For some reason, when I got to the point of wanting to replace some of my early power plants (coal, maybe some regular-fuel) with nuclear power, I decided to build the biggest plant I’ve ever made in the game, solo or multiplayer. This is my “1.0” save, started when the game officially left Early Access last autumn.

I ran the numbers and decided that 4 uranium fuel rods per minute feeding 20 power generators was exactly the right number to aim for.

What the hell was I thinking?

Please allow me to offer some advice if you want to follow in my virtual footsteps. I made some mistakes; perhaps my hubris will be partly absolved if I can help others avoid them.

For starters, as with any large build in this game, figure that you’ll need more room than you expect. Everyone knows this, everyone also forgets this, I’m mentioning it entirely from a sense of duty rather an expectation anyone will scale their workspace accordingly. It is what it is.

I figured that the vast footprint required by two rows of ten huge nuclear power generators each would cover the space required by the equipment used to feed them (and process their waste). To my credit, I was nearly right… or at least would have been if I’d made a couple more of the required materials off-site rather than in the main building. Ten manufacturers (the actual uranium fuel rods) and fourteen blenders (nitric acid, uranium fuel, and waste recycling) take a whole lot of space, though. To say nothing of the row of refineries which stand just outside of the main building on account of their height.

The next piece I absolutely cannot stress enough: Get your (alternate) recipes sorted out, run the numbers, and then lock the plan down. Unlike yours truly, who changed a couple of recipe selections partway through but forgot to update the list of required materials in the spreadsheet. (You are using a spreadsheet to track this stuff, right? Right. Good.) I spent half the build thinking I needed a bunch of steel beams, I routed one of the assigned trains to bring in steel beams, then promptly pivoted to using steel pipes for crafting the encased industrial beams instead.

Oh yeah, and I make the steel pipes on-site now, no delivery required. That train station’s assigned platform for steel beams is utterly useless.

It gets worse. Just this very afternoon, with the plant actually operational, I spent a couple of hours building a train line to a new site for producing additional electromagnetic control rods… that I may not need, because I never updated the original tally I jotted down of required rods to keep the plant running. I don’t really know where my original 26 per minute figure came from, but I only need 20 per minute… which the existing plant, the one that I thought was under-producing and needed replacing, already makes. I think. I need to go double-check. That’ll be my first task in the next game session. Whoops.

(Please note that I intended for the new power plant to be operational “just enough” so I could expand the production of these parts, because I couldn’t afford the power requirement to build more ECR production before going online with the power plant. This was the only material I was planning on being short of in the near term, intending to fix it ASAP after completing the power plant build.)

While I’m cataloguing some of the bad ideas which went into this build, may I gently steer you away, dear reader, from the idea of creating a gigantic nuclear power plant in the middle of the dune desert region?

Nuclear power generators are thirsty creatures. Each one wants several dozen cubic meters of water per minute. Twenty of them add up to a staggering amount of H2O requirements. And the desert is… not exactly known for its ready availability of large quantities of water. Sure, there are options: The eastern border of the map is wet, for instance, but that’s a big vertical lift and the building locations available at that edge of the desert biome aren’t great for this kind of project.

So I went with the high oasis plan instead. Which, yes, is another big vertical lift. And the way I chose to do it, it’s actually two big vertical lifts. I need to get a train all the way up from the desert floor to the oasis, then once the train’s gone back down to the factory I have to use a bunch of pumps to raise the water up to the reservoirs that are placed at the same height as the generators to keep them easily (ha ha) supplied.

I could have saved myself so much trouble by either building this whole power factory halfway up the cliff and running pipes, or elevating the delivery station to the same height as the generators, but no. I wanted all the train stations at the same level for this build.

Related to that? Make sure you have enough clearance to allow for logistics floors (aka “space to run all the conveyor belt spaghetti”) under each equipment floor. This is especially important when you site your factory in the desert, where the ground level is… extremely variable.

(As an aside: Yes, this power plant is kind of naked right now. I wanted it operational first and didn’t want to wall myself in until I knew where I needed walls not to be, if that makes sense. Before I start on the Phase 4 space elevator parts, which is next on my big-projects list, I want to get this site “prettied up” with walls, windows, roofing (where appropriate), and so on. I’ll post the results here when it’s done, of course.)

I ended up running some belts overhead in this build’s main floor just because I couldn’t run enough of them underneath. There are too many different belts, thus too many opportunities to block one material with the belt delivering another.

With all of that said… I’m proof that someone can make a lot of silly mistakes and still wind up with a working arrangement of complex machinery, and have fun doing it. The entire reason I went with this desert plan is because I had the wild idea of, “What if I delivered all the water needed for a nuclear power plant… by train?” And here we are. Plus, for a bonus? From the waste product of all those nuclear power generators I’m creating plutonium fuel rods to power my aerial drone fleet.

I love this game.