If the coolants lasted longer and capacitors had much higher capacity then late game active would be a viable option. Right now it can be done for fun but likely at a loss. I've tried but the coolant only lasts a few seconds, less than maintenance, and upgrades only increase it just a slight bit. Perhaps replacing a warmed cooler could be considered an upgrade (shift-left click?). I know the lack of capacity seems to be a struggle even early game. I mean, you can't make a setup to come back and click the sell button every couple minutes, you know? You have to smash the sell button which make you rely no the auto sell component from idling. It shunts everyone into the same designs.
It's just that these $1-10Qi still won't let me get to the next set. I mean, I can get them in a few hours of idle, but the next set will only be slightly faster money gain for way more money and just another precise increment of speed. Ya, I'm idling 23.4T/t. Also, I know endgame guys like me are flashy and you have new players to help too, lol. But, we'll see.
35 single nef chekcer board with ult.vents. 17.7T/t heated. Took me 6 cores to stabilize temp to +6k per tick, like 5+ days to move from 450 to 537B. Just a lil math to keep it hot over night, do it. Can vent 1Qa but only get 150T plating, lol, could run a couple quad nef with the vent. Dogging my CPU a bit. Neutron at 10% is niche. Use caps to ratio vents, but you'll prolly still need more caps to soak up energy. At 10% or 20% of a core per cell it's just better to consolidate and get another group.
The upgrade prices are in magnitudes, but the effects are super linear, so... like getting a bunch of these things on the screen and idle can't happen anytime soon. Of course... I suppose that would be highly dependent on income, which would be considerably more if the numbers were as displayed.
I'm lucky? I can run two nefastium fuels with 4 vents on them with 3 ultimate plates and the rest ultimate capacitors. I don't think this is what the dev was going for. 900B/t. The heat numbers are wrong somewhere, I think it's the vents, but, I'll have to make sure I make a profit with coolants, then switch to 4 coolants on nefastium rods, fill the screen, then grab an upgrade or two. Lasts about 2 minutes between changes for me or about 90 seconds on a time.
You can make a 22, 45, 68, 90 minute coolant quad nefastium reactor by pairing them with 1, 2, 3, or 4 respectively ultimate coolants. And the rest of the spots with neutron rods. The one with 3 coolants I made as a test is getting me 21.291B/T, with heat, and the 5qa nefastium upgrade. Whenever you feel like active play it goes- row 1: ultimate coolant every other
row 2: empty
Row 3: blank, then coolant every other one
Repeat...
Last row, now use your brain here, on the last couple rows your going to have a few ultmate plates, a bunch of capacitors, and a lot of nuetron rods, how much of each depends on your upgrads. Then fill it up and carefully heat it up. This should work with whatever coolants, capacitors, and fuel you can afford for going super fast, if you're careful. For long term, it still looks like 3 fans per double nefastium is the best.
Okay, so my starter, after using a vent and uranium to collect some cash, for anti idle just use whatever 8 coolants and 4 best fuel you can afford. You can get more energy if you have more rods. For, instance, 2 quad dolorium and 2 nefastium in checkerboard square make a lot of power. Anyway, and surround it with batteries. Carve out as many cells as you can maintain and then just upgrade the components and buy upgrades. That's how you play the game as fast as possible.
(If I restarted the game again, that's how I would build money quickly to ~where I am now... the next upgrades are all 200T... so there's a lag here...)
You could probably run 4 sets of 4 quad cells safely... With five cells or four you cash bar would be full in just a couple ticks, so you'd need to mash all the time. With three there was barely enough time to replace 2 components. I'd say getting and actually reaping the rewards of the income is at a few Billions per tick. So, maybe 5.4B/Tick (6 cells) which means 10.8B with the 500Qa upgrade. That's my guess... but there's not time to go pee... and wouldn't have much time to hit the cash button, but it might still have 10.4B in capacity to hold a tick
The biggest power unit that doesn't produce heat that cannot be captured, AND has two coolants per constituent part for maintenance, is 4 quad cell nefasium components in a 2 by 2 square. You surround it with 8 ultimate coolants. This produces about 900M/tick with the nefastium upgraded 3 times. As I posted earlier, I ran it with three such cells linked by coolants. It made ~2.77B/Tick.. maybe a couple T per minute. Constantly needed attention replacing coolants and clicking the button for cash.
Yah, the heat vents, in a good design, should stay completely chill. The coolants need to have at least enough heat in them to get the exchanger to run at capacity into the vents. That's the theory. The reactor, the heat exchangers, and the coolant should all have some heat in them, in theory, as the exchanger attempts to heat the vents to its capacity every tick and fails, because the vent dumps the heat.
50Qa? 500Qua? That is a lot of time to make upgrades more aggressive, I suppose. I have a few 200T upgrades that will make things a little faster, but not like 50Qa faster.
Part 2... this takes up 25 square and 15 plates or 40 squares. Each repeat tacks up lots of squares that could have just been used build plates on and increase vent capacity instead. Another thing is that the heat exchangers should offer protection against heat, and they seem to do this, except for how they run makes them dangerous. All this stuff adds up to using ultimate plates rather than heat exchangers. In other news, I think I've completed the game, because the further upgrades to the Nefastium are simply too expensive. 5Qa? Idle that is certainly going to take days and days.... anti idle that's still going to take forever, probably over a day, like a whole work week...
In theory the heat exchangers should melt down when all the heat cannot be sunk and the reactor is above the heat exchangers temp. I'm going to be busy letting it run idle, and am not going to do this experiment right now. So, in my short experience with them, they seem to work okay, just not as good as a direct vent if the vent can fit, and a vent can fit up to Nefastium 1 cell. So, going to Nefastium 2 cell, you'd need over 300 cells or so of ultimate plate to make it possible for a vent to contact a nefastium 2. I believe he's added power to the heat exchangers (HE) to 462.96 (ultimate). Used to cool coolant, then, this can move about 3.7M per tick away from the coolants. We'll use, say 12 ultimate vents. They need to have about a 309k/tick so about 15 ultimate plates (giving you plenty of heat to withstand overheating by the exchangers).
Running 3 4 quad cell nefastium connected by coolant and surrounded by coolant was getting me about 2.77B tick and maintenance plus the cash button was about all I could manage. You could do 4 and make money just a touch faster. It was pretty fast, the experiment took just a few minutes to get back my investment and then I let it melt down. It wasn't fast enough to get me to 200T, however, lol, maybe some people would sit there that long.
Ultimate capacitor is 1.99M/Tick with the second to last upgrade... The last one seems to take it to about 2, from the reactor design with 7 quad nefastium single stressing 4 ultimate coolers each for about 988M/tick.
Yes, I played with the heat exchangers, but they aren't good enough to spend time designing with. Just add plating until the vents are exactly what you need. Oh, and the upgrades -say- 1%, but they -mean- 5% for the venting. The big capacitor is like 1.99something million $/tick. Anyway, 3 heat pipe take a max of .75M off of a coolant/tick... or more like 8 time .75 off 4 coolants is only 6M, and you need like a giant thing to do that and they're screwey as hell so you need tons of plates. It would be a huge reactor block too. Just for 6M... with about 90 ultimate plates (less than 1/3 of the tile) you get the ultimate fans to about 1.5M, and you don't have to replace coolants... because the heat exchangers are screwey.