Back at the start of the year I lamented the failure to launch my originally-planned Rocket Fuel power plant, a mess caused by not paying attention to available unlocked material recipes.

I’m happy to state that the original site’s power plant is now online and on track to running at maximum capacity. Why did I bother, though, when the Blue Crater’s power plant worked out just fine?

Did it though?

Here’s the thing: The Blue Crater’s facilities are a mess. Both of them. I spent some time over there last weekend trying to do the beautification work it desperately needs, and… nope. The Phase 3 plant in particular is an absolute write-off in the looks department. Individual bits of it turned out nicely but I can’t get them to play well together (as it were). At all. And the fuel plant is mostly “a bunch of stuff hovering in the air over train tracks” and basically needs to be partly torn down and reassembled into something a bit less hideous. This made me… very reluctant to build out the remaining several dozen Fuel Generators that the site could technically support, which would give me the available power needed to move on to Phase 4 shipment work.

So I built a bunch of new stuff over a different set of train tracks.

Since I was already partway to the “need two groups of Blenders” stage of the original build when I had to change gears and head down to the Blue Crater, not much prep needed doing to get this site online: Create and schedule the trains to bring in outside goods (sulfur, nitrogen, iron plates), add the fourteen Blenders (Turbofuel, then Rocket Fuel), hook everything up, light up the power, then start adding generators. I only needed a few hours of work to get from where-I-left-off to plunking-down-generators.

I connected fuel to the first handful of Fuel Generators at almost exactly the 200-hour mark in this game save track.

I’m also going a bit “tower of power” with this build, stacking rows of generators vertically to get the most use out of the (somewhat) cramped space available at the build site. This is serving as a good opportunity to see if the “concrete ramps” ground-support design works for generators as well as it works for “regular” factories. So far so good, though I’m incorporating some of the normal, standard pillar pieces as well.

My immediate goals look like this:

1. Actually place all the generators for this plant. I’m… really bad about saying, “Well that’s enough for now, I’ll come back later when I need more power.” No! Finish the freakin’ job, Me!
2. Phase 4 production & shipment project(s).
3. ???
4. Profit!

I’m almost halfway done placing generators and it only took me a couple of hours. Odds are good that by next weekend I’ll be elbows-deep into getting my first Phase 4 products’ factories built. Wish me luck!