Deeper Understanding of Mindustry II - Extraction and Production

In this guide we will learn how to extract, distribute and generate resources properly by creating efficient and compact designs.

Introduction

Important Note: This guide is incompatible with current game version.
This is an unlisted old guide. Do not take the informations as it is many tings has been changed and there are no plans for us to update this guides.


This is the second part of the "Deeper Understanding of Mindustry" guide series. In the first part I have covered all types of transportation components and transportation chains. Now it is time to learn about what are we transporting, and how should we use these resources properly according to our situation. If you didn't read the first guide, I strongly suggest you read it first. Understanding the transportation components properly is required for better understanding of this guide as well:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1935045318


Last Check: Accurate for 104.10 Steam build.

Important Note 1: My main goal in this guide is not listing "The Best" schematics all around. In some sections I intentionally give you "The Best" ones we could found for now, especially on problematic production lines like slag. But in many cases I intentionally inspect schematics compact enough for this guide but not perfect setups. I am just drawing waypoints here. I want to inspire you to do better ones. Keep this in mind while reading this guide.

Important Note 2: When I was writing this guide I was assuming that some problems within the current game version will be fixed soon. However, game development is more focused on the next big update. In the current version, Overdrive Projectors does not have any effect on the bridge conveyors. You may see some setups I am explaining here may have overdrive projectors and bridges in it. Please consider them as a concept design for now until I remove/replace them all with different stuff. Or don't use them under the overdrive projector effect.

Defining the Measurements and Abbreviations

While playing game, we casually build mining drills and use conveyor belts to carry stuff around. We casually decide how much a system is getting raw resources, by just looking at the items on conveyor lines. What ever you say, our real measurement unit is that titanium conveyors we mostly use. To make things simpler and practical i will use that titanium conveyors as our main measurement unit:

TBL: I call this as "Titanium Belt Line" to define fully saturated titanium belt worth of items. Like, "You need to insert 1 TBL sand and 0.5 TBL coal into this system" which means, we need to insert a saturated titanium belt of sand and half saturated titanium belt of coal.

On the first guide we have experimented and calculated how much materials some of the transportation chains can carry. Here are the numbers to summarize chain speeds with my new measurement unit:

At 60 FPS:
Router / junction chains: 0.4 TBL
Standard conveyors = 0.5 TBL
Unloader unload speed from buildings = 0.5 TBL
Router Chains = 0.66 TBL (Depending on length)
Unloader unload speed from containers = 0.75 TBL
Titanium, armored conveyors = 1 TBL
Bridge chains = 1.15 TBL
Phase conveyor chains = 2.35 TBL
Junction chains = 2.5 TBL
Junction / overflow (or underflow) gate chains = 2.6 TBL
Sorter (or inverted sorter) / overflow (or underflow) gate chains = 6 TBL (Dependent on FPS)
Router / overflow (Overflow only) gate chains = 6 TBL

They may not the exact numbers but they are precise enough for us to understand and calculate what kind of chains we need to use on our designs.

Full extractor/drill : A full drill means a drill which has full ore deposits below it. A full mechanical drill means a drill sits on 4 ore deposit (2 by 2) spots. A full airblast drill means an airblast drill which is sitting on 16 ore deposit (4 by 4) spots.

PU : Power unit.
LU : Liquid unit.

Input/Output Components I

Because of their single oriented transportation system, conveyor belts are the most convenient components for buildings when it comes to be an input or an output point. You cannot put items to a conveyor which has an opposite transportation orientation than yours. While they are convenient in general way, this single oriented transportation becomes problematic when it comes to creating super compact setups. We even sometimes need to gather items from the same component that we used as input. Yes you read it right and we can do that.

Some transportation components in Mindustry accepts items from multiple directions unlike conveyor belts. Overflow gates, routers/distributors, sorters, junctions are that kind of components. They should not be used as input points for production buildings as default. However we will going to use them conditionally. People doing mistakes mostly because of this "accepting items from multiple ways" behavior.

Let's have a look at this setup:



Coal will come from above and routed to the 3 graphite presses one by one. Let's see how it works:



System worked for sometime but halted at some point. Let's see what happened to our distribution system:



We already know that buildings are also distributors. They will distribute items evenly to each possible output point that are touching them. Because both the junction and the router in the example accepts items from every side, graphite presses defines them as both input and output points and pushes graphite into the router and to the junction. A single graphite which enters to the router will block coal input. Because there is no escape for graphite to leave the system.

If you must use routers or distributors in your design you have to have an escape point for possible unwanted produced items or even under-flows. Let's try to achieve this:



As you may remember from the first guide, distributors are simply routers with more sides. With this design we are using distributor as an input component which is not a suitable one for this job naturally. But just because we added an escape path for graphite by adding a sorter to the system, it works perfectly. If we know how the system works, we can generate solutions with even unusable components. For example like this:



Conveyor belts just below routers are escape ways for produced graphite. Weirdly they are also the distribution for coal. Actually we are gathering items from the same component we use as input. We also use the same conveyor for both distribution and collection. Let's look closer how coal (black arrows) and graphite (blue arrows) moves in the same system:



Ideally, you would want to use underflow gates instead of routers in order to create space for inputs for such systems. We will cover this subject later on.

When you design something with routers, you have to be careful with the amount of routers and their placement. If you don't design it carefully, each router you add to the system will slow down your distribution. Normally if routers are not routing something they are as fast as a titanium belts:



But when you start to use their routing property, they will start to slow down your distribution:



This effect is natural. There is nothing wrong here. In this setup, each router has to divide incoming materials into two different directions. Each router will reduce the incoming materials by 50%. First rotations has more items than the last ones. This creates a chain effect and you slow down item distribution on each router you add to the system. Let's see this in action:



The last graphite presses receiving almost no materials because of this effect. This is the reason why we don't use routers as distributors for production buildings generally. But this is not a strict rule, routers can be powerful distribution components on some situations, and you will see we need them at some point.

On the first guide you already read and know how problematic are routers can be on the "Why router chains are slow?" section. This setup above is just for example to how we use the sorter escape point for router distributions. In shared input/output distribution systems, underflow gates are heavily preferred, in order to properly use each machine at its highest productivity, and to free up space for the output resource.




Sorters can be conditional input and output points for buildings because of their behavior. Have a look at this setup:



Sorter, will only let coal to pass through itself. So graphite press cannot push it's items to the sorter. It works. But you shouldn't forget that sorters are routing unwanted items to it's sides. If there is a way to get out, graphite will get out from the system:



That's why I say conditional. These conditions depend on your design. In this case, if there was another transportation component that touched the sorter, where graphite could escape, it might have blocked your distribution system. Because when there is a way to go, the building would definitely try to push the items onto this way.



Here we used an inverted sorter, as an input and as a router for example.

junctions are naturally bad distributors. We have seen them in action on the first guide. We can somehow use routers or sorters because there is a way to remove items from them. But you should think junctions as they are closed conveyor systems. 4 conveyors actually. They are sitting on top of each other and they do not mix their contents, and they even don't mix the orientation of their contents. We have to use other components to take the contents from junctions:



Here is a two way conveyor system. This system prove my hypothesis about junction behaviors. Let's investigate what is happening here:



When coal enters to the system overflow gate will try to split incoming coal to the left and to the right. There is no way to go to the left for coal because of the sorter configuration. Then coal will directly routed to the right, to the graphite press. Graphite, produced by the graphite press will be inserted to the junction. Then graphite will go to the other side of the chain and will leave the chain from the sorter..

This is the overflow gate approach to the two way conveyor system. It should be look like this as default:



But this system has a flaw. If any side of the transportation chain somehow overflows, all the system would stop



Thanks to Teh_Killa_Ethan he showed us we have an alternate way which is not overflowing for that two way conveyor system with inverted sorters like this:

Input/Output Components II

Unloaders also can be used as input/output components. We had a demonstration for such a build on the first guide. There is not much stuff you need to know about unloaders except they unload stuff from buildings with around 0.5 TBL rate and from containers with a rate round 0.75 TBL. And also you need to know that if you are going to transfer items between the same production buildings, you need to give them a space for unloading their resources. This will not work for example:




It is a normal behavior because it cannot know which smelter it will going to unload on this case. You need a second component for this to work for example:



The last setup in the image is a bit problematic. Such design should only be used when the income speed to that building is high. Otherwise It may slow down your production. When your income speed is slow, arrange them like this:



Bridges/phase conveyors are one of the best ways to input/output stuff to buildings and we will use them a lot. Let's finish this section here and have a look at some common distribution systems.

Distribution Systems I

Buildings

"The Best" way to distribute items from point a to b is done by placing production systems next to each other. Just because every production building is also a distributor, it works perfectly well and this is the fastest way for transportation. You should remember the coal generator we have built in the first guide.



By just placing buildings next to each other enables item/liquid transportation between them almost instantly. Buildings won't accept items that they don't use. So it is totally safe to place unrelated buildings next to each other too. We will be doing some fancy setups with this behavior.

Overflow gate (or router) / junction (or inverted sorter)/ conveyor setup.

This is the generic distribution system and a very important subject. I had to mention this again and dive into it:



There are still some folks don't know about this distribution done best with overflow gates, not with routers. This is the most common way to distribute items to buildings. Everybody should have been seen (or even invented by themselves) this. Specially if they watched game play videos or played on multi player servers:



We can see the difference between doing distribution with routers or overflow gates clearly in this setup. Routers are distributing more items to closer buildings, overflow gates are less, even none. Routers barely distributing items to far away buildings, overflow gates are distributing them first. With this input, we can clearly see that we can only run barely 4 silicon smelters and 2 of them are unnecessary. But routers gives us a visual illusion that every 6 of the smelters are running time to time. Overflow / Underflow gates are "The Best" distributors in this setup.

The setup is very effective. You can handle nearly all of the production in Mindustry with this distribution system. You can input any number of different items to a system and it is very easy to build. This setup for example, accepts 4 different type of inputs and distributes them to the buildings perfectly:



Look at this monster, how beautiful it works... Even i can see that my lead input is not enough to handle 4 fully working alloy smelters. With this knowledge, i know that putting a 4th smelter will do nothing but costing me a lot of space (and if you did this with routers instead, they would also cost you a lot of energy.)

Just put overflow or underflow gates(please!) diagonally touching each other and fill in the blanks with junctions for below 2.6 TBL input or inverted sorters above 2.6 TBL input. It is that easy:



The system is also has 2 and 3 directional distribution options:



Do not forget that your input rate in such setup on 1 entry point can only slightly more than 2.6 TBL. When you need to input items to your system in a rate more than 2.6 TBL, we switch junctions with inverted sorters which has an unrelated item selected or nothing selected on their configuration. I prefer nothing. Their setup looks like this:



But we shouldn't forget that this is a sorter/overflow gate chain. More than 2 sorters next to each other will not work so we have a 3 different type of item input limit on this version, which means you cannot run alloy smelters with this distribution until you do some sorter tricks:



In order to further use the fact that sorters contain no buffer, you can extend a machine/block's input and output further, to allow for more complicated setups, however it may not be the most space efficient method possible.
Keep in mind however, that this method can also be two way, so you should always use belts to input/output into a system like this.





This works since one sorter acts as a turning piece, at the same time, carrying no buffer meaning that it cannot jam with a certain input/output.

A method like this may be the most useful in setups with small machines that require many inputs, such as Pryatite, Surge alloy smelters, or even mods with machines that require a lot of inputs.

Distribution Systems II

bridge / phase conveyor distribution

Bridges are extremely useful components when it comes to create compact designs. Phase conveyors can do everything bridges do, except they are faster, can carry more items. I will only mention and show bridges now on, i will give speed info of phase conveyors when needed. There will be some situations we create which will have phase conveyor requirements later on design concepts. I'll show them there.

When bridge conveyors used as output component, they are like collectors jumping from place to place. When they jump, they leave some space below them. This space can be used by something else, input for example. Imagine a scenario that you want to put your production buildings safely at the edge of the map and you came to a situation that you have to input and output on same sides of the buildings:



I know, I know, last coal centrifuge is not working because of the false placement of the bridge ending. I did it to demonstrate wrong positioning:



To summarize the info on the first guide, bridge endings are only output distributors. Bridge endings will not accept any type of input from any direction. Bridge starts are the opposite. They will not distribute anything, but accept everything from 3 sides except the connection side. Also don't forget that the middle bridge heads will accept inputs from 3 sides like the bridge start.

You just need to keep the bridge ending out from the system like this to fix that issue:



We said that bridge endings act like distributors. And they don't accept input. This means, i can use them for a good alternate to routers to input stuff into our production buildings.



This is a good demonstration of many properties of bridges. Let's see the item flow:



Lead coming from top will be distributed to three directions at that bridge's ending point. however there is another bridge ending to the bottom. This blocks that direction, and lead will be divided into two directions. Same is happening to sand coming from below. Just because bridge connection points are passive, we can safely run conveyor belts below them. Let's play with this structure a bit:



Adding some sorters to the distribution system allows us to grow this setup like this:



Lets take a closer look what is happening to items in this distribution system:



Lead coming from above will be distributed to 3 directions at the end of the bridge. To the bottom there is a sorter which only accepts lead to pass through. Just after passing this sorter, lead enters to another sorter which only accepts sand to pass. This sorter will distribute lead to the left and to the right because of it's default behavior. Same thing happening to the sand that is coming from below.

When we use bridges as distributors we need to be careful about our bridge placement. When we need to distribute something we cannot chain bridges like this:



Because as i said before, chained bridge heads in the middle will not distribute anything. We can only input items to that bridge heads from sides. We need to chain them like this:



Here is a demonstration of this chain system:



We also should not forget that distribution of this type is same as routers. So the slowing effect also happens here too:



If you want to build efficient transportation and efficient production, do not make long chains with bridges.

It is also possible to merge two or three bridge chains to be able to input more than 1.15TBL resource to a system:



We can use the empty space below the bridges to reduce space usage like this:



And of course same for distribution :

Distribution Systems III

One line router/underflow gate distribution system

This is a very compact distribution/collection system. Because we use only a single line to do all the job, maximizing our space usage efficiency. We already been seen this one on building input/output section. We could do the same ting with using underflow gates and it is far more efficient like this:



Underflow gates are more reliable components for this. If you have read the first guide and the "Why routers are slow?" section there, you know that routers have to route it's contents to all possible directions. On this setup, underflow gate behavior works perfectly for our needs. It will distribute coal to sides first. Which means coal will be redirected to the sides first. This generate more empty space for graphite to flow and leave the system. Routers will route %33 of the incoming coal to the possible conveyor touching it. Apart from being compact there some points you need to know while designing such distribution systems.

Leave an empty conveyor at the end of the system:



This way you will prevent possible clogging and jamming happens sometimes with the systems that has no empty conveyor at the end of the lines.

Use pairs while designing the system to prevent production latency



If you carefully observe the images, you will see that pairs will reduce production clogs happening regularly. This is not a strict rule. If you need a constant "same speed" production on your chain, using pairs is much more reliable.

Keep your output lower than your input per single line



Graphite presses has a good production ratio for this system 2x input to 1x output. We can safely use only 1 line distribution on such buildings. System will start to clog regularly when your output amount gets closer to your input amount. On production buildings which has 1 on 1 production ratio like metaglass, we can use 2 different distribution lines to reduce the produced item flow to half on both lines. Because buildings are also distributors, they will distribute their items evenly between this two lines.

You can use this setup with 2 types of input.



We already demonstrated this with the metaglass factory system. If your one type input requirement is more than the other type, like sand on silicon smelters and phase weavers, use the middle line for the lowest required input and split the more required input to sides like shown on the image.

You can find a silicon smelter schematic done with this system from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1989620343

Let's see it on action:




We know that bridge distribution system is much like routers. This means it is possible to manipulate this distribution system with bridges too. Like this:



These were preliminary information. I'll be covering more of these distribution styles later on our designs.

Resource Extraction

Before we start, we need to get resources for our setups. We have some talk here about efficiency. There are basic resources which we can directly collect from resource deposits or from the map terrain. Scrap, sand, copper, lead, titanium, thorium, water and oil. All others are produced by production buildings.

First you need to know here is each extractor or drill has a different production amount on different resource deposits. For example if your design works with 5 mechanical drills on scrap and you are doing something similar to it but with lead instead, 5 mechanical drills will not be enough this time. Because of this extraction stat differences. Keep that in mind.

It is not practical to create static designs for ore extraction. Ore deposit shapes varies a lot. Which means your drill/extractor numbers will change a lot. And the ore nodes below them will also change a lot. But i can show you a design concept may help your extraction efficiency specially on early game. Imagine we have a coal deposit like this:



My immediate response for this deposit would be this:



I will build 2 titanium lines to sides and 1 to center to gather everything from that drills. However as you see from the image ,there are 9 ore deposit spots which are not used. I needed that space to gather resources. But since we know more about our transportation systems i may have a component to use here to increase productivity of this coal deposit.

When we collect materials with conveyor belts, we trash many usable ore deposit spots. For example this setup trashed 5 ore deposit spots for conveyor belts, which is more than a full mechanical drill:



But if we have used bridges to gather resources from drills and our drills had a setup like this, we only needed to trash 1 resource spot. And i still can build below that bridge conveyor to collect that resources.



This design concept may be handy when you don't have too much resources on your map and you need every single possible ore spot. The main goal is gathering as much resources as possible from an ore spot with early game drills. So space usage or coast efficiency is not important. This drills does not use energy, doesn't matter how many of them you have used. You can use as many bridges as possible outside the ore spot, but only 1 bridge start per 3 drills if you can. Start from somewhere and fill in the blanks like a puzzle. You don't need to have a "perfect" design. Doesn't matter how it looks. If you practice this concept, It will be very useful for other designs we will going to talk here.

Here's my first try:



This is not a perfect setup. I just casually placed them. Only 6 of the bridge heads are on ore spots. So i have decreased the trashed spots from 9 to 6. which is almost a full mechanical drill. Don't dive deep into this to generate a perfect design. Because ore deposits varying too much and this design will change too much according to the ore deposit positioning. Just don't do it except if you want to practice it. If you see someone who is building such a setup, don't touch it. It will be better than yours and helpful for sometime. All this drills will be upgraded to laser or airblast drills in the mid game anyway.

Note: When you play on public servers, you will see that there is a map rotation. People are playing on same maps again and again. Even there are quite a few favored community maps. Some players have some "perfect" drill setups for such maps. You can do that too. The maps on the servers are also on steam workshop. Giving some time to create "perfectly efficient drill design" on the key ore spots on such maps may help you and your team.

Boosting drills with water is very effective. Specially if it is free like this for example:



I say it free because mechanical pumps does not need energy to run. And you need "only one" per drill (even for airblast drill). If you don't have access to shore water or metaglass, then you have to use water extractors. They need 60 PU to run. Boosting a laser or airblast drill with a water extractor in this situation is OK and a must, but using 60 PU per a pneumatic or a mechanical drill is not considered as efficient. Do not use water extractors on such drills until you really need it.

Another efficiency note about laser and airblast drills, they have the same speed. if you have 3x3 or lesser space of ore deposit, do not put an airblast drill over it. Laser will be enough which uses lesser energy than airblast drill. Laser drill uses 66 PU but airblast drills are using 180 PU. More than double. If there is an ore deposit which can be covered with less than 3 laser drills, use laser drills. but if you can cover an ore spot with 3 laser drills or one single airblast drill, use the airblast drill. You get the point.

Copper and lead is best mined with mining drones. Having a single drone on a single copper spot is better than having a water and overdrive (phase) boosted laser/airblast drill on the same spot. Mining drones also can mine from a single spot all together which increases that ore spots efficiency dramatically.



Mining drone factories may need time and energy to construct their drones. But after that, they don't need power to operate. Once they finish their drone production, they will immediately stop using power. Even while they are still connected to energy grid. Most people doesn't realize that auto power switch and wait above mining drone fabricators to disconnect their connection to main energy grid once they finish their production. It was a ting before, but not any more in current build. Keep that in mind. Also keep some uncovered lead and copper deposits near your core to increase drone efficiency.

Liquids are collected with pumps. There are three types of pumps and each of them have their own uses.

Mechanical pumps are like mechanical drills. They don't need energy to operate. They are the most energy efficient pumps. If your base is close to a large source of water or you have a lot of shore space to use, generally pick mechanical pumps. A lot of them. They are free to operate and metaglass is an easy resource to generate. I suggest you to always pick this pumps until you have so little source of water/oil and you need lots of them.

Rotary pumps are the most production efficient ones. They use only 6 PU and gather 12 LU/sec from a single spot and They can cover 2 by 2 square with 48 LU/sec. They are much more effective than thermal and mechanical pumps.

Thermal pumps are the most space efficient and all around type. They gather 10 LU/sec from a single spot and can cover 3 by 3 space which generates 90 LU/sec, while using 18 PU. You can generate 108 LU/sec with the rotary pumps at the same space that a thermal pump covers:



However you will be using 36 PU, instead of 18 which is used by a single thermal pump. Also you will be covering extra space around that tar fields in the image. Each pump have its own uses. It is yours to decide which pump you are going to use. But stuff that are not using energy is preferred on multi player. Specially on early game.

Water extractors are simple water generators from energy. They are so simple. All you need to care is their pump efficiency of 7.8 LU/sec. Most of us behave them like they produce more water. But they don't. That illusion mainly comes from the terrain bonuses they get from specific maps:



There are cultivators and oil extractors to mention, however because they need extra materials to function, i am not classifying them as basic resource extractors. But you need to know that there are similar type of effects to cultivators on moss and spore moss terrains. Oil extractor is effected by shale terrain.

Sand I

Although sand is a basic resource which can be extracted from terrain, there is another way to get it by sending scrap to pulverizers. This is one of the problematic production buildings in game. No one ever tries to calculate to find out an efficient way to use them. Because of their sizes are too small may be?

Anyway a design is a solution for a problem. If you define the problem as just "producing sand", your solution will be very basic and varied a lot. We need to narrow this. For example:

What it takes to create 1 TBL sand with pulverizers?

Pulverizer accepts a single type of material, scrap and produces sand from it. it has a 1 to 1 production ratio. Just by looking at this, if i want to create 1 TBL sand from it, i have to input 1 TBL scrap to my system. Because the predicted input is lover than 2.6 TBL, i can use the best distribution system for such calculations. Overflow gate / junction chain. I prefer to chose this chain for calculations, because the distribution will give me the numbers most accurately. I already demonstrated this many times. Lets calculate it by making a basic setup:



I casually placed 10 pulverizers with an overflow gate / junction chain distribution system. As expected, this chain shows me how much pulverizers i can really run with the 1 TBL scrap input. I see that the 7th pulverizer runs time to time because of lack of items. But as we expected, this 7 pulverizers are capable and the perfect number to produce 1 TBL sand clearly. So we know what it takes to produce this 1 TBL sand.

But this setup is for large maps. We often have lesser space to build this type of setups. The system has only 1 type of item input. If you remember from the first guide we have a powerful distribution system for such builds. Overflow gate / router chains. Do you remember this?



We only need to add pulverizers to this setup:



It is way much more compact now. Don't forget that there are more than one way to do things in Mindustry. Who knows when you need such a solution for example:



We used sorters this time. Remember the escape point concept on sorters and routers? We did another example for inputting and outputting from same side. Production buildings are at the bottom. Who knows when you need such an input/output option. This sand generation setup can be a part of a larger system where you need to put all pulverizers at bottom for example.

But this is not the only compact design for such a build. we have used bridges on the last setup. This bridge chains can be handy if i ever need a more compact design. Because a bridge ending will not accept inputs i can just place 3 pulverizers next to a bridge ending so i don't need to use any conveyor belts:



As you see from the image, it perfectly works. Pulverizers cannot push items into the bridge. But is it possible to distribute enough scrap with a single bridge chain? Let's try and see:



It looks like, yes it is. if it wasn't enough we need to separate the input into smaller ones to keep chains short. But for this, we don't need to.



With such a design we handled to distribute scrap to 5 of 7 pulverizers. We need 2 more. let's continue:



If i place an inverted sorter with scrap selected on its configuration, it will distribute scrap to its sides. There is a possibility that the middle pulverizer may dump sand into this sorter. But because there is no escape path for sand anywhere, it will not push that sand into the sorter. Remember this:



Coal was perfectly getting to the graphite press. Graphite press was not dumping graphite to the sorter, until we crate an escape point for it. This is how sorters and buildings work. So we handled the distribution now. How do we collect the sand from it? Answer is again bridges let's remove the input bridges to enable us to see the output path:



If we place the bridge heads and connection directions carefully, we can collect all of the sand from the pulverizers, without mixing scrap. You need to be sure that distribution bridges and collection bridges are not touching each other. Here the distribution (input), the collection (output) chains and the finished working design:



It is more compact than the overflow gate / router chain setup:



The last system we made can be considered as a symmetric design. We sometimes need an asymmetric approach according to different situations. Let's see the input/output system and the working example:

Here are the layout of pulverizers, input bridges, their connections and input item flow



This time we used an overflow gate for distribution. We could be using another bridge there instead. It would do the job perfectly. But let's stick to the design. Here are the layout of output bridges, output bridge connections and output item flow of the system:



And look how it is working:



You can find the schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917361121

I suggest you to follow the owner of this design, killall -q This player has a nice design collection both made by himself and collected from discord. He calculates, evaluates and only adds the best designs to his collection. (i mean his account)

If you practice this type of bridge input / output systems, you could be able to fit many pulverizers into cramped, tight layouts.

Sand II

There are more design concepts we can use to create 1 TBL sand output from pulverizers. One of them is distributor approach. We can perfectly place 7 pulverizers to the sides of a distributor. However, this setup gives us only one free space for both inputting and outputting. This looks problematic:



However as I have demonstrated before, we can input and output from the same component like this:



Doesn't matter where our output is, we can rotate this output any side as we want by using jumpy bridges:



Note that i put the conveyors there on purpose. Not only to show output rotation, it is also a good demonstration for how the distributor bridge endings stops outputting when they suddenly becomes a middle element in the chain.

There is something you need to know when you do your designs with distributors. Although this design is theoretically correct, it has a flaw. The distributor in the middle tries to handle both distribution and collection at the same time. Problem here is distributor has a storage capacity of only 1 item. That means only 1 item can be pushed into distributor at a time. If you try to input more than 1 TBL scrap into it, system generates an inequality between input and output. Input will be faster than output and this will make more scrap being occupied in the distributor than the sand. More scrap, less sand means lesser output and we cannot achieve the 1TBL output.

To reduce this effect, we need to use as many bridge collectors as possible to increase output by taking some of the sand from the system directly from pulverizers. So the best usage of this system is like that:



Everything must be perfect. If someone ever tries to change that input amount, system will continue to work but fail to create 1 TBL sand.



This effect also can happen if you boost the input amount with an overdrive engine. I have placed a booster which also covering the item source to demonstrate this effect:



However it will work normally when you just overdrive the system like this, because input and output amounts are not really changing:



Use it wisely:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1970618134

Let's continue with another design concept. I call this as container/unloader setup. This concept is generally not compact as it's nature does not allow that. And have to mention it's not cheap. But it has it's own benefits. We will use a container or a vault which is generally positioned center in the design and use unloaders as distribution components.

I fit our 7 pulverizers and unloaders like that:



This is just a single way to arrange pulverizers and unloaders like that. There are more ways to do it. And this is for you to explore. Let's see how i arrange the output system in this setup:



There are pulverizers directly touching to the vault. This means pulverizers will output in to both vault and the bridges i placed there. Just because of that i also need to output sand from the vault. That is why i placed sand unloaders there. Here is the flow of sand in this system:



Actually a single unloader was enough to output sand coming from 3 pulverizers(they even send half of their content to the vault remember buildings are distributors). For the sake of having a symmetric design i put another one to the other side. And here's the working system:



This is not the most compact and cheap design. i am just showing you the design concept. You can do better than this.

The benefit of having a container/vault in such systems is the storage capacity. When this system starts to overflow, it will continue to work until the container/vault get filled, which means you will always have some buffer for both production and resource.

There is also another way to generate 1 TBL sand from scrap. It can be done by placing 5 pulverizers directly next to a full airblast drill which is boosted by water and an overdrive engine. Which is a waste of energy but can be useful if this is your only scrap source or you have too much power to spend.

Slag

Slag is a liquid source produced by melting scrap. It is hot and dangerous. If it is leaking to the surface it will burn and destroy any building touching it.



We mainly use slag to generate copper, lead, graphite and titanium by putting it into separators. Which is another problematic subject. People are wasting a lot of energy, resource and space while building this melter/separator systems. Because we don't like to calculate stuff and we are right about it. Look at this numbers, who ever wants to calculate them:

melter: input 1 scrap, output 2 slag, production time 0.17 seconds?
separator: input 2.5 scrap, output copper/lead/graphite/titanium, production time 0.58 seconds? What?

What are those floating numbers. Come on, 0.17 seconds? We don't even know how much resource it is producing it just says it produces copper/lead/graphite/titanium. But don't worry i am here to make calculations easier.

Before calculating something we need to have a purpose and ask the right question. Since output of the separators are mixed there is no meaning to have 1 TBL of mixed resources. What we need to ask is, what is the most efficient way to generate a melter/separator setup.

First let's have a look how much melter we can use with 1 TBL scrap input. Because input is below 2.6 TBL We will use "The Best" setup for this. Classic overflow gate /junction chain distributor system:



It is not even possible to make 2 melter work continuously with 1 TBL scrap! Second melter occasionally require more resource distribution. It is because that 0.17 second production time. it is a very fast working production building. So let's calculate how much separators we can run with this 2 melter:



It is just barely enough to run 5 separators. You need to remember that we don't have overflow gates for liquids. And liquid routers works as same as normal routers. This makes stuff harder to visually calculate. On router distribution, remember, first elements near to the input point gets more resources than the far away ones. So What you need to do for such calculation is make a big chain and remove the last elements one by one until every production building gets resources continuously. Just hover your mouse to production building and carefully observe if it needs resources or not. When you come to the border line, you will see that only last 2 buildings will require resources time to time. Remove the last one and you get the amount.

So melter/separator setups should have 2 melter and 5 separators in it to work efficiently. This means a single melter can handle 2.5 separators. With this knowledge, let's create some compact designs from this numbers.

Here's a good layout from (› '.' )› CaribbeanMax:



It perfectly demonstrates the numbers we have found. 2 melter and 5 separators. 1 melter is touching 2 separators and sharing 1 separator in the middle. There are free sides above to input material to melter and many free space to output from separators. Here's the input system:



I used bridge conveyor to start with, then put junctions after that bridge to prevent separator dump items to input system. Last component in that chain is a sorter which has no items selected on it's configuration to route scrap to the last melter and prevent separator to dump items into the input system. And i collected items from separators with our jumpy bridges:



This efficient design can be found here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917943434

As i said before there are always more than a single solution for stuff. If we have some metaglass to spend we could build this more cubic style. This is from Eyel:



OK, we have found efficient ways to separate this slag but how do we separate the output? What is the amount of this output anyway? I want to know how much copper, lead, graphite or titanium this system generate. I have done a lot of experiments about this and find out that each time a separator finish it's production time it spawns an item. This item is determined by a random calculation. Which we translate this as "chance" in English. So that means a separator will spawn an item on each 0.58 seconds and this item can be:

32% a copper, 19% a lead, 13% a graphite and 13% a titanium. (Thanks LCT for correcting this numbers.)

Those numbers may be change during updates. I put them here to give us a slight understanding about how often we could get a specific resource from the separators, before building a calculation setup.

There are many ways to separate this mixed items. First approach can be done by directly from separator itself by using sorters:



Be careful that i have used double sorter chains in this setup to prevent items to mix. Also you need to know that separator setups should never overflow. Otherwise your system will stop working. When i overflow the copper in the system, because there is no way to go for copper, it will fill the building's inner storage and building will stop working because it is full.



This approach is not realistic, nor efficient to do. You should never run a single separator with a single melter until you only have a little scrap input. We also mostly gather all produced items with a single transportation chain. We can use a distributor instead of the building itself like this:



We can also use sorters here like this to be more compact:



We can also get all this materials separated with a sorter / conveyor chain like this:



Here, i used our famous overflow gate / junction chain to collect overflown items instead of distribution this time. Copper was already overflown. System were continuously running even with it. It will run even with all items are overflown. I used only 1 incinerator to save the power. This is not so compact but it handles the job without costing you any silicon. Which means you may use this setup before silicon. We also did not used any liquid transportation system so no metaglass needed either.

We could use container/unloader concept if we have silicon to spend here like this:



Best way to handle such container/vault setups is placing the overflow gate / incinerator before you separate items like this:



We will be handling more melter/separator setups in the future. I'm leaving it here for now. But you can take this generic setup from komodo0dragon0island:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2002963827

Also check this compact separation system from Katsute:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2034125646

Spore Pod

A very valuable flammable resource. We will be using it to create oil, energy and explosive compounds. According to the game, it is cultivated slowly from atmosphere. Yes, slowly... it has a production rate of 1 item per 2.33 seconds. This cultivators also uses 25.2 unit water for that production. Let's skip that floating numbers and visualize the stuff.

The problematic resource to create spore pods is water. A single water extractor cannot create enough water for a cultivator. 2 of them can produce more water for 1 cultivator. Most efficient ratio is 3 to 2 like this:



or like this:



There are also maps with lots of water tiles which we can be build over them. That maps are where this cultivators shine. Because only 2 mechanical pumps are enough for 1 cultivator.



It takes 24 cultivators to create 1 TBL spore pods. Luckily we will not need to create 1 TBL spore pods for any reason. Because production buildings which requires spore pods are also works slow or require little of them :) we will be making more stuff which uses spore pods later. When it comes to produce them this is all you need to know for now.

Oil

We are able to gather oil from tar by using pumps. But there are more ways to produce oil. We can directly generate oil from energy for example. We use water, spore pods and spore presses for this. Very basic flow is like that:



As you can imagine, this is not efficient. For a single spore pod, we need more than 1 water extractor. Also Spore press can and should handle more than one efficient cultivator.

Since we started a little bit more complex builds here, we need to talk about efficiency a little bit more. Until now, we always had a goal of creating 1 TBL resource. But when it comes to create liquids, we need more calculation. A measurement unit like "one titanium conduit worth of liquid" is not practical. It is also not a visual ting to determine. This time we need to calculate this stuff by a buildings production efficiency and the info on that building which says how much LU it produces. To determine that visually, there are 2 indicators we can use. Let's look at the mouse over info screen on the spore press we have build.



If you see that indicator i marked with red arrow, this means spore press don't have enough input to produce oil. It does matter how often you see that indicator. If you see it too often, then it is not efficient. To create oil, we need to use another production chain, spore pod chain. Which means we also need to be sure about that chain's efficiency. Have a look at that setup:



I casually placed 10 efficient cultivators. To determine if it is enough for one spore press. But spore pods are building up slowly, which means that our spore pod production is more than it can handle. That is the second indicator for us to determine the efficiency. I tried some setups. With 6 efficient cultivators, we still get the input not enough indicator on spore press. When i place a 7th fully efficient cultivator, then spore pods are started to build up slowly. Then i came up with this:



6 efficient spore pods and 1 less efficient one (70%-74%). In this setup you can still rarely see the input not enough indicator. But the timing is very short. I can speculate that it might be lesser than its production time. However, when we create compact designs which include more than a single production line, We need to be sure that we are creating enough input for the last product. Because we always want to be sure that we are producing the last product as efficient as possible. It could be another input for another setup and we always want to be precise about it. So i call it 7 cultivators for a single spore press. Here is a compact design demonstrates this numbers:



I think i don't need an item flow animation for this. You should easily understand how this kind of stuff works based on all of the information i am giving you in this guide. (Inform me in the comments otherwise, i will add it.)

This is quite a large setup for just 18/sec oil output isn't it? It could be smaller and much more energy efficient if we were building this over water:



I changed the sorters over the spore press with routers. Just wanted to show that it is also possible to distribute spore pods with them. I prefer sorters most of the time. Because it looks cooler with the colors they have. Not necessarily important specifically in this setup but i know that they are faster too.

When we look at to the spore press with even compact designs like this, it looks like an unnecessarily resource and energy consuming building. However if you don't have access to tar, thorium, sand or scrap in your map the only way to produce oil is this building.

Thorium is needed to build oil extractors. Which is another source of oil. It is an expensive building, requires a little bit sand and moderate amount of water to function. It also cannot be built over water.

To get the sand we can use a single full pneumatic drill. It generates just enough sand for it. Mechanical drill speed is not enough for it to fully function. It also requires 9/sec water input. Which means 1 water extractor is not enough for it to fully function. 2 Water extractors are producing more water for single oil extractor.

For a single oil extractor, we can use the second water extractors excess water to boost a mechanical drill. This works very nice:



But since both mechanical drills and pneumatic drills covers the same area, and they don't use energy, there is no point on doing this.

Having two oil extractors sharing 3 water extractors is the efficient way to use it, like this:



We are actually generating oil from sand and energy here. We can generate sand from scrap. So it is possible to generate oil from scrap and energy. One pulverizer is generating more than enough sand for 2 oil extractors. You can barely run 5 oil extractors with 2 pulverizers:



We have the numbers now. Since setups with oil extractors are very conditional and it requires not too much buildings, i will be evaluating them when we need to design something which requires them. As soon as you place buildings touching each other, Your design will be compact with oil extractors.

Coal

Coal has many uses from being burned for generating energy to being ammo and to be used as key resource at the production buildings like silicon, graphite and pyratite. Having efficiency notes, schematics for coal in your pocket is very important and will solve many problems you are possibly having. Apart from being extracted from terrain, it can be produced from oil with coal centrifuges.

If you remember, we can generate oil from pure energy, this means we can also generate coal form energy. So there is no map which doesn't have coal source as soon as you have some some silicon in your pocket. Guess what? You can generate even more energy form generated coal by energy :) Let's first generate coal efficiently and leave the energy stuff to energy sections.

So let's ask our generic question. What it takes to generate 1 TBL coal with coal centrifuges?



5 centrifuges are "just" enough. It sometimes create small holes on the line because of the traffic on the conveyor line. Last centrifuge sometimes cannot push items to already occupied conveyors. Better you collect that output with a bridge. You will see that holes will vanish.

With a coal centrifuge we can generate 2 coals per second with 5.4 sec oil input. For 5 centrifuges we need 27 oil/sec input.

Let's first try generating coal with cultivator / spore press approach. i will need at least 2 spore presses because i need 27 oil/sec, a spore press is 18 oil/sec max. They don't need to be fully efficient dough. 2 spore presses and 5 centrifuges. This reminds me the melter/separator setup we did before:



They work with the same principle. So we need to support 2.5 coal centrifuges with a single spore press. Let's find out how much cultivators we gonna need for an spore press to be able to support 2.5 coal centrifuges. I believe we need an efficiency of 75% on each spore press. From the knowledge we achieved before on oil section, we know that 6 cultivators were not enough for a fully functional spore press. We needed to add a 7th one. But what if 6 cultivators are just the right number for our setup to make an spore press work on something close to 75% efficiency? I believe it is probably much but this gives me a good opportunity to show you a visual calculation method:



It looks like 6 efficient cultivators are a bit more than we need. Spore pods are building up slowly. This spore pods will continuously build up until their traffic jams the cultivators below the line. Because there is no way for this cultivators to push items, they will fill in their internal storages and stop working. This will stop the spore pods gathering more and it will stay in an equilibrium point. This will give us a very visual clue to calculate how much cultivators we actually need. As you see from the image, last 2 cultivators were not fully working. But they sometimes work. We don't need the last cultivators to be fully efficient. So 5 efficient cultivators for each spore press which are also sharing 1 cultivator is our sweet number.

The setup we used for calculation, looks very large. It consist of 33 buildings, conveyor lines in the middle, really reminds me the drill usage on ore spots. I came up with an idea like the one i did on drills. I arranged cultivators and water extractors like that:



This is another efficient setup for 3 cultivators. Each cultivator touching two water extractors. a bridge start will collect all materials from all cultivators in 2 jumps. I choose this as a base and came up with this compact setup:



I changed the spore press / coal centrifuge arrangement a bit. Used the 3 cultivator setup i just show you as a puzzle peace and arranged stuff like that. Edited the triple setup when I needed new arrangement. I also used bridge conduits to distribute water around a little bit better. Everything works nice. Oil and spore pods are slowly building up, so we can be sure about all 5 coal centrifuges are working continuously.

You can get this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1975853625

This is a square like symmetric design. You may want to make more versions of this. More rectangle(ish) slim versions for example to be used in narrower spaces. That is up to you now.

Let's make an over water version for this generator. That setup may occupy less space. I'll only show you the design this time. I believe most of the time, you don't need that arrow item flow animations anymore. But inform me in comments if you want to see the item flow. I'll add it here.



You can get this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1946418102

if we have access to thorium on our map, we can make coal from sand (or scrap) by using oil extractors. Oil extractor setups are always compact so i will give you the numbers, you can make the designs:

1 Fully efficient oil extractor can handle 2 efficient coal centrifuges with 100% ratio and 1 inefficient coal centrifuge with ~78% ratio. Which means you can generate ~ 5.5 coal per second.

An inefficient oil extractor which has a water input from only 1 water extractor can handle 2 efficient coal centrifuges with 100% ratio and 1 inefficient coal centrifuge with ~40% ratio. which means you can generate ~ 4.8 coal/ second with such setup.

According to that calculations, to generate 1 TBL coal we need 2 efficient oil extractors supported with 3 water extractors with 5 coal centrifuges. If you need to do it with scrap, remember the oil section, we only need 1 pulverizer to feed this two oil extractors

Graphite I

Graphite is our first produced resource. We cannot mine it from map terrain. It is one of the key resources in the game. Mainly used as a construction resource. It is also ammo for some important turrets and used in large combat mech production. You need a good graphite income for your core to make your building progress faster and smoother.

After collecting lead and copper you will directly make graphite presses to get it. Graphite presses are slow production buildings. They don't use power but they use a lot of coal. Their production rate is 2 to 1. Means you need 2 TBL coal input to get 1 TBL graphite output from them, which will require 15 graphite presses.

The most common and the most compact design for graphite press setup is this one:



We have already been seen this on input/output and distribution systems sections. You know how it works. It is a modular design. You can chain this setup to increase your output. Maximum graphite presses you can run with this setup (which is using conveyors) is 8 which requires 1 TBL coal input:




Here is a distributor approach for 8 presses:



I may save this schematic. But I will not use this setup until i have (or i am sure i will have) 1 TBL coal income. Before that i should have been already build a 4 or 6 graphite press setup with the first chain design i have shown before. I will be just adding 2 or 4 more presses when i achieve the 1 TBL coal input. For me, those will be changing to multi presses anyway at mid game.

You can find this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1977482614

This distributor approach is very common within graphite presses. Here is another design for 8x presses from Sir Silicon:



As you see from the image this is a clog free setup. Specially on multi player you will encounter many item mixing where everyone is building at the same time. This one keeps your graphite presses working and dump unwanted items out from the system:

You can find this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2015159258

In my very own perspective, for 1 TBL graphite output, having 15 graphite presses at early game is kinda not necessary. Many maps doesn't have that large coal deposits to generate 2 TBL coal income with mechanical and pneumatic drills. However there are some custom maps which are allowing us to create such setups. If you have enough space and resources for it, it is more reliable to have large graphite press setups cause they don't use energy.

To achieve this large constructions, we can use bridge distribution systems manipulating the 1 line i/o system. Just because graphite presses does not cost energy, we can use 16x presses instead of 15 to achieve the pair system. We can use a design concept from (› '.' )›CaribbeanMax here. This will be our numbers and the separate bridge systems:



This is how the distribution works separately:



And this is the final design:



However this distribution system contains long bridge chains. You may experience some production latency from such systems specially on low fps rates. We can use :3 Sweetness and Blushes's design style here for 16x multi press setup like this:

Graphite II

Multi-presses are the better versions of graphite presses. They make 2 graphites from 3 coals with using 3 units water per 0.5 second. They cost energy to run, faster, more efficient but problematic because of the production rate. Each multi-press can handle 0.5 TBL coal. 2 of them can handle 1 TBL coal. To get 1 TBL graphite by using multi-press in your design you need 3 multi-presses and 1.5 TBL coal input.

First mistake people are doing is not making calculations before starting a design. Which leads to inefficient setups for both space usage and energy usage. I understand this, people hate numbers. Just because of this, there are many designs in our workshop which has 4 or even more multi-presses in it. To make a setup which has 4 multi-presses in it, you need 2 full titanium lines of coal. None of them has a transportation system to handle that much coal.

Second mistake that people fell into while building multi-presses is the water input. More than 1 water extractor per multi-press is an energy trash. A water extractor generates 7.8 LU/s. a multi-press uses 6 LU/sec. More than enough. it is possible to run 3 multi-presses with 2 water extractors, if your aim is generating 1TBL graphite.

The most basic setup with multi-presses should look like this:



This setup is compact and can handle 1 TBL coal input. But when you go up from this point and want to handle more than 2 multi-presses you need a faster distribution system than titanium and bridge conveyors. And if you want to handle 4 or more multi-presses you need a better collection system than bridges and titanium conveyors. I mean you need at least 2 titanium conveyors to output from 4 efficient multi-presses.

Let's make a proper setup with multi-presses which has 1 TBL graphite output. It requires 1.5 TBL coal input which means we cannot use bridges or titanium conveyors for input. closest ting we can use is overflow gate / junction chain which has a rate of 2.6 TBL. Phase conveyors also has 2.35 TBL but they are not an option mostly at that point in game when we are switching from graphite presses to multi-presses. Here is a very basic design:



Because of 1.5 TBL input requirement i needed to use the overflow gate /junction chain here. I placed junctions in a way that they cover the multi-presses top side. So i prevent graphite to clock our input system. Then used inverted sorters to route coal coming from overflow gates to multi-presses.

You can find this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1977490248

We can also make an over water version of this setup to save some space and energy like this:



It is also possible to generate graphite from pure energy. Because we can generate coal from energy. Remember the large coal generator we made before which has 1 TBL coal output. Just put 2 multi-presses with 2 water extractors, then you are good to go:



You can make more versions of this with oil extractors. You can generate graphite from sand with this way, which will be more space efficient than this. You can also get graphite from separators by melting scrap. But you would get much more graphite by just making sand from scrap and using this sand to extract oil for coal centrifuges.

Here is a container/unloader design version, if you somehow want to use the vault storage space:

Metaglass I

Metaglass requires more than 1 type of resource. 1 lead and 1 sand to produce 1 metaglass in 0.5 seconds. It's production time is same as coal centrifuge. So we will need 5 kilns to produce 1 TBL metaglass. From what we have experienced so far, we can easily say that 1 TBL output in such systems requires 1 TBL input for both lead and sand. Let's check:



As we guessed it is just the perfect number. 5 kilns with 1 TBL lead and 1 TBL sand is outputting 1TBL metaglass. However, if you are not using this resource as ammo, you will never need that many metaglass input for your core. Mostly 2 kilns are enough for single play. 3 or 4 kilns for multi play cause more than 1 person will be constructing stuff around.

I already have shown you a setup with 4 kilns before while we were talking about distribution systems:



You can increase your productivity with this design like this:



Because we need to input more than 1 TBL to each side we need a faster transportation chain. I used overflow gate /junction chain for this. But because we only distribute 1 type of item from each side it could also be a router/overflow gate chain too.

For a good compact setup for 5 kiln's you can use :3 Sweetness and Blushes's super compact underflow gate / conveyor system from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1929583285

Metaglass is a very good example for us to practice a new design concept, scrap generators.

From scrap we can make both sand and lead. So it is possible to create metaglass from scrap. All we need to do is taking out all materials except lead from a separator setup and burn them and use remaining lead for metaglass making. Let's do it.

This will be our first scrap generator. So there will be so much stuff to talk here. For metaglass I'll try to demonstrate how the calculations done, as detailed as possible but after that all scrap generator setup explanations will be shorter.



I used our most efficient separator setup we have manage to make so far but replaced the sorter at the end of the input chain with an inverted sorter to make tings more clear. I also took some of the scrap from there to feed a single pulverizer to supply our kiln with sand. A simple sorter was enough for me to take lead from system and i burn every other stuff with an incinerator. Our goal here is to produce metaglass only. So I am burning all other resources generated by separators to enable them continuously working. Now we know that separator systems requires overflown items to be handled.

When we crate design consists of separators we need to wait for sometime to see the final result. This setup may work good for a while but after sometime i can see that single pulverizer is not enough for our kiln. Because lead is building up and kiln info screen informs me about the lack of sand. I added another pulverizer to the setup:



This time sand is building up. But i can see that second pulverizer is needed time to time. But why does sand building up this time? Because we were already stealing scrap from our melter /separator setup for 1 pulverizer. When we add the second one we started to steal more. If you remember this melter/separator setup requires 1 TBL scrap Input. When we steal scrap from it, separators would not get enough slag for fully working. We simply killed the separator efficiency and reduced the lead income with this pulverizers.

Metaglass II

When it comes to slag separation everything works with chance. So having only 1 example is not a good solution to calculate what we need efficiently. You need to have more of them to get a real understanding how they work. I already calculated before that having 2 pulverizers than 1, generates more metaglass. What i am not sure is we already reduced the separator efficiency what if i run this with only 4 separators instead of 5. Let's see the setup i made to calculate such stuff:



I have duplicated calculation setups which are outputting into a vault that runs with 4 separators to the left. Did the same with 5 separators to the right. I wired them in a way that i can activate all of them at the same time by placing an infinite power source. So every one of them will start at the same time. I will allow them to run for sometime and remove the power source before any vault gets full. I did this calculation with 15 setups of each side. What will i do is count the numbers in the vaults and divide them to 15 to get an average number. Here are the numbers:

With 4 separators: (819+821+775+771+818+762+770+788+785+839+777+771+755+795+784)/15 = 788.6666
With 5 separators: (803+777+728+807+799+777+775+820+784+818+759+850+762+801+787)/15 = 789.8

i am intentionally giving you this numbers. Look how different they are. They look like random numbers between 700ish and 800sih. Scrap generators are inconvenient on the output because of the randomness on separators. Keep that in mind. Let's continue.

Now we are sure that there is not a significant difference between them on average. So having 1 extra separator does not effect the output too much. In my opinion, having about a single or two extra metaglass on each 788th production does not worth it. Removing 1 separator and reducing the energy is more logical. So, our sweet numbers are 2x melter, 4x separator, 2x pulverizer, 1x incinerator and 1 kiln. Now we have both production efficiency and energy efficiency in our pocket. Time to lay down this solution into a compact place:



This is what i came up with. I still feel that it can be arranged in a more compact fashion but this metaglass generator, i don't know if i ever use it anyway :) This is a guide at the end of the day. i want to show more of this stuff. I enjoy this as a puzzle at this design stage.

This design has two different transportation chains evolving to another different chain at their ending points. This is an example of mixed chains. Let's see the item flow 1 by 1 starting from input chain:



When we start to transfer stuff in compact spaces, we value the properties of this components much more in this mini world. Sometimes we have to use everything in our arsenal to solve problems. So knowing this components a little bit deeper helps very much here. I draw the lines, you read the first guide, then you already get it:



I wanted to show you how all the separated(from slag) but mixed items are entering to the bridge system from all possible locations. Now let's see how the unwanted (red) items and lead (purple) moves separately:



My point here was putting that incinerator to the top right. This way if someone ever needs that other resources, can replace it with a conveyor and use them else where (if only handles the overflown items). So i needed to move the mixed items like a snake to turn them around as I need. To do this, i used mixed chains from bridge to sorters. There is a flaw on this chain. Some of the items returning to the chain again. I thought that might effect the efficiency. Tested it, working safe. Luckily that happened. Cause we may do such mini flaws as soon as they don't effect our efficiency goals. In this case even helped me on placing that item burner at top right.



Remember when we used a sorter as an input for graphite on the input section on this guide. Same is happening here. and i used the escape path concept to burn the unwanted items with using the same type of component above.

Just one ting left. If i want to make a schematic from this and if i even wanna share this schematic around, i will fill in the blanks with something useful. My number one choice would be solar panels. But if i ever need such a build at somewhere, i believe i may not have access to silicon yet. So I will go with small batteries. They are cheap, fast to build and always good to have some around. Also having a good energy line coverage in your design negates the need of having to put a power node outside this design. Which helps space efficiency.



You can find this schematic and copy paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1945263333


We will be making more of this scrap generators. They are fun to play with. They are also very good to provide you with many items specially on large maps where the only resource you can reach is scrap on some places. Yeah, many maps are being played on public servers have those type of opportunities. We can make everything except thorium and phase fabric from scrap with using some energy. We can even make impact reactors just running with scrap. And i will going to show you how to do all of this.

Silicon I

One of the most important resources in the game. You always need a good silicon income for your core. It is used as building resource, ammo for some towers, on combat mech and fighter production and mostly on surge alloy production. Specially if you are going to make surge by unloading from core, you need around 2 TBL silicon income. This much, if you are playing on single player. You may need more on multi player where many people are building at the same time. So we need to know every efficient way to create silicon.

It has not an equal input ratio like metaglass has. 2 sand and 1 coal. This is where most of us start to make mistakes. When you make a setup and casually input 1 TBL sand and 1 TBL coal to a silicon smelter system, you can barely run 4 of them:



Then second mistake comes with using routers for distribution. Because they both give a visual illusion that more silicon smelters are working and it is possible to input more materials to router chains from everywhere. Which leads to the third mistake, building spaghetti bases. This types of bases will bug you a lot and take your attention from action more often.

Our calculation rule says, if i need to generate 1 TBL silicon, i need 1 TBL coal and 2 TBL sand input. And i already calculated that, 7 silicon smelters needed for it. Even if i didn't calculated that, i may know this number by just looking at a silicon smelters production time. It has the same production time as pulverizers. So the number should be the same as them:



I have started writing this guide before 103.4 build. Before that build there is a false info about titanium conveyor belt speed as 12 items/second. Just because of this, we needed to create setups to calculate how much production building we need to create 1 TBL item output. After build 103.4 that info corrected as 10 items/second. Now with that info we can easily calculate input, output and how many buildings we need to make. You even don't need to do a real calculation. You can define this numbers just by looking at info menu on a production building:



When we look at to the production time at input/output area, you can see that it is 0.67 seconds. All you need to do is multiply that number with 10. Which means remove the zero at start (if there is one) and move the point 1 digit. Which is 6.7 in this case. That means we need 6 fully working and 1 70% working silicon smelter. Since that 70% efficiency is not something we can create visually and it is already happening naturally when you feed the system with the required input, we call this 7 smelters.

Let's do another example:



That is the input/output info of the cultivator. production time -> 2.33 seconds multiply by 10 -> 23.3 round up -> 24. To have 1 TBL spore output from cultivators, we need 24 of them (actually 23 100% efficient and 1 33% efficient).

Your need of silicon increases when you progress throughout the game. At early stages, when you need your first bits of silicons to progress, there is mostly no way that you are getting 1TBL coal and 2TBL sand input with mechanical or pneumatic drills for a large silicon factory system. You need to start small, get some silicon and use it to build a moderate energy income first with steam or thermal generators.

After getting some energy, you will upgrade your graphite production system first with multi-presses. After that have some spare silicon on your core and upgrade or replace your silicon system with the 7 (or 6) smelter version. After reaching to a point when you going to make alloy smelters, you should have more larger silicon setups.

So let's start with early game builds first. One of the good early game silicon design is the common distribution system with overflow gates. You should build maximum 4 silicon smelters at that stage. If your coal source and sand source are at opposite directions, or there are enough space between them to put this design, it is a decent one for 4 silicon smelters for this conditions:



You know that design from metaglass. You also know that it is expandable. Let's expand it like this:



Here is a setup that you can make many mistakes. First mistake is the input. This input shown in the image is not enough for 8 silicon smelters. We know that we can run only 7 smelters with that input. You need more coal and sand for this setup. Second mistake is conditional. With that input 8th smelter is unnecessary. The third mistake is again conditionally the output. With this input it is OK. But if you increase your input to be able to run 8 smelters then you need a second conveyor line for output. Because you will be outputting more than a single line with 8 smelters. Having an extra output line for just 1 silicon smelter is pointless.

We can easily fix this setup like this:



Now we can talk here about production and energy efficiency. But space efficiency? It looks very compact when we just look at to the setup. But when we start to add input lines and output lines around it, it becomes a mess. Specially if your sand and coal inputs are both coming from same direction.

Here is a more tidy solution for 4 silicon smelters by Boyd with some inspiration from killall -q's collection



This is the item flow of the system:



This a very good setup collects input from one side and does the output from other side. We can barely run 4 smelters with 1 TBL sand input. But this early game setup may allow you to input more sand to the system if you have spare. The sorters at input points are not necessary. They are there to kindly point the input locations to other players who will use this schematic.

You can find this schematic from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1980553720

When it comes to create a setup which has 7 silicon smelters, input variety, input amount and smelter count makes our job harder. We require a symmetrical design due the input count. Boyd's design was handling sand input by dividing it into 2 which is increasing the chain count by 1. But he uses bridges in a way that he can do both coal distribution and silicon collection at the same space in the middle. This is only possible if we have a symmetrical design which has a single gap between two mirrored sides.

Let me show this with a 6 smelter design i made. This one can be a little more space efficient But i like the way how it looks. Also allows me to show you some unloader usage:



This is the foundation. As you see from the image, it is just a mirrored design with a gap between that mirrors. With the unloader setup on the first smelters, i only need to care about distributing sand to forward smelters. Let's do the coal distribution first:



You need to be sure that first bridge and the second bridges must be separate otherwise it will not distribute coal to the first 2 smelters. Now let's handle the sand distribution:



Al we need to do is collecting resources:

Silicon II

On the 6 smelter setup i used unloaders which requires silicon to build. You cannot build this setup in your base without having some silicon in your pocket. As i said before, efficient way to create silicon consist of two parts. A starting design which has 3 or 4 smelters, and a mid/late game design which has at least 6 smelters. You need to make at least 2 lines of silicon coming to your core if you are going to build surge alloy by unloading from your core. You need at least 3, better 4 lines of silicon income on multi player maps. Specially on attack maps you will need much more for combat unit production. If your design has more than 4 smelters, you may use components which requires silicon to build, according to my strategy.

Here is a more compact version of this setup. This time we used coal unloader instead:



This is a very good setup. I'll re create and inspect it on pyratite production later. I just wanted to show you that we could do better if we wanted.

Anyway that gaps on the output of those 6 smelter setups bugs me a lot. I need a setup which generate actually 1 TBL silicon. I have to admit that the generic 7 silicon smelter setup is actually my best. Because it is already altering the sand input into 1 chain instead of 2 chains, it can be considered as compact. Only problem with the setups is that conveyor lines:



Chains which can carry 2 or more TBL resources are problematic because of the components we are using on that chains. They have very large potential to dump unwanted items every where. That is why the 6 smelter setups always have that 2 different sand input chains.

If you remember the 1 TBL output graphite design we made with multi-presses, i can use the same concept here. But with 7 smelters it would be a long and slim design. It is useful to have different shaped designs for the same solution. You can use them according to the space you have. You can fit this one into narrow places:



This design has production and energy efficiency. But for space usage, i am not sure. Because It looks like, all we did is taking the basic setup and pressing it from top and bottom and squeezing it. It is no more thick as it was before. But it is longer now. What we did is we placed a gap between smelters to input sand safely. There were 14 conveyor belts on the generic setup i marked with red. Now we have 14 spaces between smelters. The generic design and this one technically takes up almost the same space:



I tried many tings for 7 silicon smelter design. I was looking for a way to do it more compact than generic design. Here is a design based on (›'.')›CaribbeanMax's 7 smelter solution. That is the foundation and the item flow between buildings:



We just add input and output than our 1 TBL output efficient and compact design is ready:



Here is the input and output. This design has some storage space within junctions and bridges. So expect some production latency.

You can find both this schematic and copy paste codes from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1925949893

7 silicon smelter compact design is a challenging one. We need more of this designs. If you have a compact and efficient design for that much smelters, please share the steam schematic link or copy paste code on comments. I will gladly inspect it here.

Let's continue with other ways to generate silicon. Sand and coal is what we need for silicon. We can generate coal from sand. So it is possible for us to generate silicon from sand. Let's start with counting the numbers first. We will generate oil from sand and coal from that oil with coal centrifuges. So how many coal centrifuges we need per a silicon smelter? Coal centrifuge has a production time of 0.5 seconds and silicon has 0.67 seconds. There is a 0.17s time difference between them. This causes a little overflow of coal on each 1 to 1 centrifuge/smelter ratio. You can safely use 1 centrifuge for every 1 smelter until you have 3 centrifuges. When you add the 4th centrifuge to the system, this small overflows build up enough for you to run 5 smelters. As we remember from the oil section, 1 oil extractor with 1 water extractor attached to it can run 2 efficient and 1 inefficient coal centrifuges. However that low efficiency is enough for us to run 3 smelters with them, because of this small production difference. Those are my sweet numbers when i think of an efficient silicon from sand setup. 1 oil extractor 1 water extractor 3 coal centrifuges and 3 silicon smelters.

Let's try this numbers before starting to a design first:



Looks like our calculation was right. Coal builds up a bit as expected. And what i can i see the movement on the sand line is our input is almost 1 TBL sand. If i added more smelters to the system, input had to be more than 1 TBL sand. So this is actually a very good number. Let's have a compact design for this. I will inspect and explain a very good setup from killall -q. I don't remember how many times i used this one in game. This is the foundation:



The exact numbers we have calculated. (I love people who does real calculations before making and sharing designs. That is why this guide full of killall -q's designs.) Of course it doesn't make any sense when we place them like this. Let's see the sand input first:



Overflow gate used here to distribute sand to oil extractor first. Then all overflown sand goes to a bridge chain distribution system. Now we can easily move oil with a bridge conduit and a liquid router like this:



Let's see the output flow:



Look how simple it looks when you break down input and output and inspect them separately. Now put them all together, fill in the blanks with useful components like a power node and some batteries. Because this design already costs silicon to build, we can also use solar panels here for banks to reduce power cost:



This is more power efficient when you fill in the blanks with solar panels but costs more silicon than before. Use solar panels safely for your cause. But kindly replace them with small batteries when you like to share your design. I'll return this design again on this section. But it is time for my favorite part. Scrap generator version of silicon.

Silicon III

if we can generate sand from scrap, than we can generate silicon from scrap too. We can make two different versions of scrap to silicon generator. We can assume that there might be some maps around which doesn't have thorium ore deposits. So we cannot use oil extractors on such maps. Then our first design will generate coal from energy instead. Let's calculate first:

As i mentioned before, pulverizers has the same production time with silicon smelters. A single pulverizer produces 1 sand per 0.67 seconds. To run a single silicon smelter, we need 2 pulverizers. With 1 TBL scrap input we were able to make 7 pulverizers work. But the 7th one was not fully efficient. So we can run maximum 3 efficient silicon smelters with a little bit less than 1 TBL scrap input. Because the smelter number is 3, not 4 we need 3 coal centrifuges.

If we think about the small production time difference between coal centrifuge and silicon smelter, we have some plenty overflow on coal centrifuges. It is not enough to run 4th smelter, but we don't need to have fully efficient coal centrifuges either. With all coal centrifuges attached to same spore press i can control the efficiency on them by reducing the spore amount going to spore press I have calculated the numbers as we have the most energy efficient way to produce it:



Coal is very slowly building up with 4 efficient cultivators and 1 inefficient one. If i remove that inefficient cultivator, then generated coal is not enough to run 3 silicon smelters all the time. 7 water extractors, 5 cultivators, 1 spore press, 3 coal centrifuges, 6 pulverizers and 3 silicon smelters... We generally need to create large designs with cultivator / spore press included:



Just edited the oil generator we did before. I thought instead of taking scrap from side, i could use the space around that water extractors to make and deliver the sand to silicon smelters. It also satisfy my input from one side output from other side view :) You can use and generate spaces around that water extractors to make different designs like this:



You can find this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1940377398

If your map has some thorium deposits then we can make oil with oil extractors which will reduce the space usage of our scrap to silicon generator. When we make scrap generators, our main design concept is having a single TBL scrap input and do whatever we can efficiently with that input. With 1 TBL scrap input we can make 7 pulverizers. 6 of them will be used by silicon smelters. The 7th pulverizer in such setup is not fully efficient but works more than enough to run an oil extractor. If you remember from the oil section, an inefficient oil extractor which is supported with 1 water extractor was enough for 3 coal centrifuges. This numbers are perfect for a silicon generator:



Calculation was right as we expected. 7 pulverizers, 1 water extractor, 1 oil extractor, 3 coal centrifuges and 3 silicon smelters are our numbers. This time i will be doing a design which has a 2 by 2 space around the middle, preferably close to the edge. I'll put a large power node there. That power node will do it's job as a power node for sometime. Then we can change it with an overdrive projector to increase efficiency of the system. It will not as space efficient as we might want but having an overdrive projector option is really nice. I have casually made a distribution system for coal centrifuges and silicon smelters before. Something like that:



Overflow gate / junction chain is for sand. Then i used bridge conduits to distribute oil like that:



I took three smelters from this setup and placed an oil extractor like that and distribute oil within that bridge conduits like that:



Then i placed a power none over oil extractor. Then i assumed that i will bring sand to my overflow distribution system with a bridge from that position. Also the empty space below that bridge will allow me to input phase into the overdrive projector if i want, like that:



Now it is the fun part. I have some space behind this setup to put 7 pulverizers. I placed small walls to duplicate that space. So i can work freely on that place without getting distracted by other buildings.



All of the walls represents areas that we cannot build. Plastanium walls represents the points that i need to input sand. Titanium walls represents my optional space which i can expand through that direction if need. This is now a puzzle piece. I placed my pulverizers and handled the input like this:



Now time to gather the sand from this maze:



The last 2 optional space was just what i needed here to put my snake like bridges within those pulverizers. You see how sand gets into the system, then how does all of them moves throughout the system. Mind one of the pulverizers just placed next to plastanium wall. That is my input to the oil extractor. Now time to plug in this puzzle piece to the system:



You can find this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1940389564

This is not a space efficient setup. A lot of space has been used for distribution. It could be more compact. That is one of my early designs. I wanted to study it to show how can we use our favorite system parts as puzzle peaces. Also i wanted to show you my way to reserve spaces with using walls to concentrate to a single part of a design without getting disturbed by surrounding buildings. I didn't tried to make more compact scrap to silicon design. Because we already have it.

You should remember this from the sand section:



We also inspected a very compact design for sand to silicon concept:



Those two actually designed for to be a part of a modular design. All we need to do is plug this together:



harsspartan118 made another plug-in for this system. More compact and has interesting properties. His plug-in enables both scrap or/and sand input at the same time. A hybrid system. Let's have a look:



When we input sand or scrap directly to the system, it just passes through the first 2 sorters. As we know from the first guide 3 sorters here will not work as a chain. There is only 1 way for the input and that is the routers. At that point that routers act exactly same as the distributor designs we made for scrap or graphite. if the input is sand, it will be returned back to the middle sorter then to the sorter with sand selected on its options. If input is scrap, there is no escape path for scrap other than pulverizers:



You can find this design and copy paste codes for both silicon smelter and pulverizer setups from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1915883869

Plastanium I

Plastanium is my next item to produce after i upgrade my silicon production and increase my energy income a bit more to handle airblast drills. Normally it takes ages to build large structures like alloy smelters, impact reactors even oil extractors. Also building more advanced towers like salvos, ripples and cyclones takes a lot of time. So i need to upgrade my ship to trident as soon as i get this point. Trident ship pad requires plastanium. I also like to upgrade my defenses to cyclones fed with metaglass at that stage too. Cyclones can handle both air and land units. If you use metaglass as ammo for them they will have a large area of effect which can even be used at very late game. (Specially at survival mode, AOE becomes everything on late game) Let's have a look at game info on plastanium compressor:



It requires 2 titanium and 15/sec oil to function and production time is 1 seconds. Remember our new calculation method. Multiply the production time by 10 which is again 10 in this situation :). So i need 10 plastanium compressors to generate 1 TBL plastanium output. Which requires 2 TBL titanium and 150/sec oil input. Thats a lot of titanium and oil. We have the same issue like we had on metaglass here. Do we ever need that much plastanium other than if we use it as ammo. Luckily we don't. Only 3 or 4 plastanium compressors for core is enough for single and multi player games.

If we assume we gather oil from terrain, we have a good generic design for 1 TBL titanium input:



For ammo production if you like to increase your output, just duplicate the setup and you are good to go:



Or with some bridges to be more compact and while we have some space to play with within compressors, let's add a power node there to connect them all:



https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2018702861

Of course this design is not enough for our needs. There are alternate sources to create oil if we don't have tar on our map

First way we can make oil is spore presses. From the oil section, we know that maximum output of a spore press is like a tiny bit more than 18/sec oil. Plastanium compressor uses 15/sec oil. Which means we cannot run more than 1 plastanium compressor per spore press. Designs consists of more than 1 spore presses are always large. Remember the coal generator we made. Let's do the small one:

Our design goal here is having a fully production efficient plastanium compressor, an inefficient spore press running with enough cultivators. We will input titanium from outside:



Let's do a design for this:



That inverted sorters were not necessary but i like how they look :) You can chain them to the same conveyor like this:



Or like this:



Behold! The mighty conveyor eater! Looks like a huge mechanical monster eating the conveyor and the distribution system is it's teeth :) Let's have a look at that teeth closer:



I tried to show the overflow gate behavior with that weird arrows. And this is the collection:



I hope you never get to a desperate position to make yourself have to build this none sense in a gigantic map. (or you can consider this as having fun for building this silly ting...) Here's the schematic of it, if you like:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1990022619

Plastanium II

If you have thorium on your map and a way to create sand, you should consider using oil extractors. An oil extractor can generate exactly the required amount for a single plastanium compressor at it's 100% efficiency. We know that most efficient way to use oil extractors is using 2 water extractors on 2 oil extractors. And a single water extractor shared by 2 oil extractor. Most energy efficient extractor/plastanium setup is this 2 pairs. Which means we again fell into the pair situation. Then 4 plastanium compressors is our maximum number on pair systems, if we don't want to handle more than 1 TBL input. Also to be realistic we don't need more than that. Even if you need it for ammo, duplicate that system with 2 pairs off plastanium compressors and you are good to go.

I could use this distribution system for 2 pair production systems as you remember:



But i will edit it in a way that i can use it for both distribution and collection. The underflow gate trick also can be used here safely because of pair system. But i will stick to that distribution system which is more reliable:



Our efficient numbers were 2 compressor, 2 oil extractor and 3 water extractors. We can arrange them in many different ways:



I will use the top right one. Because it has two compressor next to each other, perfectly fits to my design and there is just enough space behind the oil extractors which will allow me to input sand.



There is even a beautiful spot for a power node which will connect everything to each other, just below the bridge conduit. Then i added the sand input chain to the system like that:



You can find this design and copy/paste codes from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1990842945

We can also generate plastanium from scrap. Since spore press solution requires too many buildings, i will go with oil extractor here. A setup with an oil extractor will cost less energy. Because titanium spawn chance is low on scrap separators, i guess we cannot even run a single fully efficient plastanium compressor with 1 TBL. And i guess we even don't need a fully efficient oil extractor for this. Let's do the calculation:



Like we did on scrap to metaglass generator, i have stolen a little bit scrap from the separator setup to convert it into sand for oil extractor. However it will not effect the separator efficiency enough to remove the 5th separator like we did on metaglass. Also as i expected, system is not generating enough titanium for a single plastanium compressor to fully work. Then an oil extractor supported with only 1 water extractor is enough for this setup. Here is my compact solution for this numbers:



With what we have learned so far, the distribution system should be easy to understand on this design.

You can find this design and copy/paste codes from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1944264996

I did more calculations on this generator. Adding another 5x slag separators with another 1TBL scrap input overflows the titanium output even with a fully efficient oil extractor. 2 fully efficient plastanium compressors are a bit much in that situation. We always come to a point that, instead of having a single design with 10 separators, duplicating this design is almost same. We could only save 30 PU by sharing one pulverizers produced sand with 2 oil extractors.

Phase Fabric

Phase Fabric would be the next resource after i receive some plastanium and increased my defenses. This will allow me enough free time to design larger systems. To build larger compact designs we would use the item carriage capacity of phase conveyors.



When we look at to the info screen of phase weaver we can see that to generate 1 TBL phase fabric, we need 20 phase weavers. With 4 TBL Thorium and 10 TBL sand. You will need maximum 4 of them, until you gonna phase boost everything on your map, which is completely unnecessary according to myself. That is what it takes to generate 1 TBL phase fabric output:



Good luck on collecting that much sand, seriously :)

if 10 sands per 2 seconds required for a single phase weaver, than 5 sands required per a minute for it. For 2 of them we need 10 sands per seconds which means 1 TBL sand. just having 2 buildings requires already 1 TBL input. For 4 buildings, we need 0.8 TBL thorium and 2 TBL sand. Making a design larger than this numbers without phase conveyors will mess things up a lot.

Here we are again with even numbers of production buildings with more than 1 TBL input for a resource type. Just like silicon but this time 4, rather than 6. If you remember Boyd's design on 4 silicon smelters, we could use that design style for a compact design for phase weavers:



Boyd's 4 smelter silicon design has extra 1 jump on bridges at start. I believe he did this to put there a power node. The left side would be occupied by conveyors anyway. I like the way he is thinking. But on paper this one is more compact:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917344906

It is also possible to use one line i/o technique we already been seen it on distribution systems:




There is no way we can make phase fabric from scrap. So we are not getting a scrap generator for this.

Surge Alloy I

Surge alloy is the key to the higher tier buildings and defenses. That's why people are so hyped for this resource, specially on multi play servers. Because every one tries to build same stuff at the same time, that's why you almost instantly loose all your power and resources and your building operations gets delayed and halted big time. Let's have a look at the info on alloy smelter to see why:



It uses 250 PU/s. Requires 13 of them to get 1 TBL output. Which requires 4 TBL lead, 3 TBL copper, 3 TBL silicon and 2 TBL titanium. It is quite a lot. High tier defenses uses many surge alloy. Impact reactors which you need to support high tier defenses requires a lot of them to get build.

It depends on how fast you want to build stuff. On single play i only build 2 or 3 of them. But i guess not so many people are patient as me. So, i name it you need "as much as you want/can" of alloy smelters for your core :)

There are 3 ways to build alloy smelter setups. You can gather required items naturally from ore deposits and building silicon smelter setups just for alloy smelters. You can unload resources from your core by using unloaders and build them next to your core, which is the most preferred design concept. And the most logical way is you can generate it from scrap.

With casual 1 TBL resource input you can only run 3 alloy smelters:



If you plug the 4th to the system, 4th one will rarely do anything:



With the generic distribution system, you can expand your production to 9 like this:



I feel so lazy about this buildings so many resources they consume and for me to calculate thats why I just casually inserted 3 TBL on each resource. Which is actually 2.6 TBL on each one because of the overflow gate / junction chain speed. And with that setup 9th smelter again a lazy one.

There are generally many lead and copper resources on maps. But they are scattered around. Collecting them and routing it to one specific location makes your base spaghetti most of the time. Also lead and copper mainly gathered by mining drones. If you don't have scrap or not too much of them on your map, the most logical way to do it is unloading resources from your core.

Even before doing that, you need to prepare your base for alloy smelters. Increasing titanium and silicon income is essential. Adding extra mining drones is essential. Do not use the generic distribution system if you going to unload resources from your core. That system takes a lot of very important space near your core. If you remember, 1 TBL casual input can only handle 3 alloy smelters. With unloaders, you even don't have that much input because their speed is ~75% of a titanium line.

Maximum alloy smelters you can run with this style just with 1 unloader for each type resource is 3:



You can see that middle smelter is not running with full efficiency. You can increase the number of smelters by adding another unloader/system. But this will block your core income way a lot. Let's have a look at this solution:



4 efficient smelters using 2 unloaders of each input type sharing 1 titanium unloader. Very well calculated compact system:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917345802

But i generally turn scrap into alloy if i have a chance. We can generate every required resource for surge from scrap. Let's start with 1 TBL input. I will use a silicon smelter. I don't know how efficient it should be. But i know that even if i don't need an efficient silicon smelter, i have to use at least 2 pulverizers. For both silicon and oil extractor (to generate coal). So if you remember from scrap to metaglass generator, when we add a second pulverizer, the 5th slag separator is not required. Here is my calculation setup:



As i expected, i don't need a fully efficient silicon smelter. Sand is slowly building up. But it never builds up enough to increase the separator efficiency to be able to run the 5th one. So for 1 TBL input; 2x melter, 4x separator, 2x pulverizer, 1x oil extractor, 1x water extractor, 1x coal centrifuge, 1x silicon smelter and an alloy smelter. That is too much buildings. But the variety is our friend here.

Guess what, we already have a compact design for this exact numbers in our workshop. Someone already calculated this before. Let's have a look:



Now we start to see phase conveyors on compact designs. There is an input system here we haven't seen before i want to show you the item flow on this one starting from input:



Main purpose of using phase conveyors here is jumping long distances. Phase conveyors also can carry 2.35 TBL items. With the phase conveyor at entry, we can insert a little bit more scrap to that system to increase efficiency a tiny bit. But remember our calculations were for 1 TBL input so adding a little bit more doesn't effect your output too much. Let's see the sand flow:



From all the scrap generators we have seen so far, we used only one resource coming from separators and burnt them all. But this time it will be the opposite. We need all of the items coming from separators instead of graphite. That is very problematic, because the randomness of the items. So having an overflow gate as an input component is essential. With that component we can handle every type of overflown items and route them elsewhere by adding escape paths. This is the item flow of all mixed items in the system:



After that mixed items get into the system we don't use any kind of separation this time. Only sorter is there to route the produced surge alloy to the side. We let the production building handle the real separation.

Surge Alloy II

Here, i have altered the system like this to show this separation more clearly:



Every production building has its own item storage. And reserved for each different type of item it accepts. Like containers and vaults. We know that production buildings only accepts items they use. Before i placed the alloy smelter everything was being routed to the incinerator. After i placed the alloy smelter for a short time only graphite was being routed to incinerator. Then all other items are being routed to the incinerator one by one as soon as alloy smelter's storage of that item type gets full. If we were not using this style, copper or lead would clog the system before anything else and system would stop. Remember, scrap generator systems should always handle all overflown items. When we add the silicon to that system and make alloy smelter work look what happens:



Because all buildings are also distributors alloy smelter outputs surge alloy also to the overflow gate. Because there is a way to go for surge alloy there. Then we end up routing half of our precious surge to incinerator. To prevent this we could place an inverted sorter to route that to elsewhere:



Inverted sorter will allow everything pass through to the alloy smelter but route surge to the sides. You can find this compact design by Slava0135 from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1900791749


We could increase the separator numbers to input more scrap to the system. But with the input design we have, there will always be overflown item rotation which halts the smelter time to time. Even we route that items to a second smelter it doesn't increase the output instead of having two separate system of this. I already did the experiment. You need to have a larger design which handles two different mixed items separately to increase the output. Which is same as building two of this setup.

Only different scrap generator you can make from this is using spore press instead of oil extractor. That one will be more production efficient than this one. But if i give you all the designs here, what are you going to do?

Pyratite

This is a highly flammable resource. Mainly used in energy production and ammo for some towers. You can think this as an upgraded version of coal. It is a required resource for impact reactors by being used on blast compound production.



It takes 14 pyratite mixers to generate 1 TBL output with 1 TBL sand, 2 TBL lead and 2 TBL sand. How many of them you require is depends how many impact reactors you are going to build. Or how much ammo you need for your towers working with blast compound or pyratite. Because to support a single blast mixer, you need only 1 pyratite mixer. You also need only 1 blast mixer per impact reactor. That one on one ratio allows me to build this stuff with production building numbers instead of output.

If you wanna skip the compact design and casually want to build a generic version of it, you can run 7 pyratite mixers with 1 TBL casual input.



I generally like to build them in pairs like we did on plastanium. I don't need 1 TBL output from them precisely anyway. I will start from large with 6 mixers. Because we have a pretty good design for this pair system, which can be easily altered to 2 pair and 1 pair version.

We used this design on silicon for 6 smelters. You will remember this one:



Let's have a closer look to the item flow of sand and lead:



This is the coal flow:



And this is the output:



We can easily alter this to 2 pairs like that:



Or a single pair like that:



You can find this schematic and copy/paste codes from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1922264916

Sand, coal and lead can be generated from scrap. So we can make a scrap generator for pyratite. This time we will use lead and our production building is slow. I guessed we may need to have two mixers on this setup:



But whatever i did, i couldn't get the second one working. I even removed both 1 sand and 1 separator to save the energy. Having them didn't made any effect. So my numbers for this are: 2x melter, 4x separator, 1x pulverizer, 2x water extractor, 1x cultivator, 1x spore press, 1x coal centrifuge and 1x pyratite mixer. And my compact solution to this numbers are like that:



I believe now it is easy for you to get the item flow on this one. I'll leave this to you. You can also make an oil extractor version with 2 pulverizers and 4 separators.

You can find this schematic and copy/paste codes from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1948810228

Note: Scrap to pyratite generators can only be used if you need pyratite for ammo. If you going to use it on blast production, you should go for scrap to blast compound generator instead.

Blast Compound

This is the upgraded version of pyratite. Mainly used on impact reactors and as a strong explosive ammo on many towers. It takes 14 blast mixers to generate 1 TBL blast compounds with 1 TBL pyratite and 1 TBL spore pod input.



We get the pyratite from the pyratite mixers on 1 on 1 ratio. Because both blast mixer and pyratite mixer has the same production time. We also will need to build spore pods for that production and i want to know how much cultivators and water extractors we need for a single blast mixer to run efficient:



Looks like 1x ~70% and 1x 100% efficient cultivators are enough to support a single blast mixer. To achieve this we needed 3 water extractors. We could re-arrange this water extractors like this:



This will give us 2x 100% efficient cultivators. So we should keep this numbers in mind when designing. I personally think having spore pod production intact with blast mixers in our design will makes our jobs easier. Do you remember the plastanium setup for 2 pair system? We could do the same design for a 2 pair blast mixer system:



We already have a 2 pair system for pyratite in our pocket. Just plugging in that system to our design will finish the production line like this:



When we go up from this number, cultivator - water extractor numbers will increase a lot. This numbers will make your designs very complicated and large. When i need so many blast mixers, i generally evaluate cultivator setup outside from the main system and make it a plug-in type design. For 6 blast mixers, we need 12 cultivators supported with 18 water extractors. That is a huge system. The largest one we handled so far was the large energy to coal generator on coal section:



I have altered that system to be a mirrored symmetrical setup to preserve a gap between two sides. From this gap i will transport pyratite. I also managed to reduce water extractor numbers with that layout.



All we need to do is altering the 3 pair setup on pyratite according to the blast mixers. And plug in all 3 pair systems to the left and right to complete the production chain like this:



Yeah, there had to be some gaps between systems to prevent spore pods mingling into the bridge conveyors. We could just re-arrange cultivators to overcome this issue. I also edited the input/output system in the middle on blast mixers to be more effective since we have only 2 type of input:



Still looks like middle cultivator section can be a little bit more compact. But i will leave that to you. I am guessing you would use such setups only if you are going to use blast compounds as ammo. When it comes to create blast for impact reactors, you should have a complete production chain in a compact fashion all together. I'll show that to you on impact reactor section.

Since we already have a scrap generator for pyratite, we can easily expand that setup to be a scrap to blast generator. I have to mention that again, that setup will only usable for ammo production like the pyratite one. We can make scrap impact reactors which is more efficient than this one. Both for production, space usage and energy usage. Now, that is how i expanded the scrap to pyratite generator to a blast generator:



Only ting i am not sure about this setup is the 3th water extractor on cultivators. Pyratite mixer sometimes runs on full efficiency and sometimes fall backs. Which causes same effect on cultivators. Spore pods are sometimes builds up, sometimes goes down. But blast mixer is almost always works on full efficiency. Feel free to inspect and experiment on that setup. You can find it from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1948826162

CryoFluid

That is the fluid resource you need for end-game energy production. Also used as a coolant for all towers. Specially effective on end-game towers like meltdowns. With 103.4 update meltdowns received a significant nerf when you use water as a coolant. So cryoFluid is needed even more to achieve the real damage output from this turrets.



When we look at to the info on this mixers, we can clearly see that our problematic input here is the water. Requires 24 LU water for 2 seconds. Which is 12 per second. 1 water extractor isn't enough. 2 is more than enough. When we try this one you would see that water input is just enough:



Looks like same water extractor ratio as the cultivators except for one thing. Titanium input. Since input is only one type of item and output is liquid our solid input distribution should be very easy.

Only time you should build mass cryoFluid mixers is when you going to use it as coolant for your towers. Also that kind of setups should always output to a liquid tank for efficiency. When it comes cooling your turrets, it is not necessary to have 1 on 1 production ratio. For example a meltdown uses 30 units of cryoFluid per second. But that usage is limited. There are a lot of time between enemy waves. You can even cool 3 meltdowns only with 1 cryoFluid mixer if the time between your waves is relatively high. Just store the liquid in tanks.

For turret coolant builds, this 3 extractor to 2 mixer ratio kind of forces us to build this setups in pairs. Here's a very basic 2 pair system:



We need a bit different transportation chain when we need to create a 3 paired system like this:



You can get this from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1995491703

We can also make CryoFluid from scrap. My calculation for 1 TBL input is like that:



Titanium sometimes builds up, sometimes goes down. I can support 3 cryoFluid mixers sharing 4 water extractors with this setup. And my compact solution for the scrap generator is like that:



You can find this schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1995509055

Combustion and Thermal Generators

Combustion Generator(CG)

CG is our first power generator. All early game builds will rely on this. It basically burns any flammable solid material to generate energy. It has a production time of 2 seconds. Which means you can run 20 of them efficiently with 1 TBL input. Every flammable resource (coal, spore, pyratite and blast) in game can be used as fuel. It has different output for each type.

Coal: 60PU, Spore Pod: 69PU, Pyratite: 84PU, Blast Compound: 24PU

If you feed it with blast compound, it will quickly overheat and explode:



Because producing all flammable resources except coal requires more power than generated, we only use them with coal input. We can get coal with mechanical or pneumatic drills without using energy. The most compact and efficient build for this generators is done by using overflow gate/router chains:



What you need to know here is none of the early game drills can support even only 1 generator. Even a full pneumatic drill cannot efficiently support 1 generator. However building more doesn't cost you any energy. Actually they are cheap. Just casually build 1 per drill and remove the unnecessary ones after observing the input.

Thermal Generator

This is basically a drill type energy generator. You just build it on specific terrain and it generates energy.You can consider this as free energy because it doesn't use any resources to work. You should build this generators on every possible spot on your map. Doesn't matter how much space you cover with 1 thermal generator. Just build them. Even if you cannot build them right now, designate their building areas to prevent other people building over the magma and hot rock terrain like that:



They are very very important on early to mid game. They generate a lot of power. Look how i build them casually:



Because they cannot be build over any other terrain type, i can easily spam them like that. My only concern here is covering all possible spaces with them. This setup in the image, generates ~ 4.2k energy alone. As soon as you get access to plastanium, your number 1 priority should be overdriving them, if you have some on your map, with an overdrive engine. That setup generates ~6.1k energy when overdriven. Those thermal generators are really helpful. Use them please.

Steam Generator

Steam generators are the key for your progress. Once you gather some silicon, you will upgrade your energy production with them. (if you have hot or magma rock terrain on your map you should go for thermal generators first) They are generating energy with steam which has been generated by heating water with any type of flammable solid resource in game. Just like CG's they have different output according to the used input.

Coal: 360PU, Spore Pod: 414PU, Pyratite: 504PU, Blast Compound: 144PU

Like CG's they will overheat and explode when you feed them with blast compounds. With 1 TBL input, you can run 15 steam generators. Steam generators also require water to function. They require 3 units of water per second. That means 1 water extractor can support 2 steam generators. 1 mechanical pump also can support 2 steam generators. 1 full rotary pump can support 16, 1 full thermal pump can support 30 steam generators. Most basic build you can have for this generators is like that:



I usually enhance this setup with small batteries and a single solar panel per water extractor like this to have a little bit starting power for water extractor and a modular base for chaining them easily:



I also changed the distribution system to underflow gate / inverted sorter chain to determine how much steam generators i can run with my current input easily:



As i marked in the image, i can easily determine how many steam generators are working by just looking at the colors and animations on the system. At that point i can increase my input by adding another line (up to 6), or i can delete unnecessary modules from the system if i don't have more coal income.

We can use spore pods as a resource for steam generators. We created many compact concepts with spore pod production chains. We can include steam generators in this compact systems. Before that we need to calculate what it takes to run a steam generator efficiently as always we do.

For 1 steam engine, 1 efficient cultivator is not enough. 2 efficient cultivators are too much. When i try a setup with 2 inefficient cultivators, power output is not so stable:



However this still generates more power than it uses. Keep that numbers in your mind. You can sometimes use that numbers in a corner of a setup for example to keep your design compact. Optimum setup with most stable energy output for a single generator is like that:



You may question the power output of this 2 systems. 2x water extractor setup has a fluctuating output but it's peak output is larger than the 3x water extractor setup. If you are not sure about their power outputs just hook them separately to a different large battery and observe which one is filling it faster. I intentionally said large battery because small ones will fill faster than we need. With fluctuating outputs difference shows itself by time. Use large batteries. in this case 3x Water extractor setup is filling the battery faster.

As you know, we can play with the cultivator efficiency by changing the water extractors that are touching them. This two setups are producing same amount of spore pods for example:



But the right one generates more energy because it uses lesser buildings. Problem with such setups is even we can find the perfect numbers, the water extractor placement can change our outcome. For example we can crate a setup using the numbers at right side looks like this:



This way we can achieve 100% efficiency on every cultivator. We generally call such setups as "Spore Generators" But does spore gens are efficient at all? is it possible to generate more energy by turning spore pods to oil then use that oil in coal centrifuges and use the coal instead? Let's try:



I have created an spore press setup with the same numbers we used on the spore gen setup to run steam generators. Then i find out i can run 2 semi efficient coal centrifuges with it. Then i plugged enough steam generators to the system that can use all the coal and look what happens:



Our spore gen was generating ~ 200 PU/sec now we can generate ~1k PU/sec. I want to show you the real difference between this two styles. The small cube generates almost same energy with the large one:



Spore pods are actually better than coal. However the water extractors causing a lot of problems here for us. But this spore gens shine when we build them over water like this:



Because mechanical pumps doesn't require energy, such setups becomes more efficient than coal centrifuge setups. I don't remember how many times i build this design on multi player servers. I even get it from there. I really don't know who's design is this but i have added some solar panels for self starting The space in the center is actually reserved for overdrive projector.

You can find the schematic and copy/paste code from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1946444644


If we don't have enough watery space in our map and all our coal resources used elsewhere, we need to rely on coal centrifuges. It will be handy to know that a single efficient coal centrifuge can run 3 steam generators.

When we use oil extractors to generate coal for steam generators numbers will depends on the oil extractor efficiency. With 1 water extractor + 1 oil extractor setup we can run 3 semi-efficient coal centrifuges. which can support 7 steam generators. With an efficient oil extractor supported with 2 water extractors and 3 coal centrifuges can handle 8 steam generators. 2 inefficient oil extractors supported with 2 water extractors which are fueling 5 coal centrifuges can handle 15 steam generators. You can do your own designs with that numbers. I'll leave steam generators here.

Relatively Useless Energy Production Buildings

Differential Generator

One of the most useless buildings in this game. It requires pyratite and cryoFluid to work. Which is a long chained production. They do not require a lot of resources to function but creating this resources is kind of a pain because of the required items. For pyratite, both coal and sand are important resources. Coal can be created from energy. But for sand, you are limited to map resources. We also need an extra titanium input for the cryoFluid.

The 960 PU/sec doesn't worth your efforts. Just build a spore press / coal centrifuge steam generator setup instead of this. Simply, don't use them. Take this one instead for example:



This one generates more energy than a single differential generator. Less effort, less resources to spend, no transportation chain to handle, not extra resources to extract and more power production. Logic wins!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2014971386

Thorium Reactor

The 2nd most useless building in the game. It is not as painful to get in work as differential generators. They only need thorium and cryoFluid to work. But if u ever forget to cool them, or somehow you get into negative energy they will explode and take down many buildings around with them.

A strict rule in Mindustry, thorium reactors are always explode whatever you do. When you build them, after sometime you always forget that you build them and your energy always get to negative somehow while you have been distracted with something else. This is like a curse guys. On multi player servers we never build them. There was even a thorium reactor phobia on multi player servers that force us to vote/kick players who ever dares to build them a few game builds ago. I wasn't active as i was before because of this guide stuff, but i am sure there are still some people get stressed when they see them :)

But now, yes you can remove reactor explosions on map editor. Even you set this settings right, they will again explode :) It is a curse! Didn't i said that? Not that much damage will be done like normal explosion but you loose them. They are simply bombs guys. I will not encourage people to build them by giving efficiency notes about this building in this guide. Get the spore press / coal centrifuge steam setup i suggested to you instead. It will generate more energy and less headaches.


RTG Generator

They are upgraded version of thermal generators. Their designs are the same except colors. They even produce same energy. Instead of having built on specific map terrains like thermal generators, RTG generators use thorium as a fuel instead. They use that thorium very slowly. This generators are pretty expensive to build. Look at those stats:



With that slow production ratio, you can support 74 RTG generators with 1 TBL thorium input which will generate ~ 13K PU/sec. Because they require only 1 item type to function most compact setup for them is something like this:



Yes, you may use bridge distribution to gather a little bit more space but your distribution system which takes thorium to the bridges will take more space overall. This simple setup is by best. I will gladly inspect your setups here if they are efficient as we like. Just post the schematic link or copy/paste code in comments.

I consider RTG generators useless because of the collective behavior of player base i observe in multi player servers. No one likes to build them. And of course we can build impact reactors instead of them. If you feel too lazy to start an impact reactor setup and you have some good income, you can build some RTG Generators to delay your pain for sometime. That is the only useful side of them. They can be alternate to steam generators by requiring lesser problematic resource to run and cover less space, only if you have a good income.

They may also have uses if you are again rich and quickly need some reliable energy on a far away spot on your map.

Impact Reactor I

The end game power generator. Requires some effort to be built and run. But they have a good energy production which is very much worth your efforts. Let's have a look at it's stats first:



It is an expensive building which you cannot spam around freely. Also it has a build time of freaking 28.75 seconds. If you don't want to lock your ship half of a minute in a place, you better use a trident ship pad before starting to build this monsters.

The production chain required to run this reactors are a bit scary. But when we look at it's production time of 2.33 seconds, and the resource usage amounts, it is not scary any more. We can run 23 impact reactors with only 1 TBL blast input. Well not 24 because how it works. You cannot afford an inefficient impact reactor. If you look closer to the stats again you will see that it uses 1.5k PU/second to work. An energy production building which requires energy to run:



Impact reactors have a very interesting working concept which i really like and want to see on more buildings. It has a very slow starting progress. It will not generate energy as soon as it starts. It will start slowly. Produced power also will build up slowly and come to a point which generates 6.3k normally, 9.45k when overdriven and 14.175k when overdriven with a phase fabric boosted engine. This is a huge income. But becomes an headache if you don't do it properly. If you don't want to be on a knife edge constantly and loose all your power at once with small mistakes, you need to do your calculations properly.

Before we calculate stuff you need to know that when an impact reactor runs out of a required resource, which means blast, cryoFluid or 1.5K PU/sec energy, it's production progress resets to its start point, very fast. You need to start the whole progress again. Because of that, you need to know that 1 on 1 perfect production ratios are generating problems here. Your fps rates drops down sometimes or they fluctuate during enemy waves, even if your system works great, that fps effect have a big possibility to desync your production buildings. You may end up re-starting your impacts again and again. This also might happen during a large boss weave. Just because of that we always want to have some overflow of resources on our impact systems.

There are 2 common concepts to build impact reactors:

Generic Systems

This is our general approach to making impact reactors. Production chains on this approach is separate from each other. We casually calculate the required materials to have little overflow on each. Then build according to that number. Most basic calculation may be like that:

For each impact reactor:
1x Pyratite Mixer
1x Blast Mixer
2x CryoFluid Mixer (Actually 2 inefficient fluid mixers made with 2 water extractors.)
2x Cultivator (1 can be very inefficient, if your design requires it.)

Our input will be enough Titanium, Lead, Coal, Sand, Water and Phase Fabric (if you like to boost reactors with that) to run this buildings above. That is a long production chain with many material inputs. However i have already covered efficient solutions for that required inputs. You can creatively build your own chains with that knowledge to run basic impact reactors. And with the numbers above you will end up with a nice overflown production chain which will give you enough confidence that your reactors are stable until power goes down.


Minimal, compact and efficient systems

Yes, that is the point of this guide. I want to have a design with a most acceptable overflow efficiency, (which means optimal input requirements to safely run an impact reactor) handling minimum type of materials to have a more simple distribution system between those designs, cause we will need more than one. And for last lesser booster headache.

This systems are handling issues by making a compact design for all producible resources including impact reactor and an overdrive booster in the design. With that style we only need to input extracted resources to the system. We only need to boost (or increase) resource extraction with that style. Because we will be boosting nearly all production chain with the impact reactor itself.

Because system demands not too much resources I'll create all possible input near the impact reactor. I will even create coal for the pyratite mixer in place. We can create coal either by using an oil extractor or with a spore press. I did some efficiency calculations between them. Making coal with spore press is more energy efficient than making it with oil extractor.

I will also limit blast production ratio by playing with the cultivator efficiency. Impact reactor production time is 2.33 seconds. This is same as a cultivator production time. If i make an efficient cultivator, i will limit the blast compound production by 2.33 seconds. Because blast mixer will only receive 1 spore pod per 2.33 seconds. But this is 1 on 1 perfect production ratio may cause problems as i said before. To overcome this, i will rotate half of the spore output which i will use for coal generation to the blast compound to create a little overflow to be sure that i will always have some spare blast compound on my impact reactor. Luckily we don't need that much coal for pyratite mixer and sharing spore pod output will not cause any problems. Here is the calculation setup:



2x CrayoFluid mixers with 1 water extractor attached to each,
2x Cultivators with 3x water extractors attached to them while 1 touching oil press and blast mixer other touching only blast mixer
1x Spore press
1x Coal centrifuge
1x Overdrive projector which is covering all of this buildings, including impact reactor.

Producing every possible resource at that place allows us to input only extracted resources. Also having a booster containing all this production will reduce booster usage at outside to balance the input. What if i did this calculation with a perfect spore ratio?



As you see from the image impact reactor cannot be started. Each time it uses the blast compound it resets its starting progress. Delaying the blast input to collect 2-3 blast compounds before starting this setup will fix this issue. But each time your impact reactor and blast production desync for a possible FPS reason, that collected blast may slowly reduce. We don't even need to change building count. just replacing the water extractors and cultivators to generate some overflow on spore production is much more reliable option. Here is my compact solution for this numbers:

Impact Reactor II

One of my aims while making this design is having a compact input location from the same side and most narrow side of the design. With this style, i can chain this setups in a more compact fashion. Let me explain; i copied some of the compact impact reactor setups on our steam workshop as wall systems to designate the area they cover. Plastanium walls are designating the input locations. Titanium walls are the borders of the setups. Number 1 is the copy of my design. Others are different designs that i don't want to disapprove publicly.



As is said before we will always require more than one impact reactor. So we will going to build more of this setups. Here how it looks when we chain this setups casually.

Number 1:

I intentionally designed this setup to be as slim as possible. With that input orientation, i don't loose too much space between systems while using such distribution:



Number 2

This is a more square like design. Because of the distance between input locations, i needed to create longer junction chains to connect them all to same distribution:




Number 3

This was the most compact setup we have in the list. But when we start to chain them look how messy it is:



Being super compact is not always the better solution. When i start to design this reactor setup, i just copied number 3, re arranged buildings, added some phase conveyors to make all input location at the same narrow side by sacrificing some space efficiency on the design itself allowed me to create more compact chain system.

I am not claiming that my design is better than this 2 setups. I designed it in a way that i can easily chain them like this. That was more suited to my needs. But if we compare the 3rd setup with mine, we can fit that mess in narrower spaces. A design is a solution for a problem. You cannot make a single solution for each question:



You can find this design from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1997335785

When i do this design i assumed that we will going to use phase boosted overdrive engine. There are maps out there which doesn't have that much thorium deposits to maintain both construction costs and phase fabric production for all impact reactors. Having designs which are not using phase boost overdrive engine will reduce input amount. Which will lead to a more compact design. Keep that in mind.

Also by knowing the efficient building numbers, you can make larger setups containing 4, 6, 8 impact reactors. Those systems would be much more compact than making minimal setups and chaining them. However i am not that guy. I generally evaluate the space and resources on the map, then i start to chain minimal systems according to that number. However i really admire people who are doing that huge compact designs. I am not against that. You can have all kinds of compact setups for each required number in your schematic list. Then build according to that number as soon as map resources allows that.

Sir Silicon is a well known player on multiplayer servers. I am collecting his schematics on my steam workshop. He has many impact reactor designs fits to different situations. Here is an example of that:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2039647991

Making impact reactors running with scrap greatly reduces the complexity of resource extraction and distribution process, specially when you make modular designs like this. There are 2 different calculations for such setups. Everything we calculated so far will also work for scrap reactors by adding 1 pulverizer to the system which is more than enough for pyratite production. However melter / smelter numbers may change according to your booster requirements.

If you are going to boost your impact reactor with phase fabric, you need 2x melter and 3x separators:



If you don't have plans to use phase fabric, then 1x melter and 3x separators are enough:



I'll go for phase boosted system here, you may do the 1 melter setup :) I take the easy one cause i already have an impact reactor setup. Modifying it a little bit will solve my problem like this:



Let's have a look item flow at the new scrap plug-in. It seems a bit messy. This is the item flow of scrap and sand in the system:



I believe you already figured out how phase fabric is moving through the phase conveyor. This is the mixed item flow, lead and titanium flow in the system:



You can find this design from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2006385802

Exceptional, Unorthodox Designs I

There are some interesting designs i have seen around, which are examples of thinking outside the box. This people tried to do what we generally don't and they somehow succeeded. It doesn't mean i approve or disapprove the designs here. Some of them really fascinates me

rabidworm88's super slim mixed item chain system

I saw this design on workshop and I looked at it sometime with empty eyes to figure out how the hell all of the items are moving throughout the system:



This designs main goal is being super compact. We generally separate both input and output into different chains to overcome the overflowing item issues, clogging issues etc. This designs chains are full of mixed items. Design overcomes the clogging/overflowing issues with an incinerator. This one has a very interesting item flow:



This is the first way of sand.



This is the second way. The router coming just after inverted sorter will also route sand to backwards because there is a way to go from there. Problematic flow here is when sand enters to the overflow gate, half of it will be get burned.

Let's see lead now:



Lead is everywhere... Same problematic happening with lead here too when it comes to the overflow gate at far right half of it will be deleted.

Do not forget that this bridges, routers, sorters etc.. They are all connected and you should think that as one single chain. Which handles both lead and sand distribution at the same time. It also handles the metaglass collection with the same system:



We would never get out of the box like this. Because this system burns a lot of raw resources because of the placement of overflow gate. It just burns some of the input directly to open some place to other incoming materials, even before system overflows.

This is absolutely not production efficient, nor energy efficient. (Due the power usage of incinerator). But it is super slim you can fit this design to extremely narrow locations. You can safely place this setup under the bridges.

I may use this design only for metaglass and if i have lots of raw resources to spent but very small place to fit this in:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1964031388

Exceptional, Unorthodox Designs II

harsspartan118's Silicon Generator from Sand and Scrap

With some optimization support from Sir Silicon and :3 Sweetness and Blushes, he manage to make a system working with sand, scrap and both of them together. He used the distributor concept for pulverizers from this guide and designed that system in a way that we can input both sand and scrap to the system:



This is another example for an outbox thinking. Start point of this design is having a hybrid system which can work both with sand and scrap to generate extra silicon. Let's inspect this clever distribution system. This is scrap distribution:



Tricky part here is there is no escape point for scrap, other than going in to pulverizers, while there is an escape path for sand going to the system. This is the flow of sand that we input goes through the system:



This is the produced sands flow:



And finally coal and silicon flow:



You can find this hybrid schematic and it's copy paste codes from here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2017890610

Conclusion

I still have some stuff to cover. Some more designs and I still didn't covered liquid transportation on the first guide. I'll update the first guide as soon as i have accurate information on liquids. We might need a third guide for offense and defense. I don't feel very good at that side. I need to create some maps, test stuff and play the game actually to get accurate information first.

Also check our workshop contents, we have much more designs both made by us and collected from the community:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/serdarakkilic/myworkshopfiles/
https://steamcommunity.com/id/Schozus/myworkshopfiles/

Please share your designs if they are effective as we like. I'll gladly inspect them here. Hope to see you on multi player severs ;)

[-VG- Napster]

even the guide is outdated it provides very very valuable and understandable information about how stuff works as a new player this helped immensly in understanding the systems.

some information of course is incorrect because its outdated so if anyone reading this recently i highly suggest usind this in sandbox mode and play around with stuff.
at least it helped me personaly a ton i would never had understand without this guide.

[Aleq]

This is a very very old guide guys. we don't have plans to update it.

[Unknown Knight]

Unloaders seem to work at 1 TBL now.

[JAW0M]

This is a great guide, thank you very much for it. My only concerns are:

1. Some things are broken for v6 onwards. I don't know which ones, or how to fix them. Could you please indicate which things are broken?

2. Many of the workshop links are broken. Can they kindly be replaced?

[HeRz_LoS]

Epic guide... Masterpiece!

[Reteoteigam]

wow. thanks for that guide

[humpolivus]

@Serdar Still, it is a fantastic guide! Very helpful and intellectually interesting! You are like a scientist, performing experiments to discover the inner workings of the game. Very cool!

[Aleq]

@peter647 yeh, they randomly disappear. This guide is for older version anyway. many stuff has been changed.

[humpolivus]

Some of the photos aren't loading. Is anyone else having this problem? The ones missing would be the fourth and fifth photos

[MrBinary]

I understand, I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the heads up, I hope you update this amazing guide soon!