Rebalancing the fission reactors

The breeding changes are merged, you can play with them right now in the testing release.

Exponential neutron progress on breeder rods is gone. A new stat is added to breeder rods: Neutron loss. Any amount of neutrons put onto the breeder rod from any side will have this value subtracted. This means, that the measured neutron count of the breeder rod is actually what is added to the breeding progress each tick. The neutrons needed for each breeder rod have been rebalanced accordingly and are therefore lower, keep in mind this change is not retroactive to already created breeder rods, so those will take significantly longer to breed.

Keep in mind that the neutron loss is per neutron input, so for example putting 1500 Neutrons into two sides of a breeder rod with a Neutron Loss of 1000 by using two fuel rods will not give you 2000 Neutrons of progress, but 1000 ((1500 - 1000) + (1500 - 1000)).

Another change to breeding to make it a bit less tedious to automate, while making it a bit more tedious to automate in other ways and also slightly less dangerous is that breeder rods won’t directly turn into fuel rods anymore, but Enriched Rods. These enriched rods can simply be progresses by centrifuging them to get the new material (and a bit of the old that didn’t convert).

This also changes how you need to detect that breeding is finished and therefore will most likely mean that any old automated breeder reactor will need to be updated. The Enriched Rod will act exactly like the breeder rod, with the only difference that it doesn’t have a neutron loss and thus you can measure slightly higher neutron counts on it, which can be used to detect that breeding is finished. This approach was chosen as it means that no old automated breeder reactor would be at risk of exploding. Alternatively you can also now also quite easily calculate how long breeding will take and control you reactors with timing.

A new breeder rod has also been added: Lithium-6, breeding into Tritium. The Tritium can quite conveniently be extracted with a canning machine, making automation slightly easier. I plan to make the amount of Li-6 you get from centrifuging the refined ore a bit higher to make this approach of obtaining Tritium a bit more useful and also a bit more realistic, Li-6 is a much more common to Li-7 compared to how common U-235 is to U-238 but the centrifuging ration is the same.

Another tweak I added is lowering the amount of better fuels obtained from centrifuging depleted fuel rods to a third of what it was initially. This should help combat the abundance of good nuclear fuels a tiny bit.

And now for something completely different: Better tooltips for the rods.
The tooltips now include information about what those various stats mean, hopefully making the system a tiny bit less cryptic. Here feedback is especially helpful, as to the helpfulness and clearness of the tooltips. With the next part of the rework I’ll also release an updated reactor guide to make things yet more understandable, maybe even adding some ingame books with some information.

As always, all kinds of constructive feedback are appreciated.

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I don’t like that. It took something like a RL week to deplete Co-60 in moderated reactor (so it’s much faster than normal). To get good nuclear fuel, It’s much faster to get U-235 from refining uraninite. And uraninite is available from worldgen.

So I see 2 problems: too much uranium from worldgen (and too little thorium in comparison), maybe too big fuel rod duration.

I don’t have suggestions what to do with worldgen. The same ores can be useful for other mods, so it’s probably not a good idea to reduce their count in vanilla GT6.

Fuel rod duration… it would be nice to have a configurable number, which means “how long is U-235 fuel rod duration in minutes?” (Currently 10 000 minutes). I mean, it would be one multiplier for all fuel rods’ durations.

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Co-60 by default lasts about 5 weeks in a reactor, which is quite a long time. With moderation (either by moderator rods or by running it in water based coolant) this gets quartered to ~9 days. When running the reactor supercritical and going over the neutron maximum (256 neutrons, so quite easy) we get this quartered again, one rod now lasting ~2 days. Now, since durability loss now scales linearly with power output, lets go over the neutron maximum several times. If we for example have a neutron count of on average 5000 on the rod, that means we will lose durability 5000 / 256 = ~19.5 times faster, the rod now lasting ~2.7 hours.

That is quite fast but still not amazingly fast and requires automation to be useful. And then that would only yield you some Thorium, which can’t go critical without the 1x1 reactor and then would take the same amount of time to burn (2 times the durability but half the maximum) and still only yields U-238.

It is probably best to look at the real use-cases of a burner reactor:

  1. U-238 to U-235: Burning U-238 would take 2 times longer than Co-60, because at the same default duration, the maximum is twice as high as Co-60. That means ~5.3 hours. To get a full rod of U-235 we need to burn 9 U-238 rods, taking exactly 2 days.
  2. U-235 to Pu-244 to Pu-241: We want Pu-241 because of the lower factor making it much better, while Pu-244 is more or less equal U-235 from a stat perspective. So U-235 lasts 5 times less but has a 4 times higher maximum than U-238, making burning one rod at 5000 Neutrons take 2.5 days. Burning Pu-244 takes the same amount of time because of the sharing in relevant stats with U-235, making burning U-235 into take 25 days total (since you need 9 Pu-244 rods).
  3. U-233 to Pu-243: U-233 lasts 5 times longer than U-238, meaning burning it into a rod of Pu-243 takes 12.5 days. Since you already must have a breeder reactor at this point, it is probably better to try squeezing out some Pu-239 with it.
  4. Getting Enriched Naquadah or Naquadria: There is probably little reason to even attempt this, your best starting point would always be Pu-239, taking 10 days to get one rod of Am-241, taking 90 days to get the 9 rods needed for one rod of Enriched Naquadah, taking an additional 10 days to burn that to Enriched Naquadah (100 days total for it at 5000 Neutrons on the burning rod). To burn Enriched Naquadah you need even more than 5000 neutrons to even cross the maximum, but I will continue the calculation with 5000 and pretend it crosses the maximum, making it more easy to calculate the time it would take with more realistic neutron counts. So, 900 days to get the Enriched Naquadah needed and then just an additional 100 days to burn it into Naquadria. Gives you a nice round 1000 days to burn your way from 729 rods of Pu-239 to 1 rod of Naquadria. Even if you do something absurd like 10 times more neutrons on the rods, meaning 10 times quicker burning, it would still take 100 days real time, having to deal with the heat of 50000 neutrons, so more than 3 large heat exchangers required.

So, after carefully reviewing this data, I’ve come to the conclusion, that you’re kinda right. I’ll dial back the return from 4/72 of a dust per rod to 6/72 of a dust per rod. I’ll also make water based reactors (heavy and tritiated water to be exact) more useful as burner reactors by making them lower the neutron maximum of the fuel rods quite significantly. Exact numbers undecided, but something like an at least 8 and 16 times lower neutron maximum. This should give burner reactors a more useful niche.

My solution to somewhat remedy this would be to disable getting 235 from centrifuging, having to go to the uranium-fluorite processing chain instead (or burner reactors). U235 is really your gateway into breeding and therefore getting better fuels, even one rod of it being enough to make you never need to get any more of it.

To make Thorium more available, maybe a way could be to make Co-60 much less useful for power production but more easily burnable. A lot of people seem to be running Co-60 because it is super abundant and better than Thorium for power production because it can go supercritical, so it would smash two flies at once. Thorium is not really meant to be used directly as reactor fuel, but for either breeding U-233 or for Molten Thorium Salt Reactors, so it being less abundant is not really that much of an issue imo. What could be an issue is that breeding U-238 into Pu-239 is too easy compared to breeding Thorium into U-233, so U-233 breeding would become redundant, but that remains to be seen.

Configurable duration is also something that might be worth looking into, but it also messes with the balance of burner reactors, so it would maybe be better to just change the current values and rebalance for that instead.

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While the changes I’ve made since the latest post aren’t merged yet, I think it is about time to talk about them. Keep in mind, that since these changes I’ll be talking about are not yet merged, they are still subject to change based on Gregs review of the PR.

I already discussed the most significant general changes in previous posts, the removal of the 1x1 reactor core reverted and of the centrifuging recipe for refined uranium ore returning U-235. While these changes are the new default, they can still be reverted through new config options.

The biggest and potentially most dangerous change however is the complete rebalancing of the reactor coolants. Helium, Molten Tin and Molten Sodium as a reactor coolants have been buffed, so existing reactors using them are at risk when updating, as their increased neutron output could cause explosions and turn previously stable reactors into supercritical reactors. The changes themself are as follows:

  • Gas coolants: These coolants don’t effect the factor anymore. This previously made CO2 too powerful and Helium rather useless. Now CO2 is rather unspectacular, being a little worse than water based coolants stat wise. Helium is slightly better than water and therefore also CO2, which is appropriate, since it is harder to come by than CO2. Since they, unlike water based coolant, don’t moderate fuel rods inside them, they are still very useful for building efficient supercritical reactors.
  • Molten metal coolants: These coolants are still intended for use in breeder reactors. They now increase the factor of fuel rods inside them, making them much more useful for breeding, allowing critical breeder reactors using U-235 and equivalent fuels. Since breeding now basically requires supercritical reactors, this change is rather important.
  • Heavy and Tritiated Water have been change to lower the neutron maximum of any fuel rods they contain quite significantly. This, while making them less useful for creating efficient power generating reactors, makes them much more useful for burner reactors.

These changes really help define the roles of the different reactor coolants to fit different reactor types:

  • IC2 Coolant for stable reactors.
  • Distilled Water for cheap (no boiler required) moderated supercritical reactors.
  • Semi-Heavy Water for safer moderated supercritical power producing reactors.
  • Heavy and Tritiated Water for burner reactors.
  • Carbon Dioxide, Helium and Molten Lithium Chloride for supercritical power producing reactors.
  • Molten Tin and Molten Sodium for supercritical breeder reactors.
  • Thorium Salt for unique efficient supercritical power producing reactors.

Previously CO2 was the best coolant for practically all use-cases other than stable reactors.

Another change that was made that effects the reactor balance a bit is regarding fuels: Cobalt-60 has been nerfed quite significantly. It is now practically useless as a reactor fuel for power producing reactors, having a emission of zero. The self was raised quite a bit, so it is still somewhat usable in stable reactors more akin to RTGs. Its “intended” use is for burning it into Thorium (changed from Uranium-238) using a burner reactor. Though remember, just because the base emission is zero it still can emit extra neutrons based on the number of neutrons on it.

Breeding/burning balance has also been changed a bit, breeding Thorium and Uranium-238 now takes four times more neutrons than before to complete, which seemed more reasonable after calculating the time required times for breeding. The Lithium breeder rod was also changed to use normal Lithium rather than the even rarer Litium-6, which itself is more useful in a fusion reactor than Tritium anyway, while only requiring slightly more neutrons than before. Depleted fuel rods now also return 6/72 of dust rather than 4/72 to make burner reactors a bit better.

On a very different note, new 9 guide books have been added to be found in dungeons and strongholds containing very helpful information about nuclear reactors and one less useful one on them has also been added. With the merge of these changes I will also compile their content with a bit of formatting into a PDF that should be more comfortable to read for most.

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Tritium->Tritiated water recipe may be useful. At least in my imagination :slight_smile:

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So, the reactor changes have been merged a while back and have also officially released in .15.00, as per my contractual obligation (i.e. I think I said I would do so after the release) I’ll release a new, updated version of the reactor guide PDF:

GT6ReactorGuide.pdf (67.5 KB)

This is basically a formatted (and thus much more readable) version of the ingame reactor guide book. It is licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, as also apparent when looking at the end of the document. @Gregorius should probably also link it in place of the old one.

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After the reactor was revised, it did rebalance to some extent, but according to my recent communication with some friends playing gt6, I found another problem: the balance between fission and fusion.
I often hear them say that fusion is not as good as fission, because although fusion has the advantage of only inputting one start-up energy and running all the time when there is enough fuel, the output of fusion is always only 8192EU/t, which is considered too little. Moreover, the construction of fusion reactor requires a large number of crystal processors, which leads to it being considered flashy. The use of vibranium produced by fusion as the ultimate material is far less than that of neutronium in gt5u. It can only be used as a high-performance tool or the ultimate turbine, and there is no “ultimate goal” similar to the ultimate battery.
Although the fission reactor needs to consider radiation and safety, in fact, after testing, you can only need four naquadria fuel rod to reach 81920HU / t, and after a series of conversion, you can get 40960EU / t, which is five times the power generation of fusion. Moreover, although the dynamo set needs to consume more tungsten steel than the fusion reactor, it is cheaper than fusion in other aspects, and the duration can reach one month. Naquadah can be dug only by going to the end, and then it can be centrifuged directly to naquadria, which leads to more people unwilling to use fusion.
How do you think about this problem? Is it to increase the difficulty of naquadah isotope separation (oh no gtnh’s naquadah procressing is hell… Even gregitality is also terrible, don’t do this) to prevent crazy output from using naquadah fuel rods in the beginning? Or let fusion have more uses (GT6U has plans to add higher-tier fusion reactors, but has not been implemented yet)? Or let vibranium have more uses to make people more motivated to make it?

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More reasons for fusion not to be the “end all” power source then and to have a diversification of power sources in your base? It’d be nice if fission were still a good and reliable source of power for your base and fusion didn’t completely outperform it in every possible way, I hate how power structures end up being “this thing is completely better than the last thing you ever used before and basically you should just ignore that one completely and throw that and all its infrastructure in the shredder”, which is a thing in GT6 compared to GT5U, where steam starts being a joke at LV while in GT6 it manages to stay relevant for much longer.

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Yeah I try to at least somewhat keep all Power Sources relevant, it would get boring otherwise. That said Fusion needs probably more reasons to use the Materials it produces, than just “you can make great Tools out of it”.

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An idea I had for NTM (not sure if it would work that well for GT though) was making the fusion reactor produce a new isotope or other fuel additive that could be used in fission reactors, which when depleted and reprocessed would yield something you could use for fusion again. You could play that game up to infinity but that would ensure that both fission and fusion would stay equally relevant as the energy production increases with each cycle.

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I already have quite a List of Fusion Reactions in GT6, though most Materials it makes are only really useful for more Fusion. Tritium and Deuterium can be useful for Breeding in the Reactor though, so I guess that would be a way to make use of some of the reactions.

The only really useful thing I can make (because i am bound to realism in some aspects), is all those magical made up Elements that typically show up in Pop-Culture. :wink:

So I might add an Aneutronic Fusion Reactor that is portable kinda like Iron Man has, and use Materials you can only get via Fusion to craft it in the first place.

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So can vibranium become more useful? Yes, at present, even the Vibramantium turbine can not be used normally, because the adamantium boiler does not have enough HU input. As for the gas turbine, there must not be so much natural gas for you to burn.as for the vibranium silver item pipe, no one will do it.

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Naquadria is admittedly a very powerful. If you know what you’re doing (and have 300 Thorium to spare), one rod can perform similar to a ZPM, both in raw power output and time it lasts, however since all the output is in HU, the infastructure to convert it to EU is quite significant and also loses half the energy. I don’t think fission having potential to be this powerful is an issue, but it may be a bit too easy to archive right now. Such reactors will also probably have the potential to erase your whole base when fission explosions get enabled again, fusion has the benefit of safety.

My proposal to make fusion more relevant would be to gate enriched naquadah and naquadria behind it and removing all other ways of obtaining it. Fusion, while having some energy production potential, is probably best used for high tech material processing. Using a fusion reactor to turn Naquadah into Enriched Naquadah seems somewhat logical. Naquadria can stay as a fission waste product from Enriched Naquadah, since converting the Naquadah this way is no easy feat. Since Enriched Naquadah and Naquadria are (to my knowledge) only useful for fission anyway, this would be a great way to tie fission and fusion together.

The concrete recipe I’d suggest would be Naquadah plus Plutonium 239 resulting in Enriched Naquadah plus Lead plus Helium and/or Hydrogen (isotopes) to balance particle counts. Having to use a fission fuel in addition to the Naquadah gets around the issue of Naquadah being able to be produced with the matter fabricator.

Speaking of the matter fabricator, something to produce QU that isn’t the ZPM could be useful, since otherwise you are limited by a T5 Quantum Energizer only being able to supply 4096QU to a matter fabricator, since there are no “quantum cables”, which would probably be a niche an Aneutronic Fusion Reactor could fill.

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Aneutronic would do EU directly as a Battery alike thing (being allowed in all T1 to T5 Batboxes). Speaking of, from practical experience is it easy to get 100000L Of Helium-3? I do not think it is… I might need to buff Fusion afterall, otherwise Aneutronic would be worse than a fully charged EV Lithium Battery…

And yes I know that amount of Helium-3 can be gotten from 200000L of Deuterium, which is one Hour of nonstop D-D Fusion per charge of a balance-sense-making portable Aneutronic Reactor.

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I believe heavier transuranic elements like curium or californium would be feasible (i.e. fissile with a reasonable performance) and somewhat realistic (ofc not IRL due to the tiny amounts produced, but that’s nothing the fusion reactor couldn’t fix).

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So, I wanted to go buff Endstone Helium-3 Output and noticed I accidentally buffed it already, so I guess I dont need to change anything there, except maybe nerf it a little, because NINE times more than originally intended is a bit much…

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Vibramantium turbine can not be used normally, because the adamantium boiler does not have enough HU input

can’t you just use multiple boilers?

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My point was that vibramantium turbine exists, adamantium boiler exists, but there is no powerful enough heat exchanger for them.

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I made the installation using your diagram. Thank you :slight_smile:
13x5 area





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Mm those signs feel so out of place, we need some plastic signs in here.

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