Advice - coal and power plant

[Stephen of Blois]

I had 35 steam engines running nicely. Then somehow I got copper mixed in with my coal which shut all those engines down, which shut everything else down.

Now I'm in a catch 22: I don't have enough coal to power the steam engines and I can't mine anymore coal because I can't power the drills.

Any suggestions as to how to resolve this? The only thing I can think of is clearing my entire inventory and hand mining a lot of coal and then dump all of that coal on the steam engines and hope I get enough power for the drills to mine enough to sustain the steam engines. But doing that would be quite difficult.

[jagholin]

difficult? No. First you have certainly have some coal in your furnaces/belts etc. Just grab some of it(use shortcuts like F to grab stuff from belts). Then drop all the coal into boilers manually - press Z to drop one piece at a time and draw a line with your mouse over all your boilers. Problem solved in few seconds.

[Vyndicu]

35 Steam engines that is an odd number to use and I am assuming that you don't know about the ratio of boiler to steam engine?

You can use one boiler to power two steam engines. You can use one pump to feed enough water for 20 boilers. So you have a 1-20-40 ratio.


As for clearing the belt of copper ore and hand mining. You don't necessarily have to.

You can place some burner miner to gather up some coal. You can place them in a such way that they feed themselves coals. You can just walk by and pick those extra coal up.

[Purpleganja]

Try to unplug everything else other than coal mining by removing poles, and burn some wood or coal leftovers from cleaning the contaminated belt.

[Stephen of Blois]

Originally posted by Vyndicu:

35 Steam engines that is an odd number to use and I am assuming that you don't know about the ratio of boiler to steam engine?

You can use one boiler to power two steam engines. You can use one pump to feed enough water for 20 boilers. So you have a 1-20-40 ratio.


As for clearing the belt of copper ore and hand mining. You don't necessarily have to.

You can place some burner miner to gather up some coal. You can place them in a such way that they feed themselves coals. You can just walk by and pick those extra coal up.

Yes, 35 was a typo. I do have 36. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Stephen of Blois]

Originally posted by Purpleganja:

Try to unplug everything else other than coal mining by removing poles, and burn some wood or coal leftovers from cleaning the contaminated belt.

This seems like a decent idea. Thank you.

[Stephen of Blois]

Yeah, it's looking like there will be no launch with this factory. Time to try again I think. lol

[schnappkatze]

You could set up a few coal powererd burner miners. 10 might even be enough. Set up a mining operation where they output their coal on a belt and feed themselves from that belt with burner inserters. When that is up and running, just connect the belt to your normal coal belt for the steam engines.

[Lunacy]

You could disconnect the power poles from the boiler setup and reroute it to your coal miners until its full enough to reroute to everything else.
But once you start getting to oil you should be replacing the coal with solid fuel and using the coal mainly for plastic.

[Niinix]

Originally posted by Stephen of Blois:

Yeah, it's looking like there will be no launch with this factory. Time to try again I think. lol

??? Just unplug the things that dont immediately contribute to generating power then once thats done take a stack of coal and hand load it into your main boiler set, and if thats not enough coal then just make a smaller seperate power grid off a boiler or two that strictly is powering miners to mine coal for your main power grid. No need to restart at all.

[Stephen of Blois]

Originally posted by Niinix:

Originally posted by Stephen of Blois:

Yeah, it's looking like there will be no launch with this factory. Time to try again I think. lol

??? Just unplug the things that dont immediately contribute to generating power then once thats done take a stack of coal and hand load it into your main boiler set, and if thats not enough coal then just make a smaller seperate power grid off a boiler or two that strictly is powering miners to mine coal for your main power grid. No need to restart at all.

I haven't hit the restart switch quite yet. Thanks for the help. I'm in the process of implementing the ideas discussed here. If I stay organized I think I can salvage it.

[Stephen of Blois]

Thanks everybody for your help. These were great ideas.

[Stryderunknown]

For future reference, if you are using a belt to feed your boils, you can set a splitter to filter the output on one side to a specific item. In this instance if you set it as coal, only coal will go through the splitter. If you set a box up with an inserter on the side of the splitter thats not set, anything that gets sent down the line to the splitter that isn't coal will be collected there.

[Stephen of Blois]

Originally posted by Stryderunknown:

For future reference, if you are using a belt to feed your boils, you can set a splitter to filter the output on one side to a specific item. In this instance if you set it as coal, only coal will go through the splitter. If you set a box up with an inserter on the side of the splitter thats not set, anything that gets sent down the line to the splitter that isn't coal will be collected there.

That's great. Thank you.

[Stephen of Blois]

Just one more comment. Got it all working again...I guess I panicked...Thanks again for all the help.

[Нагризолич]

If you absolutely want to make sure your base has no brownouts - power your coal patch and boiler inserters with separate grid solar energy.