Technically, in this game, making a nuclear power plant is easy.

Making a nuclear power plant that doesn’t accumulate an ever-growing amount of uranium fuel waste is much, much more complicated.

Most of this week’s work went toward getting the Quickwire arm of the facility built up. And because I’m a full-time weirdo, I tried something that I saw on a Discord server a few weeks ago: 45-degree angle refinery placement.

It’s really just a matter of rotating the foundation tiles, changing them to a different material (for easier filtering when it’s time to replace them), and staggering the machines in as even a line as you can. Pro tip: A temporary row of guard rails can serve as a guide line. Then get the belts & pipes placed. For cleanup, remove the “angled” foundations and put down the permanent tiles of whatever material flavor you prefer.

I can’t actually recommend doing this unless you’re also a total weirdo, but I’m glad I tried it once. The vents and smokestacks are still in a tidy line but the sides of the machines are better displayed, and it’s slightly less boring.

With the Quickwire done, I proceeded with building “backward” from the waste recycling/disposal logic toward the actual fuel rod creation and consumption stages. Why backward? Because starting from the Uranium Fuel Rod production and then figuring out the recycling has traditionally led to a logistical nightmare where I (metaphorically) paint myself into one or more corners and end up with a lot of janky nonsense in the process of sorting things out. I’m out over open water, I have plenty of space, so I’m happy to sprawl out a bit if it means my production lines don’t get tangled.

I mean, a tangled mess could still happen. But I’m going to try to keep things tidy this time.

My final bit of progress this week involved the trains. Two four-car trains are scheduled to bring in seven required goods (the eighth car is for returning empty nitrogen gas bottles to be refilled) from all over… though I may yet decide to build another Iron Plates mini-factory just so I don’t have a train going corner-to-corner on the entire playable map just for a small supply of one of the earliest, most basic products in the entire game.

Hmm.

Next up: Completing the waste recycling part of the build so I can proceed to the actual nuclear power parts of the build.