In Vanilla, how does nuclear affect performance?
This analysis -- The Impact of Nuclear on UPS - Reddit -- found a linear UPS drop of 0.0495 per GW, or about 1 UPS per 20GW for the given hardware.
How are the fuel consumption times calculated?
Number of reactors divided by 200. A single vanilla reactor consumes 1 fuel cell in 200 seconds. Neighbor bonus doesn't affect fuel usage, only heat output, so a 2x1 (2 reactors) consumes 2 cells in 200 seconds (200/2 = 100 seconds). And so on.
How can I use my own blueprint or design to replace an existing one?
It doesn't require knowledge of lua, but will require a bit of image editing and tweaking.
- Screenshot your power plant. I arbitrarily used "/screenshot 5000 3400", but you can use whatever resolution. If you want it to be rotatable, then you need to screenshot each orientation. If your design is rotationally symmetrical, then you only need 2: vertical and horizontal; otherwise, you need 4: north, south, east, west.
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Edit the screenshots. (GIMP is free.)
Crop it to your liking.
Convert the Image Mode from RGB to Indexed to reduce file size.
Export. Uncheck all options except the alpha/transparency layer.
Repeat for all images.
Tips: Try to keep the image size the same. Eg, if you have a vertical and horizontal image, their height and width will be switched, but the same. If you had any entities, like a steam turbine, overflowing at the top (like the rocket at the bottom of this page), and decided to crop around it, then you'll want to account for that extra height and extend the image at the bottom the same amount of pixels that overflowed from the top. You'll then want to pad the width of the other image (increase it using: overflow pixels * 2), and center it. This will allow for a smooth rotation. -
Replace the existing images inside of ./graphics/entities/. If you have 2 images, then the default one is "-h", horizontal. With 4 images, it is the "-n", or north.
- Edit ./prototypes/entities.lua and update the width and height to match your power plant. Use the resolution from your horizontal "-h" or north "-n" image. The functions 2way/4way/4way_identical are based on how many images your entity has. If you have 2 images, use 2way. You'll have 4 images (4way) if your design isn't rotationally symmetrical, and if it's a square, then you'll have a 4way_identical.
- Edit ./prototypes/entities.lua and update the collision/selection/drawing box values, based on the grid size of your design (divided by 2). You can see the grid size when you blueprint and toggle align/snap to grid.
- Zip it and test it in a sandbox. Specifically, test the border collision with a belt or inserter around the corners and tweak the values in step 5 as needed.