Guide to Advanced Supermatter Hacking

This page is currently under construction! It is in a state of significant expansion or restructuring, and is not yet ready for use.

This is a guide to creating awful, ridiculous high-power changes to the station reactor configuration. It is not intended to be a guide for new players, but instead a carefully organized record of different realistically achievable engine setups.

If you are a new player looking to learn how to operate the reactor, check out Guide to the Supermatter.

Have a setup of your own you want to add? Make sure to tell Montessquio about it on Discord!

Simple Setups

Unless otherwise specified, all of these setups assume you have set up the waste disposal to atmos outlined in Guide to the Supermatter: Engine Waste and Intercooler Loop.

Enhance the Root SMES

The Root SMES, found in the room directly to the west of the Engine Control Room, serves power to every other grid on-station. If you drain it, you can upgrade it using the spare coils in Engineering Hard Storage further to the west of the main department area.

For more info, see SMES Manual.

It is recommended to use Superconductive Transmission Coils, since this will be the main bottleneck in getting power to the rest of the place - best to let this one be fast, and all the receivers have high storage, since they only have to receive their small fraction of the total power.

Root SMES Bank

With six total coils, using all Superconductive Coils gives a maximum throughput per SMES of 6 Megawatts. While ordinarily impressive and way overkill for standard setups, the high-power setups you may find here will probably exceed that number handily. Making more than one "Root" SMES, a process called making an SMES Bank, allows you to scale your maximum reactor throughput infinitely, so long as you have space to add more SMESes.

Furthermore, having multiple root SMESes - even just two total with sub-optimal coils installed - means that one can be drained while the other continues to provide power to the station, effectively enabling engineers to work on any SMES in the bank without disabling power to the station entirely.

Renew the TEGs

The default Thermoelectric Generators are old, and don't produce much power compared to new ones you can order through cargo. They can even be replaced while the reactor is running, as long as its done quickly. Just wrench on, wrench off.

Tips and Tricks

Draining the Root SMES

Hook up the shield generator in <<SPOT>> to the left of the root SMES, turn it on. This drains directly from the Root SMES as fast as it can dump power, and is very easy to turn on and off. Using it in this way allows you to minimize power downtime.