Day 6 - Coal Power!

Today's the day! Time to go exploring and find a permanent power source! Time to find some coal!

According to my ore scanner, there's coal off to the east. It took a bit of searching, and more than a bit of dealing with the fuzzy-tailed hogs and fire-breathing spitters to find the coal nodes. Ultimately, it as the build gun that saved the day -- a ramp up the side of a cliff led me to the coal nodes... 3 of them, and all pure!

Of course, they were all protected by those nasty biting fly things, but with my shiny new Xeno-Blaster, dealing with them was like a session in a batting cage. "Pitch 'em in! I'm ready!" On the positive side -- joy of joys! -- the nodes were right alongside a sizable water source. This pond resembles two impact craters that slightly overlap, but they're big enough to put the entire coal generator plant right on the water surface. In no time, I had continuous coal power!

That was enough work for a day, though. I headed back to my base and did a bit of sorting through my inventory and maybe an odd bit of research in the MAM or two, and called it a day.

Next on the agenda is to get a Steel Mill up and running! Tomorrow should be more fun!

Coal for the Generators

Coal Generator Array

Coal Generator Pipework

Coal Power

Coal power is the first automatable power generation strategy available in the game. Unlike Biomass Generators, which must be hand-fed, Coal Generators can be belt-fed. Since they can be continuously fed, they continuously generate power, whether there is a demand for it or not. At first, this may seem wasteful, but since resource nodes are infinite in Satisfactory, there's really no "wasting" of fuel.

Setting up a coal generating plant is pretty straightforward; you need to remember three numbers: 120, 8, and 3. 120 is the "coal per minute" rate that you want to have access to. One Pure node with a Mark 1 miner will do this. If you're using Normal or (shudder) Impure nodes, you may need to combine feeds from multiple nodes, or even overclock your miners.

8 is the number of coal generators that will consume the 120 coal per minute. Each consumes 15 per minute. Each also requires 45 m³ of water, which is where the 3 Water Extractors come from. The plant can be built with Mk 1 pipeline provided it is arranged correctly.

The easiest way is to set up a "bus line" of water running along all 8 generators. The three Water Extractors should be linked into this at at spread-out intervals: one between the first and second generator: one between the fourth and fifth, and one between the seventh and eighth. If you can build the generators near the water level, you can avoid the need for pumps.

The 8 generator setup will produce 600MW of power. The Water Extractors require 20MW each, and the Miner requires 5MW, so the net power production from this simple setup is 535MW. If you need to use pumps to lift the water, each pump will require 4MW.

Scaling Up Strategies

Switching in a Mark 2 Miner on a Pure Node will immediately allow you to build a second array of 8 generators (and 3 more water extractors). So would overclocking the Mark 1 miner to 200%. Doing both (overclocking a Mark 2 miner), would allow you to build a plant that generates a net of 2140MW from a single (pure) coal node.

Another option involves the Compacted Coal recipe available from a Hard Drive. Combining the Coal with Sulfur and feeding it into the power plant will result in slightly more than double the power output from the same generator/water extractor configuration (less the additional 75MW of power the Assemblers need to produce the compacted coal)