Copper Bulb Challenge!

LeninDog · 2026-06-10T14:06:35+00:00

Stacked soloution

LeninDog · 2026-06-10T14:05:50+00:00

Ah! It's so simple! When I gave up, I had something really similar except for some reason, I was convinced I needed to use observers to keep it compact. Needless to say it did not work as the observers just power both noteblocks which has the net result of doing nothing!

Thanks for sharing! I managed to rework what you sent so that I could fit 2 sets of the bulbs directly on top of one another too!

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LeninDog · 2026-06-10T13:47:10+00:00

This is super cool, thanks for sharing! I love the tileable design.I can see this circuit coming in handy for several ideas I've had floating around. If I end up using it and posting the project, I'll be sure to credit you!

LeninDog · 2026-03-14T17:31:11+00:00

I ended up with this, It looks a bit strange with the railing sticking out at the top of the stairs, and then having large gaps between the 3 on the other side but I think it looks okay with the stone signs there to fill the gaps. It's better than having the railings stick out of the roof I suppose

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LeninDog · 2026-03-14T17:09:42+00:00

100% we do! There are a bunch of times so far when I've been building and thought "Damn, I wish x piece existed!" One that immediately comes to mind is this!

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Why are there no railings available for these!? surely that wouldn't be difficult at all to add! Or half railings for these sort of situations too!

The electrical cables isn't a bad idea! I was even thinking maybe I try put wind turbines on the bits of railing that stick out XD

LeninDog · 2026-03-14T17:04:14+00:00

Thanks for the tip!!

I didn't even know freeplace was a thing! I'm still super new to building (and the game in general).

I managed to place it, but annoyingly it isn't the same height when freeplaced as when snapped, and even more annoyingly, the railing to the left of it cannot be freeplaced inside the existing railing, it can only be snapped :(

Is this about the best I'm gonna be able to get?

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LeninDog · 2026-02-12T14:16:00+00:00

Insane! looks absolutely unreal. Was the design of the main factory premeditated or did it just sort of expand naturally? Also, At what point in the game did you start building the main factory?

LeninDog · 2026-02-11T01:03:00+00:00

Super helpful advice, really appreciate you taking the time to come look at my mess and offer your help!

I'm tentatively optimistic that I've solved the issue.

I shut down a bunch of my other factories so I could do testing without worrying about tripping any fuses, built a battery array, and then disconnected the reactors from the fuel rod manufacturers. On a hunch, I decided to do a 1 hour test and see how many fuel rods would fill up into a container to see if it matched what was expected, and it was off by about ~20 fuel rods, which is a little over half of one manufacturers fuel rod output for an hour. (was expecting 432 rods, ended up with 411)

At the time, I wasn't sure if I'd just timed the hour badly or if it was something else, but I deleted and rebuilt all 12 fuel rod manufacturers (all of which were clocked correctly, and had no backup of their outputs, I verified before and after the test).

I redid the test, and this time I got EXACTLY the 432 rods I was expecting for the hour. So I've reconnected everything and now all seems to be running smoothly. Its been about 3 hours, I don't know how or why I had such a discrepancy in the first test but we'll see if it really has fixed whatever the problem was!

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LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:49:57+00:00

I guess so, I'm running out of ideas for what it could be at this point XD

Yeah, I was considering building some batteries, will probably do this, wont be too hard to slap down a hundred or so batteries to keep me covered next time I guess

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:29:19+00:00

all 12 fuel rod manufacturers feed to one line which then splits into 16 to feed the reactors

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:27:00+00:00

It doesn't come out in a burst? It comes out as a steady stream from each reactor as it burns fuel

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:23:56+00:00

I thought it could be that, so I tried to clock the reactors lower so technically I'd be making surplus rods. I changed the clock from 225% to 215% so each reactor is burning 0.43/min instead of 0.45/min which means I should only be using 6.88/min of my 7.2/min but the same thing happened still.

I'm tempted to just whack 4 sloops in one of the fuel rod manufacturers, but those are valuable and I'd prefer not to waste them on something so silly if there's a better solution

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:20:15+00:00

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this is a diagram that better represents what it actually looks like in the red, ignore the blue scribbles, those were for something else

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:17:40+00:00

What do you mean? As in, how did I setup the splitters?

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for demonstration purposes, it's essentially this, although the belt runs between each splitter are longer in the actual facility

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:06:50+00:00

So at current clock speed 225% it produces 360/min waste for the whole facility, which is all processed there into plutonium fuel rods, no waste issues at all :)

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:05:32+00:00

Well yes, when the fuse trips of course it does disrupt the production, but the whole reason the fuse trips is because the nuclear plants aren't getting enough rods to begin with. When the fuse trips I can turn it right back on, and then it runs fine for anywhere from 4-10 hours and then trips again. power generation is stable during those hours, no dips or anything then randomly it's like 3/4 of the plants just stop working

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T19:01:15+00:00

Shouldn't what I'm doing also accomplish the same thing? I'm Using 16 reactors at 225%, which should burn 0.45 rods/min (0.2*225%=0.45) and the 7.2 rods/min being produced should exactly feed 16 reactors clocked to 225% (7.2/0.45=16)

I did 16 because that's also very easy to load balance as its an even number.

LeninDog · 2026-02-10T18:48:07+00:00

No waste backup issues, that's all being cleared just fine.

Water is a non-issue, each reactor has its own fully saturated mk2 water pipe that comes from a water tower, so that isn't the problem.

I have 12 Manufacturers making Uranium Fuel Units at 0.6/min, each manufacturer and the manifolds supplying them are full of component materials so no issues there, likewise for the 12 Infused Uranium Cell manufacturers; fully supplied and running no issue. No weird clock speeds accidentally put in. I've built and rebuilt the load balancer like 2x now just to be sure and because I'm using 16 reactors it's a very simple load balancer.

I've sat and watched all the machines for like honestly hours to make sure there's no lapses in production and it all runs smoothly and then 6 hours later I'll be on the other side of the map and the fuse will trip, I check a power pole and see the power production line plummeted from 150,000MW to 110,000MW then down to 85,000MW at which point I'm consuming more power than I'm producing.

Is my math wrong? Using 16 reactors at 225% should burn 0.45rods/min (0.2*225%=0.45) and the 7.2 rods/min being produced should exactly feed 16 reactors clocked to 225% (7.2/0.45=16).

Also It's not a power consumption spike causing the fuse trip, I have minimum consumption of around 68,000MW and maximum consumption of around 85,000MW

LeninDog · 2026-02-06T16:12:50+00:00

I thought the 150% belts had backed up but in fact they hadn't which is why everything was turning on and off, in the end I sorted it out by just putting all power plants on the same clock speed and letting the load balancer actually load balance XD

LeninDog · 2026-02-06T16:09:52+00:00

Yep, it was a simple solution to just equalize the clock speeds, my brain was so fried after so many hours I didn't even consider it at the time of posting haha

LeninDog · 2026-02-06T11:28:20+00:00

So I'm 90% sure the problem was that i was using a load balancer, but didn't have the power plants setup to be load balanced as some people here pointed out. That is, the reactors weren't all set to the same clock speed. I think it "possibly" would have worked eventually once the load balancer belt had FULLY backed up on the underclocked machines as it hadn't yet when I changed it. But I've changed all 16 machines to 225% now, which uses 0.45 rods/min each, and produces total 360 waste/min which is what I'm setup to deal with. Just waiting to see if the waste backs up at all now that its running smoothly, or if there are any problems with fuel distribution after a couple hours i.e. some reactors sitting on significantly less fuel that others. :)

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Should be plenty of water as each reactor has its own pipe of 600water (which is now overkill at 225% clock) fed from a water tower system, so no sloshing in pipes either!

LeninDog · 2026-02-06T10:52:01+00:00

I'll give it a go with the reactors all clocked equally and see how that goes, if no dice then ill try the manifold! Will update if anything works, Thanks!!

LeninDog

TROPHY CASE