Factorio Electricity Basics Guide - Factorio Guide Guide - IGN (2024)

Electricity is the lifeblood of your factory in Factorio. It's going to sustain every piece of machinery as you progress. As you continue down the tech tree, you'll unlock new forms of electricity to power your operations. Here are the basics of each type you'll come across in Factorio.

• Steam Power
• Solar Power
• Nuclear Power

Steam Power

Steam Power is the first type of electricity you'll have access to in Factorio. It mainly focuses on taking water using Offshore Pumps and turning it into steam to power a bevy of different types of machinery.

First, you'll need to find a body of water near your base. The closer it is to your base, the less materials you'll need to create pipes or small electricity poles.

Build an Offshore Pump and some pipes. Connect the pipes from the Offshore pump to a Boiler. Then connect pipes from the Boiler to a Steam Engine, and you'll have your very first set of electricity up and running.

The Boiler will need fuel, so it's smart to build a Conveyor belt of Coal and an Inserter to feed the fuel directly into the Boiler. This will ensure you do not run out of fuel to power your newly established electricity.

Placing electricity poles will give you power in a 5x5 grid indicated by the blue square around each pole. This shows the distance you'll cover and where objects that need electricity need to be placed in order to receive power.

You can now set up Electric Mining Drills which will produce material much quicker than ones that require Coal to fuel.

Solar Power

Solar Power is the next step of electricity in Factorio. It's found in the Tech Tree right underneath Electronics. It costs 250 Red and Green Science to research.

The main source of power will come from Solar Panels, which will generate electricity during the day. However, once night falls, they will no longer charge electricity so you'll need to generate enough power for your factory to stay active during the night.

Solar Panels cost 5 Copper Plate, 5 Steel Plate, and 15 Electronic Circuits to craft.

When building your Solar Panel farm, you'll want to construct it similar to the image below when first starting out. This will ensure you're getting the maximum value of your resources by utilizing all of the space from a Medium Power Pole.

So build one Medium Power Pole, a square of Solar Panels around it, connect a new pole adjacent to it, and repeat the process.

What you will need now is Accumulators, which can store extra power generated. This is how you will be able to run your factory at night when your Solar Panels are no longer generating power. Begin placing Accumulators around a single power pole like the image below.

This is by no means going to be viable as you begin to scale your factory even more, but it's a good starting out point as you learn what your intake of electricity is going to be moving forward. If you click on a power pole, you can see how much charge the Accumulators have left, as well as how much electricity you're using for production.

From here you're all set to branch out with your poles to begin powering the rest of your factory.

Nuclear Power

Nuclear Power is the last form of electricity you will unlock in Factorio. It's very far down the tech tree, right below Uranium Processing. It will cost 250 Red, Green, and Blue Science to research. Nuclear power is by far the most complicated energy system in Factorio.

The first step to using Nuclear power is mining Uranium. This resource can be found around the map and is noted in the world by a bright green mineral on the ground.

When placing Mining Drills on top of Uranium, you will now be able to attach pipes between the drills. This is because you'll need to pump Sulfuric Acid into the drills to actually mine the Uranium. You can bring it by train, but depending on how far away your base is, you might just want to connect pipes to carry it.

Sulfuric Acid is created in a Chemical Plant by mixing Sulfur, Water, and Iron Plates. Once you've created a pipeline to make Sulfuric Acid, either carry it through pipes to your Mining Drills or by Train if you have the means. Once it's piped into your drills, they will begin mining the Uranium.

You will now need to take the Uranium you've just mined and bring it to a Centrifuge. This will process the Uranium into a new form, and will be the next step in making the Uranium fuel cells which is how we will get our new energy. The easiest way to do this is to set up conveyor belts that feed the freshly mined ore into the Centrifuge. Similar to how you've been feeding ore into everything else so far.

The Centrifuge can produce two different types of Uranium Ore. Uranium-238, which is the more common of the two, and Uranium-235, the rarer of the two. You will need both types of uranium to produce the Fuel Cells, and you don't have a choice in which one the Centrifuge produces.

The best way to deal with this is to set up a massive farm or Mining Drills and Conveyor Belts. pump all of them into multiple different Centrifuges in hopes of getting both types of Uranium.

From here, feed all of the newly processed Uranium into an Assembly Machine 2, which will build the Fuel Cells needed to power the Nuclear Reactor.

Once the Nuclear Reactor begins being fed the Uranium Fuel Cells, it will begin to expel the used up ones, attach a Chest to the nuclear Reactor to collect these so it doesn't interrupt the process. Eventually you will be able to recycle these into more ore.

Nuclear Reactor's will emit a lot of heat during the burning process. you'll need to attach a Heat Exchanger to the reactor and pipe in water to the Heat Exchanger to keep the Nuclear Reactor cool.

Attaching Heat Pipes to the reactor will help cool it down further. So attach Heat Pipes to the flame icon on the corners of the reactor, and then place a Heat Exchanger.

The actual electricity you're producing comes from the heat exchanged off of the reactor burning the Fuel Cells, which gets turned into Steam using Steam Turbines.

Attach four Heat Exchangers to the Heat Pipe like the image below, pump water in using an Offshore Pump and connect the pipes together so water is flowing through each exchanger. You can connect the exchangers together using standard pipes. Then attach a Steam Turbine to the pipes coming from the Heat Exchanger.

You'll need to use Solar Power and power poles to give electricity to the Turbines, and Solar will take priority over Nuclear, however, once the sun goes down, Your turbines will kick in and power the grid for you when Solar is no longer functional.