It’s been the entire month of May getting this done.

But it’s done. Mostly. At least the really important bits are done. Mostly. I can walk away from it and do other things. Mostly.

When we left off last week I expected to have two more weeks’ worth of sessions remaining before I could safely start bringing in uranium ore for processing into fuel rods for feeding into the 20 giant power generators. Turns out I only needed one week (“since you looked at me…”) but it was a busy one because I… kinda goofed.

Twice.

First goof: Somehow, in all the planning and checking and confirming and double-checking, I missed that Encased Industrial Beams weren’t being brought in. At all. And by the time I realized this, I’d already built the entire facility. Solution: Since they are only needed at the western portion of the facility and there was already a railway roundabout out that direction, I just built out another small train platform.

Second goof: I didn’t actually have one of the alternate recipes designated in my factory plan. To save myself even more problems with fluids (more about that, shortly…) I decided to use the “dry” version of the Encased Uranium Cell recipe. Great! But until I actually get that recipe from a drop pod hard drive scan, I can’t use it in a production line. Solution: I spent a few hours scavenging and scanning hard drives from drop pod crash sites.

With that all fixed, I spent some time belting (and sometimes re-belting, like in the case where I realized I needed a load balancer rather than a manifold for one of the nuclear waste products) and then… I put walls and roofs on three of the key buildings: The transport station, the acids section, and the uranium fuel rod production building.

Then, at just before the 260 hours mark in this save, I told the drone assigned to pick up uranium ore from the Bamboo Forest to get going. It took a little while for everything to spin up but within half an hour the fuel generators were all happily steaming away, fuel rods in and uranium waste out. Success!

Well. Mostly success. Two problems revealed themselves once everything was fired up, and this is why you check over the entire production line once it’s operational, folks.

First problem: One conveyor belt lift feeding part of the waste recycling machinery wasn’t connected properly, starving one Assembler of needed Concrete. Solution: Removed and placed the lift piece again. I forgot I’d placed that lift as a “guide,” followed by not ensuring it was hooked up to the splitter properly. It was a long, busy build, okay?

Second problem: A much more serious issue arose in the acids section, where waste water from the Non-Fissile Uranium production line wasn’t feeding into the Sulfuric Acid refinery properly. And when waste products aren’t evacuating the system, the machinery stops. Solution (may or may not be temporary): I disconnected the “fresh” water feed from the Sulfuric Acid refinery and flushed the relevant “waste” water pipe segments. After wandering off-site for a bit to do some railway work (completing a part of the loop around the Rocky Desert) the problem seems to have stabilized. If things go sour again I’ll just pipe the waste water over to shore and use it to make Concrete for sinking.

Pro tip: Waste water can’t be sunk, but the “Wet Concrete” alternate recipe can net you oodles of available Concrete (something you never stop needing a steady supply of!) the excess of which can be sunk. This is a common and valid solution to the “I hate recycling water” problem.

As of this writing I’m hitting about 94k MW of power production across all operational power plants. (Other plants include one full plus one very incomplete Rocket Fuel power plant, the Diluted Packaged Fuel plant, and probably a handful of coal generators here & there which will be taken out of service before much longer.) My “max consumption” line is once again well below my “production” line.

Ah, that’s nice. I can relax. A bit. For a while.

Three jobs need addressing that I want to come back for at some point:

1. The Quickwire building is still uncovered.
2. Almost none of these buildings are “grounded,” if that’s not a weird word to use for a facility built out over the water. They’re all hovering, and I don’t like that. I just need to come up with a support blueprint that I can tack onto these buildings to make them look like they belong where they are.
3. Once I figure out the distribution system, I need to start collecting Plutonium Fuel Rods for use as drone fuel. Right now they’re getting recycled for coupons, but the long-term goal is to use them in at least some of the drone ports.

Those are all projects for later, though. First up on my agenda next month? Reworking my “original” Rocket Fuel plant (the one I built because I hadn’t yet unlocked the prerequisites for the actual original Rocket Fuel plant) so I can get even more bottled fuel (for drones, yep) and finish placing the power generators so I can (hopefully) break the 100k MW mark. And while we’re thinking about power, it’s been literal years since I last built a battery site to handle Things Going Wrong With The Grid, so at some point I’ll stop down and build some kind of monument to hubris along those lines.

After that it’ll be time to dig in on all the new toys that Phase 5 brings. Finally!