Talk:Resource node

Extraction energy
Extraction energy is used to calculate the energy usage of a product in a production chain. For example, being used in Alternate recipe analysis.

To calculate the extraction energy of the particular ore / fluid resource, first achieve the maximum mining / extraction rate on the map, overclock all of the miners and extractors appropriately. The summation of the power consumption is then divided by the extraction rate.

For example, for Iron Ore:
 * The maximum mining rate is 70380 / min or 1173 / sec.
 * There are 33 Impure and 41 Normal Iron nodes on the world, which means 74 Miner Mk.3 to be built on them, each overclocked to 250%, which means MW each.
 * There are 46 Pure Iron nodes on the map, which means 46 Miner Mk.3 each overclocked to 162.5%, which means MW each.
 * The total power consumption is then MW. Recall that MW means MJ / sec.
 * Dividing MJ / sec by 1173 / sec, we will get:
 * The average extraction energy for Iron Ore is MJ.

For most playthroughs, players are unlikely to fully utilize all the resource nodes in the world. For such cases, the upper and lower bounds of extraction energy per ore are:

Which is between 2.5 MJ and 25.993 MJ for ores. For Crude Oil and Nitrogen Gas the calculation is slightly different as the power consumption of Extractors has to be considered instead.

Conclusion
To save energy:
 * use Miner Mk.1. If wish to improve mining rate, use Miner Mk.3.
 * do not overclock the Miners. If wish to improve mining rate, overclock to 250 %.
 * Due to the Belt Mk.5 throughput limit, it is pointless to overclock a Miner Mk.3 on pure node beyond 162.5 %.
 * prioritize mining pure nodes over impure nodes.
 * Sometimes, pure nodes can be located far away or grouped loosely, while impure nodes can be found in large clusters. In such case, it is advised to mine the impure nodes altogether.

For most large scale factories, the power spent on Miners is negligible compared to the processing buildings. As Miners are often the bottleneck of a production line, it is highly recommended to overclock the Miners.