release. The mod loads and the core progression is implemented, but balance values, long-running save upgrade paths, and broad compatibility with other power mods should still be treated as experimental.