This will be a very basic guild to help new players understand how to play the game. It won’t provide optimal placements just the basic tools to start the game. The first thing you need to do is build a Wind Turbine. Notice it costs $1 and lasts for 10 ticks producing 0.15 power per tick or 1.5 power over its life.  Once you place it a yellow bar will appear under the turbine and start decreasing. The yellow bar reperesents the number of ticks your Wind Turbine has left. Once your Wind Turbine has produced some power click on the “sell all power” button to turn energy into money at a rate of 1:1 This can be automated later on  After the Wind turbine has used up all 10 ticks it will become transparent and stop producing power. At this point you need to spend another $1 to replace it. You can Left Click on the Wind Turbine to replace it or CTRL + Left Click to replace all of the same type. (More controls listed under help) This process can be automated later on.  Keep building Wind Turbines and start saving for your first research building and upgrades.   In the upgrade tab you can up grade your Wind Turbines so that they last longer or produce more power per tick. If you buy the first increase power production the Wind Turbine will change from producing 0.15 energy per tick to 0.22 per tick. If you buy the first increase in Wind Turbine lifetime upgrade the Wind Turbines will last 20 ticks instead of 10.  After buying your first research building you can build a research center to generate research points to buy new technologies.  After you have purchased the Wind Turbine Manger from the Research tab the game will automatically rebuild if you have the money. To automatically sell power you have to build a home office building it will start off selling 5 power per tick and can be upgraded.  **SOLAR CELLS** Once you have saved up enough research points you can unlock Solar Cells. Solar Cells work differently than Wind Turbines in that they produce heat and the heat needs to be processed by a generator to produce power. Do not place research centers or office buildings next to Solar Cells or they will explode. Generators must be placed first or your Solar Cell will overheat and explode.    At the start Solar Cells produce 3 heat and Generators process 3 heat. This means that you can only have 1 Solar Cell feeding into 1 Generator. You can upgrade generators to handle more heat and allow more Solar Cells to attach to 1 generator. Be sure to balance your upgrades. Generators must be placed first or your Solar Cell will overheat and explode.   The game will warn you but be careful when upgrading your Solar Cell heat production. If that added head overloads your connected generators your system will explode. That is about it for the basics the rest of the information you will pickup as your progress through the game or you can continue reading for some additional information.

**COAL BURNERS** To upgrade to Coal Burners it will take more than the $100,000 needed to build one. You first need up upgrade your generator effectiveness to level 16. The final Generator upgrade will cost $175,000 so you should focus on your solar power/generator upgrades until you are able to afford the level 16 upgrade.    Once upgraded each each Generator can convert 106.6 heat so you will need 4 Generators around 1 Coal Burner.  **GAS BURNERS** Lets take a look at Gas Burners. To get them to work you will need 3 upgraded Boilers and a Heat Sink.    If you notice the Boilers can only handle 18,000 heat and the Gas Burner produces 75,000 heat. Using 3 Boilers you can only handle 54,000 heat so you need to upgrade your Boilers one time.   After this upgrade your Boilers can handle 25,200 heat each and using 3 Boilers that is 75,600 heat enough to run your Gas Burner. You can than make a simple setup like this. Remember that the Boiler will explode if in direct contact with heat so a heat sink is needed inbetween the Gas Burner. Also the Boiler automatically sells off the power do you don’t need to worry about that.  For more complex Gas Burner information look at [http://www.kongregate.com/forums/17013-reactor-idle/topics/549564-gas-burners](http://www.kongregate.com/forums/17013-reactor-idle/topics/549564-gas-burners) If you upgrade your Generator max heat you can use a Generator 2 instead of a heat sink. The max heat of the generator must be above what your Boiler needs to run. Just remember you will need to sell the power that your Generator 2 makes.   

Here is a short rundown on how boiler houses and heat exchangers work.  The little black castle looking things are your boiler houses. When you first get a boiler house, it will say this: > **Boiler house** – sells heat in a bulk. Explodes if in direct contact with heat. > Price: 15 million > Max heat: 2000 > Takes heat from adjacent tiles if amount is over 18000 and sells it all at once. Can take heat from heat batteries and generators. Great, so what does that actually mean? They will sell the amount listed on them in a lump sum each tick that that sum is exceeded in the surrounding components. Do not apply direct heat. Still sounds like Greek to me. If you have less than 18,000 heat in surrounding components, your boiler house will do nothing. If you have more than 18,000 heat in the surrounding area (one tile, 4 tiles, it pulls as evenly as it can) it will directly convert the heat into money. If you place a boiler next to a heat producing cell or a heat exchanger, it will blow up and you will lose your 15 million dollar investment. Because they will blow up if they are directly heated, the only viable heat storage items are going to be heatsinks (formerly known as heat batteries in case you were wondering about the description) and generators. Heatsinks have a high capacity and will literally suck the heat out of an exchanger network. They also dissipate 5% of it’s stored heat every tick-it’s gone forever. Boiler houses are the only thing that is capable of extracting heat from them. Generators can store heat that it can not process until it blows up. this requires several generator heat max upgrades, which isn’t that expensive. This stored heat can be moved by heat exchangers or sold by boilers. Which brings me to….  Heat exchangers. These will transfer heat that is in it’s surroundings (cardinal directions) or placed directly into it, and attempting to balance it. You will notice that with longer runs of exchangers, heat will accumulate near the source of heat. If this happens and your generators can’t hold enough heat to keep passing along, they will blow up. Exchangers can take enough heat out of a generator that it will not blow up even if it’s maximum heat capacity is below what the cell next to it is putting in… but be aware of that pooling effect-that generator will be the first to go. Exchangers touching exchangers reduces the pooling effect by a large margin. I know I’m forgetting stuff but I hope this helps.

Finally some guidance. King\_of\_goons and jcheung, you da real MVP.

I’m making progress. 

Can’t get a gas burner runnin :/ hanging around with the coal burners and does not really increase the income. Any suggestions?

take yourself to [http://www.kongregate.com/forums/17013-reactor-idle/topics/549564-gas-burners](http://www.kongregate.com/forums/17013-reactor-idle/topics/549564-gas-burners).

> *Originally posted by **[stede](/forums/17013/topics/562975?page=1#posts-9875570):*** > > Can’t get a gas burner runnin :/ hanging around with the coal burners and does not really increase the income. Any suggestions? I edited my second post with some Boiler information. If you are still confused after that let me know.

i’d like to request that you not push for heatsinks in your guide, gen use in place of heatsink is fairly cheap, cheaper than upgrading boiler a couple times… this is already enough for 2:1:1 boiler:gen:gas [http://i.imgur.com/5xI3x66.png](http://i.imgur.com/5xI3x66.png) with a lot of extra battery for when i was sleeping :P

> *Originally posted by **[jcheung](/forums/17013/topics/562975?page=1#posts-9876183):*** > > i’d like to request that you not push for heatsinks in your guide, gen use in place of heatsink is fairly cheap, cheaper than upgrading boiler a couple times… > this is already enough for 2:1:1 boiler:gen:gas > [http://i.imgur.com/5xI3x66.png](http://i.imgur.com/5xI3x66.png) > with a lot of extra battery for when i was sleeping :P When is the second generator unlocked? I only went with the heat sink because it seems like the most natural progression path. If people want to be more efficient than generators with max heat upgrades is better, but I feel like there is no point playing a game where someone tells you how to min/max. I like figuring it out with some basic info so I dont feel like all im doing is copying someone’s design than waiting to beat the game. I can add that info in so that people understand it is possible however.

gen2 is unlocked when you unlock gas. i meant to say don’t just give them only info on heatsinks, add in info for generators too. i actually started a new game to refresh my memory on how hard it was to get to gen instead of heatsinks everywhere. it’s not.

Okay do you know the max heat upgrade needed to use the Gen 2 instead of the heat sink?

[http://www.kongregate.com/forums/17013-reactor-idle/topics/549564-gas-burners?page=3#posts-9875435](http://www.kongregate.com/forums/17013-reactor-idle/topics/549564-gas-burners?page=3#posts-9875435) lvl 9 can hold more than a base gas.

I’m not as far as some in the game (dev didn’t mention it to his followers of his previous similar title… grumble)… Anyway, the whole point is to make as many squares as possible the highest level offices you can build, much like batteries in the previous version. For me, I just started… after I got to coal, lol… by making some fairly efficient design, then improving the generator and heat tech until the generators reached the heat of the next energy tier. This might be a little slower than using boiler? I don’t know, I just noticed how expensive they were to upgrade and decided they certainly would serve my purposes as well (and I’d have to redesign my stuff, lol). Now, map 1 is all research buildings teir 2 I think, lvl 28… it’ll be higher soon. 100T is a pretty hefty price tag still, like 4 days if I let it sit, so I’ll be moving into nuclear on map three which, right now is a fairly efficient 1:1 gas:generator design… my offices next upgrade is 1T so the offices will be taking up more and more room on this map as it upgrades, lol. Map 2 is 4:1 generator:nuclear. On this map too the number of generators is going to suffer as efficiency improves. I recommend getting the longevity upgrade prior to moving to gas, lol, nuclear isn’t so bad. Anyway, that’s my quick and easy guide for skipping the challenging design characteristics of building a heat sink boiler system, good luck!

i restarted a day ago. i covered my map in power production and the rest with batteries, in that order… following that, it’s been less than 24 hours and i’m up to nukes. and i wasn’t even actively augmenting things that much.

And in case it wasn’t clear how hardcore (we) I am I’ll be buying those $1Ts in the morning and need to do as well as I can without, you know my epic understanding… tonight… lol, to position myself well.

I was missing a clearer water example, maybe the water post could be split into “distribution” and “effect” sections. The only real effect part is the “Items of Interest” at the very end, the rest is about water distribution. I left all my area on research overnight as I missed offices to be able to sell off my 3-1 generator-nuclear setup. After waking up I have both office 4 and water available, and batteries are a thing of the past for now.  The money so far has gone into upgrading water capacity on that Generator. It is a G2, 100 heat per water. The Generator effect is 985288, Level 52. It is balanced to run 3 generators on a reactor. This value can also be seen as the difference between water contribution and the reactor heat: 3,93 million – 1,94 million = 0,99 (rounded). The water required to create 1.94 million effect (with a G2) is 1.94 million/100 or 19400. I calculate 19448, but that is a small error by me or rounding. That is also the water missing between current (4398) and max (23842) water on the generator. And since this is a very small system, we can also see it between max and current on the water pump: 337500 – 318056 And to show that something needs upgrades, the water pump can not even run two setups like this: 37500 production is less than twice of 19400. If you want the image, feel free to use it. It shows water pump feeding directly into generator too :)

> *Originally posted by **[jcheung](/forums/17013/topics/562975?page=1#posts-9883025):*** > > shameless **bump** > > can we get a sticky on this? I noticed this was added to the help page in game.

Nice topic and hints! Something I’d like to add as a small contribution to help new players is about optimization. This may have already partially be said, but better to say it twice. This is probably redundant with some other topic, but at least it is grouped now here. Your main objective is to get as much as money as you can, because you want to unlock new areas to gain even more money. As most of the idle game, it’s pretty easy to make a positive gain – i.e. you produced more that what it costs – but as you don’t want to wait 1 month at 1000$/tick, you’d better think about optimization and how to gain more/time you play. Using inefficient setups will make the game run slower and boring, which will make you want to stop playing this awesome game… NO! So here are few hints, to optimize your money income. **Income per heat cell** First of all, very obvious but we often tend to forget it in the beginning: take in account the price a source into your calculation. Each source (wind turbine, solar cell, coal burner, etc…) has a cost, which can be significant when you just unlock it. For instance: a coal burner costs 100’000, produces 380 heat/tick and has 400 ticks. → A coal burner with no upgrade will therefore produce 152’000 heat = 152’000 money if you catch it all → Taking in account the purchase price(100’000), each coal burner will give you an income of 52’000 only per unit. Therefore, don’t rush over new heat sources as soon as you unlock them. It is more effecient to keep running on your current setup until you can buy some upgrades for the new source. If you buy a lifetime upgrade for the coal burner (same example as above), it will produce 2x more heat (304’000) therefore giving you a profit of 204’000. In maths: profit = (heat \* ticks) – purchase price **Income per tile** The second point i’d like to bring up, is maximizing the income/tile. It is good to use your highest nuclear reactor, but if takes you 10 generators, + heat exchangers + heat sinks and boilers for a single heat cell, you may quickly see that it is more profitable to use a lower tier heat source that is more compact. Therefore, it’s important to check your income/tile ratio. For instance, a nuclear reactor produces 1.2 million heat per tick. If you just unlocked it and have not much upgrades bought, you may easily need 20 tiles in generators/exchangers/batteries/boilers. So you you gain 1.2 million / 20 = 60000 per tile. Now if with your current upgrades, you can run a gas burner setup requiring only 1 generator (gas burner with 3 production upgrades gives 146’484 heat), you have 146’484 heat / 2 tiles = 73242 money / tile which is more efficient. So think about : average money = produced heat per system / number of tiles. The higher the better! This is also true when moving to setups like 1 burner for 2 generators to 1 burner with 1 generator only. In my setup, I can run now 1 nuclear reactor with 2 upgrades ( 1.875 million heat ) with only 2 generators (which can absorb each 1.23 million heat). I could sell the nuclear upgrades back to 1.2 million and run a 1:1 setup (1 reactor : 1 generator ) but this is in fact less efficient! Let’s do the maths : setup 1 reactor and 2 generators: 1.875 million / 3 tiles = 625’000 per tile setup 1 reactor and 1 generator : 1.2 million / 2 tiles = 600’000 per tile And I can even see that I can buy another reactor upgrade and still abosrbing all the heat, which would make : 1.875 million + 25% = 2’343’750 heat 2’343’750 / 3 tiles = 781’250 per tile To conclude, I’d to finish with 2 things : - unfortunately there is no general you can follow from the above considerations. You have to make the maths, based on your game progress and upgrades you have bought, to decide which setup is more efficient. - Make sure you don’t waste heat (by using too much heat sinks or buy having the battery full). happy gaming & have fun!

> *Originally posted by **[blake62](/forums/17013/topics/562975?page=1#posts-9883980):*** > > **Income per tile** It is also important to take into consideration terrain features, which would allow you to place more reactors (your basic unit of power production, say one heat cell and a generator for example), you think not only about the profit per tile, but also for example in region, there is an island with 3 places, which would allow you to put a heat cell with 2 generators, however if you have a setup with a heat cell and 3 or more generators you cannot utilise this place, and if you have a setup with a 1 to 1 ratio, you will ut the same amount of cells, so therefore i think the best way to calculate this would not be by profit per tile, although that would probably be easier, but by profit per map, claculated by the profit per reactor, (fairly easy, unless you use heat sinks it should be equal to your heat cell production), multiplied by the number of heat cells you can fit.

i wonder if i could ask a favor…. please don’t quote massive blocks of text or images… your reply is literally right under theirs. however, i agree, calculate per map depending on upgrades.

> *Originally posted by **[blake62](/forums/17013/topics/562975?page=1#posts-9883980):*** > **Income per tile** You can compare relative profit of different layouts with much less efforts. It’s simple: more generators(fully utilized) – more conversion power of map – more income. Not a heaters, since you can increase amount of heat about anytime, “heat production” much cheaper than “max water\generator effectiveness”, which is usually are your bottleneck. So, when you see a new layout – count a gens, not a cells ;)

one image to explain water 

Hello, I did some simple images to link in chat for fast explanation. Although all seems to be already said. Here they are. Gas FAQ  One possible way to nuke in the village  Water FAQ Possible mistakes in ground pump