How are you all dealing with Aluminium production.

[vitriol17]

Just starting aluminium, lots more complexity than anything previous, how are you going about efficiently producing it?

Are you mining the ore and transporting that back to your main factory, or making it in situ and transporting everything to the mine, I'm building a factory to do the latter, but looks like its gonna need stuff from all over brought in to make it.

[tullaian]

Depends where you are mining the bauxite. You need water, oil and bauxite to get as far as ingots and copper as well if you want to make the sheets. If you ramp up production you need to bring in silica as well to keep up as you won't generate enough just making the aluminium buy itself to sustain production.

I found it easier to take silica and bauxite to a place with oil/water and then build a refinery complex there to make the ingots and send the ingots by train back to the main factory to make sheets & heatsinks.

Given after sheets you will make heat sinks , radio control units and turbo motors which all need the aluminium parts plus lots of rubber you end up making a aluminium/oil/rubber factory anyway.

It is actually quite easy to overproduce aluminium (ive got tons of it lying in storage containers scattered around with nothing to do with it) since it isn't actually used in great quantities as there aren't any tier 8 items yet so you don't even need to be super efficient with it.

[cdog]

Depending how many alclad sheets you go for its going to be a massive complex. You need:

Bauxite
quartz -> silicate
Oil -> heavy oil residue
Copper -> copper ingots


I use a train for bauxite and silicate then drops off at a spot with oil, copper and water for processing. Then i haul the alcad sheets, plastic and rubber back to my main base.

3 car train
Station 1: bauxite pick up, 2 cars
Station 2: silicate pickup (its processed from quartz beneath the train station)
Station 3: drop off everything at alcad sheet plant
Station 4: loops around alclad sheet plant picks up alclad sheets, rubber and plastic
Station 5: drop everything off at main base

Ita works pretty well, took forever to set up but I like seeing the trains zip around.

[フィティーマン]

I already had petroleum coke at my base. What I did was I set up a train between my base and the bauxite. I transported the coke and silica (2 pure quartz nodes literally next to base) to the bauxite mine and transported the aluminium ingots to the base. That's 3 train cars.
I had water next to the bauxite, so I made the aluminium ingots there. I kinda forgot about the copper ingots, so started producing the sheets at my base along with the heat sinks. Otherwise i would have transported those as well to the bauxite.

[Ruges]

We have an oil refinery on the west side of the map where those 4 oil nodes are. So we had the petro coke there. And right by that there is a bauxite deposit up high, so we put a Our main base was in the W NW side of the map. where the alunium is needed.and we had a steel factory in the N central of the map .We have a train setup to go between the 3 bases. It picks up Pipe, crushed crystal and silica at the pipe factory, goes to the refinery base and drops off silica picks up aluminium ingots, plastic and rubber, Goes to the main base and drops off the pipe crushed crystals, alunium ingots. repeats.

I guess it sounds complicated when its all wrote out. But we already had the train route going between those area's so adding in an aluminium route was pretty easy.