In the co-op Satisfactory game with the kids (look, I get to call them “kids” even though they’ve been full adults for over a decade now, it’s my parental privilege) we’ve finally reached the point where we need to consider actually doing the thing we only really joked about early on: Tackling nuclear power.

None of us have done it in this game. I started my third solo save last autumn rather than go down the nuke route. (I mean, I had other reasons as well, but “nope not touching that” is still high on the list.) But given that we’ve made tremendous progress in a bit less than seventy hours of game time, we think we might be able to pull it off. Heck, in roughly four total in-game hours we went from “not even a foundation tile laid” to “fully operational Supercomputers plant using all new resource nodes” complete with drone delivery of the final product to storage. There’s a serious chance this is within our capabilities.

With that said, we’re facing some challenges. I worked through the process and… well, here’s what that looks like.

  1. Start with safely (ha ha) mining some Uranium. And that’s the last time anything about this is simple until we reach the “AWESOME Sink,” the machine into which you deliver materials you don’t want anymore. (The game specifically forbids sinking unprocessed nuclear waste. Go figure.)
  2. Uranium, Concrete, and Sulfuric Acid (Sulfur & Water in a Refinery) gets you Encased Uranium Cells (and… more Sulfuric Acid, similar to the Battery/Water problem).
  3. Now’s a good time to note that we’ll also need Electromagnetic Control Rods, made either from Stators & AI Limiters or Stators & High-Speed Connectors, depending on if we have the latter alternate recipe.
  4. Putting Encased Uranium Cells, Encased Industrial Beams, and Electromagnetic Control Rods into a Manufacturer gets us Uranium Fuel Rods. (There’s an alt, and it involves Beacons. Ell oh ell.)
  5. Cram that Uranium Fuel Rod and a whole deluge of water into a Nuclear Power Plant and you get beaucoup power (2500MW per plant). Oh, and Uranium Waste. The getting-rid-of which will require more steps.
  6. This is where things get to be a gigantic pain in the backside. There are two products you make with Uranium Waste, one of which is needed to produce the other. Let’s start with Non-fissile Uranium, acquired from a Blender into which have been fed Uranium Waste, Silica, Nitric Acid (acquired solely from nitrogen gas fracking operations, a whole complicated loop on its own), and Sulfuric Acid. This time the waste product is… Water. Goody. We can decide which acid plant to feed that back into.
  7. The Non-fissile Uranium we just made is combined with even more regular old Uranium Waste in the exceptionally cool looking Particle Accelerator to make… Plutonium Pellets. And we’re still not done.
  8. Slap those Plutonium Pellets and some good old-fashioned Concrete into an Assembler and you get… Encased Plutonium Cells.
  9. Finally, finally, at long last, we shove those Encased Plutonium Cells along with even more Electromagnetic Control Rods plus Steel Beams (okay) and Heat Sinks (a relatively simple Tier 8 aluminum product all things considered) to get… Plutonium Fuel Rods.
  10. Which you can sink.

Because no, we’re not dealing with permanent plutonium-power by-product radioactive hazards, thank you very very much. But by golly we’re going to rack us up some Awesome Shop tickets.

Theoretically, anyway. Wish us luck.