coal consume issue on steel mill

[ottoVonRibbentrop]

I decided to buy coal and iron instead of mining, since they are cheap on the market. In future I will probably mine them, I want to reach the self sustainability. Right now I am still deep learning the mechanics, like train and chit.

I can't buy coal directly from the mill only, it's not fast enough, so I decided to buy it on another place, near the custom so it's cheaper, and transport it by train to a storage near the mill, with a connection of course. Then I set to 0 the buy of coal directly from mill

Since the usage of coal was SO high I decided to set a threshold of a minimum of 6 tons, below that the mill should again directly buy the coal.

I have two issues:
1) usage of coal is huge, is this correct? It does not look correct doing quick math, result in steel is not so high
2) when I raised the threshold for buying coal from 0 to 6 tons, the stored coal stopped transfers as first step on the mill, but it fill the aggregate storage and then... priority is still to buy it. So I decided to set one of the 3 trains transporting coal to have 2 unload stations, first to the aggregate storage, with the option to wait until full unloaded removed, and then to the mill directly . Here I noticed how huge the usage is.

and a question: what does limits the speed of buying stuff? Iron is a lot faster to buy...


https://youtu.be/Cb5_w38pzTk

[OffTheRailsGaming]

Buying in coal and iron will drain your economy. The more you buy the more the price will go up. You're far better off mining it, especially as there is a lot needed

[ottoVonRibbentrop]

Originally posted by OffTheRailsGaming:

Buying in coal and iron will drain your economy. The more you buy the more the price will go up. You're far better off mining it, especially as there is a lot needed

Yeah I will, but my question was different, I think there is a bug.
Price didn't raise so far, or at least just a bit, not so much, in fact I gain a lot selling mechanical component

[Dr. Fao Xi, DO/MD [31 CHN]]

The Steel Mill consumes 375t of coal and 200t or iron per work day. That's incredibly high. You are much better off producing the coal and iron yourself. However, the cost of importing coal and iron is MUCH lower than the cost of importing steel so it will help construction costs if you build your own buildings. What I do is mine my own iron and coal, and buy as a backup. That way I only buy when the building reserves are empty and produce the rest myself.

If you want to go totally cheap, just mine it yourself, but then your plant will have downtime when it's not producing steel. There's a lot of trade offs, you just gotta find the best balance. Another way you can save money is import the iron and coal base ore, which is cheapest, then refine it in the city.

[forzion]

If you want to use transported coal and have a reserve through autobuy set it in the aggregate storage. Minimal amount is enough. Then the unloaded coal will be consumed first.

IMO it is not very good idea to use massive imports for Steel Mill. You can do well if you need to run the steel mill under 20% but you will waste a lot if you will try to run it in higher output with imported materials even if you transport them from the border.

Just try to get at least one of the imputs from your own mines.

And you can push material into steel mill using automatic conveyor engine between aggregate storage and the steel mill..

[adriankowaty]

I generally find problem simple to solve.
Make up 2 iron processing plants and 4 coal processing plants. Connect them with conveyors to two separate magazines, and then connect those magazines to steel mill itself. Then set up buying iron ore and coal ore for processing plants.
It is cheaper in workforce than mining all the iron and coal (as mines consume a lot of people) and you still make nice profit from it.

[ottoVonRibbentrop]

you seem to don't understand my point... I don't care what's cheaper and if it's not a good idea to buy coal.

I think usage of coal is much higher that it should, in some cases, so there may be a bug. It's like (I don't remember exactly) 400 tons of coal and 200 tons of iron for 40 tons of steel, in some case I noticed it consume more coal than it should

[forzion]

Originally posted by ottoVonRibbentrop:

you seem to don't understand my point... I don't care what's cheaper and if it's not a good idea to buy coal.

I think usage of coal is much higher that it should, in some cases, so there may be a bug. It's like (I don't remember exactly) 400 tons of coal and 200 tons of iron for 40 tons of steel, in some case I noticed it consume more coal than it should

The question is how to measure that then. Practically you need coal from 4 coal ore processing and 2 iron ore processing plants to run the steel mill. You need one train full of coal for each day the steel mill is operating at full capacity. That is 30 trains per month. If you would bring iron there by trains too it would be 45 trains.

But I have an idea how to measure that. Set the steel mill to work from autopurchase and staff it to full capacity. Then check how many coal was imported that month. It should be 30*375 tons which is about 11.250 tons. And that is a lot. Uff!

I tried to test it but the main issue is you need lot of workers for that and autopurchase can supply only about 30-40% of coal needed, so you need autopurchase from multiple sources.