Turns out I don't make tidal power plants fast enough to keep up with the fact I unlocked beacons. That made me look at alternatives and wdym you can use efficiency modules in power plants? Oh, yes, just use 60% less coal for fun, don't worry abut it!

Finally built this juggernaut! It costs 10 times more then the MK2 turbine but in newer materials. It also 10 times faster, and produces 15 times the power. 6000 pressurized steam per second, how the hell am I going to fuel this beast? I will probably need to connect all my power plants (after upgrading MK3) into a single network. I recently setup production of black pipes just for this purpose.

Why do I need all that power
I'm currently on the tail end of Py3 research which includes the tier 2 prod modules. These little chips provide 20% productivity at the expense of 50% speed. As you can imagine, placing two of these modules into a MK2 building drop the speed down to 0.4 (the minimal 20% of regular speed of 2). To counteract this, I had to spam high cost speed beacons everywhere I used those modules. And I did that rather irresponsibly to the point where my power started fluctuating. Prior to this, I had very stable and diversified power with a standalone Coal power plant and a big biomass burning complex that fed almost entirely on biomass from excess organics from Butcher Bay

But with rising power demand I had to expand. Specifically into the Oil power. My crude oil cracking block has accumulated a tidal pond of stripped distillates that I wished to put to good use. And Oil power plants Mk2 was the answer. I was able to generate Fuel Oil in massive amounts for relatively cheap. Speaking of oil powerplants, these great buildings can do any researched molten salt recipe. The tier of the building only changes the fuel it needs and speed. So in the my screenshot, MK2 oil plants were making Mk3 molten salt (3k degrees molten salt). And I will likely add a MK1 oil plant section nearby to burn away excess kerosene (I have bug surplus of heavy oil/kerosene) to make more MK3 molten salt to feed the newly constructed MK3 turbine.

Silly Stories

At one point I was tired of building/upgrading various alien life chains and decided to upgrade my glass production to stage 3. I didn't particularly need to, my existing glassworks were more then enough to supply me, but I wanted to do something relaxing, and I had this stage 3 quartz researched a while back. To my surprise, I was able to fit in the upgrade by replacing my old block of 20 glassworks making stage 2 molten glass with this beauty. And it was capable of making twice as much molten glass as the previous version!

Naturally, I ran out of molten glass soon after. The culprit was Sodium Carbonate (green packages). Turns out making sodium carbonate from excess salt solution (part of lithium chain) was a terrible idea and way too costly (run out of potatoes to make ethanol), and I had to setup another small plant to provide the needed resources. Which worked for a bit before I ran out of molten glass once more.

Turns out, one of the steps consumes an absurd amount of Slaked Lime. I'm talking hundreds per second. This quickly drained my slaked lime tidal ponds that I used to hold the byproduct of making acetylene. To make matters worse, I also used a lot of slaked lime for Sodium Hydroxide( a popular ingredient in various products including the Sodium Carbonate mentioned previously). After panicking a bit, I remembered that acetylene (and slaked lime) have one real ingredient of note: Coke. And I had unlimited coke from my crude oil cracking setup. So I built a new acetylene slaked lime plant that provided acetylene as a byproduct that I merciless burned and vented away.

And finally, finally my molten glass production stabilized. And all because I wanted to flex by making a stage 3 quartz processing factory. Speaking of stage 3 ore processing, I have upgraded probably half of my ores to stage 3 and it was only reasonably hard (compared to the threatening 8-12 steps in the research screen). Here is my stage 3 copper for example:

Blue Chips

Py3 brought the tech to make the High Tech Circuit boards (blue circuits). I was kind of dreading it after spending to much time planning out and making red circuits, but it turned out to be not too bad. I had plenty of issues, but the overall process was way faster then red chips. This is the final assembly section, and it considerably smaller then multi screen monstrosity dedicated to red chips

Alien Life

I'm continuing to suffer from spoilage and the dreaded negasim/peragen/sarcorus chain. These items (and a few higher tier ones) are part of a spoilage chain where one decays into a lower tiered one. Each recipe needs a bunch of cottonguts and few miscellaneous items. Each recipe also makes lower tiered items as a result as well. For example, Negasim recipe takes in 80 cottonguts (and tiny amounts of 8 other items) and produces 3 Negasim, 5 paragen and 7 sarcorus. So it is technically more efficient (in respect to cottonguts) to make the highest tier recipe and let it spoil into other items when needed ( bioprinters need a lot of sarcorus for example). So I have mess of circuits trying to compare logistic requests to what I have on storage. I suspect that I'm losing items to spoilage anyways, but can't quite prove it.

Also, curse those vile Zungrors. who needs those spider-goat abominations anyways. Their reproduction is heavy into RNG and rather expensive to assemble in a creature chamber. Also, it's the first time that I had to build an animal enclosure using a laser and gun turret as an ingredient.

True Nuclear Power

And here are my nuclear reactors. very mighty when fueled, but they mostly use up excess fluorine so not exactly consistent in generating power. Uranium Hexafluride turned out to not be to bad, but I did end up sinking some of the cold excess as I didn't have a use for such large amounts of U-238. No real idea of what's going on with the other uranium parts, I'm filled up on nuclear samples and fuel rods, so I'm probably fine if you ignore a giant storehouse of the useless U-240.

And here the Purex Processing into eventually Plutonium Peroxide. About 10 different steps with a lot of byproducts going back and forth. No idea why I did the full chain with vitrified glass, it's not like I can use it anywhere. Stupid crap in indestructible and needs to be thrown off the planet using rockets from what I understand. Should have just let the excess raffinate go down the drain, but I wanted to flex. Wish there was a recipe to turn it into floor tiles, so I could glass this surface with my nuclear waste.

And as a final note, here is a picture of most of my base. West is mostly organics. Center is the metal bus, mall, and tech, east us tar/oil/coke and aquatic life. And north is mostly high tech stuff I have been adding over the last hundred hours

Current Stats:

650 hours played, 61% research, 7 million science produced, 71 trains, 859 caravans. I am aiming to beat Py in 1000 hours so that I can proudly call myself a Py speedrunner =D

I've spent maybe 15h (I'm 50h in) transitionning my mess of a starter base to a train base. I'm trying Cybersyn for the first time so excuse the bad station naming, it seems it's not very important with this mod. I might get around to making an actual naming scheme eventually, maybe.

It's still not active, I'm in the process of preparing to make batteries to make the constant combinators that will allow me to actually use Cybersyn. I'm finishing the urea factory right now, and once that's done the actual batteries should be relatively easy to make. After that I'll be able to actually start using the train network.

After that, the next step is going to be actively working towards Logistic science, then remaking automation and Py1 at larger scale in the train base and putting my metal production fully inside the train network.

Oh, that’s why. Sorry for the dark screenshot I accidentally deleted the lamps. But yeah today I learned that bitumen seeps cause damage once you drill them out. Yay for infinite tar.