Guide: Pre-Nuclear
We are slowly getting ready for the nuclear age. This article is basically a guide for late early-game. If you haven't upgraded your oil refinery to an intermediate one yet, do it. Right now, petrochemicals are the backbone for further progression. A massive web of pipes, chemical setups, and potential automation is coming your way.
Rare Earth Elements 
You can use rare earth ore chunks to get small amounts of rare earth elements. You will need cobalt, niobium, boron and zirconium the most.
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Living the Silicon Valley Life 
Main Page: Silicon
Silicon is an essential material at this stage since it is required to make higher tier digital circuits which are required in advanced machines.
To make your first silicon boules you need an electric arc furnace.
Electric Arc Furnace 
For silicon, you need some graphite glory. An electric arc furnace can give you silicon fairly easily, being an essential machine. The machine has a maximum storage capacity of 2.5MHE, and consumes 20kHE/s in operation, making it reasonably power hungry. So, with enough power and some graphite electrodes, this'll be a huge upgrade from steel and iron furnaces.
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Right now, only graphite and desh electrodes are useful, as lanthanium is basically redundant because of desh, and too hard to produce compared to it. You can craft them like this:
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Silicon can be sourced from sand, nether quartz or flint (there are other materials that can be used but the aforementioned are the most abundant), later on it is recommended to make 
fiberglass rolls from sand with an ore acidizer; you can choose to either operate it in solid mode or liquid mode with the red button on the top corner of the GUI; solid mode directly deposits the silicon nuggets in the arc furnace's inventory, while liquid mode liquifies the silicon nuggets and outputs them through a crucible output at the side of the arc furnace (for some inputs it also gives you a bonus of a few nuggets/quanta), you can then setup a foundry basin with a billet mold to produce silicon billets.
The silicon billets should then be pressed with a circuit stamp to actually make printed silicon wafers to be used in circuits as shown in the recipe below.
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Now you can make microchips and use them for making advanced circuit boards.
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More Circuit Boards 
Main Page: Circuits#General Purpose Circuits
Integrated Circuit Board
The first circuit board to require silicon which requires an arc furnace in order to create. Used extensively in mid game machines, automation devices, 
missiles, and various small tools such as the 
geiger counter.
| Details | Recipe |
|---|---|
| Integrated Circuit Duration: 10.0s |
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Military Grade Circuit Board
The first circuit board to include a liquid (
sulfuric acid) in its recipe along with 
rubber, necessitating the automation of more complex oil and chemical setups in order to fully automate this circuit. Used the most out of all other circuits with recipes across particle accelerator components, nuclear warheads, advanced reactor components, and more.
| Details | Recipe |
|---|---|
| Military Grade Circuit Duration: 15.0s |
 416 1,000mB |
Machine Upgrades 
Main Page: Machine Upgrades
Different machines have specific areas in their interface. known as upgrade slots. Not all machines accept every upgrade, and some have unique upgrades that are exclusively theirs. You can install upgrades in these slots, which enhance performance based on the upgrade you choose. The three upgrades that are most frequently utilized are compatible with the majority of machines.
Speed: Increases the operation speed of a machine. Sometimes increases the power usage as a takeback.
Power Saving: Decreases the power usage of a machine. Sometimes decreases the speed as a takeback.
Overdrive: Most powerful of them all, increases the operation speed and some other properties by a huge amount.
All upgrades require the Machine Upgrade Template, which can be crafted in 2 different ways:
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Silex & FEL 
Main pages: Laser Isotope Separation Chamber, FEL
The Laser Isotope Separation Chamber (or SILEX) is a machine that separates isotopes and elements from compounds or other materials via the SILEX. It's kind of like a centrifuge. It needs to be used with another machine, the FEL. Using our newly acquired Desh, rubber and other materials, we can craft both the FEL and Silex.
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The SILEX requires the materials to be in a liquid compound state in order to be processed, this means it can take in 
uranium or 
plutonium hexafluoride, but it doesn't require them to enrich either material. It can use 
hydrogen peroxide to liquefy any material to be processed, the material may even be in a powder state. The processed items come out into the right side collection of slots.
The FEL or Free Electron Laser is a large (7x3x3) multiblock utilized with the SILEX to produce various laser wavelengths needed for all SILEX recipes.
| Details | Recipe |
|---|---|
| FEL Duration: 20.0s |
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To start it up, simply place a laser crystal inside the marked slot, and supply it with power, then just click the switch to activate it. You can only craft the CO2-Desh crystal for now. The energy consumptions of the crystals can be found in the FEL page.
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You must place the SILEX at least 2 blocks away from activated FEL laser, or else Its going to melt, you can power up to 5 SILEX'es with one FEL, which is probably more than enough for all of your needs. In order to "cut" the laser (and perhaps protect the chests if you placed it in front of them for some reason), you have to use place any type of concrete on the laser. Glass on the other hand is going to let the laser through, while reinforced not, resulting in it being melted. Any other block other than concrete is replaced by fire, except for digamma, which replaces it with digamma fire, and the block under it with ash.
Note: Put the the SILEX at least two blocks away and place it in the right direction, or else it will get broken by the FEL!
Ore Acidizer 
Main page: Ore Acidizer
The ore acidizer (also referred to as 
crystallizer or just acidizer) is a useful machine, used for processing various items for utility, ore multiplication, and more. It is powered by electricity and requires various solvents depending on the item.
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The acidizer represents a hike in power consumption, requiring improved generation or the use of upgrades to counteract. However, its recipes tend to be superior alternatives to other methods. You can insert an effectiveness upgrade into this machine which increases the output but increases the fluid usage as a takeback.
Learn more about the energy consumption and usage in it's main page.
Bedrock Ore Processing 
Main Pages: Bedrock Ore, Bedrock Ore Processor
Note: This is an optional thing to do, you aren't required to make a bedrock ore facility.
Are you tired of running with low resources and mining with low resources? What do you know, you can automate it and get an endless amount of iron, copper, gold, thorium, uranium and whatever you need! It's not easy as it takes a lot of resources to create your first basic bedrock ore processing setup. This setup also requires a lot of space depending on how you build it.
You can produce a large quantity of basic resources very fast making things much easier. Even materials such as techetium steel, uranium, thorium, radium, and more can be produced. You don't always get all the resources you want from it, but you'll get some. Visit the bedrock ore main page and learn about it.
Tip: The best capacitor you can make right now is 
niobium capacitor. It is better to wait until you make a RBMK or ZIRNOX before you attempt at making a bedrock ore processing facility.
Early-game Armors 
There are three different armors you can make at this point of progression.
M1TTY Environment Suit
Main Page: M1TTY Environment Suit
The M1TTY environment suit is a cheap power armor set which has a capacity of 100kHE per piece, and charges at a rate of 1kHE/t. It has high mobility on ground and underwater, with underwater-exclusive night vision and propulsion, which works similarly to a vectored jetpack. It is very cheap to make, requiring mostly 
titanium plates, rubber, a single microchip and no armor platings.
The full set radiation resistance of 1.0 reduces incoming radiation by 89.99%.
T-51b Power Armor
Main Page: T-51b Power Armor
The 
T-51b power armor has a capacity of 1MHE per piece, and charges at a rate of 10kHE/t. It offers decent protection while being not expensive, requiring mostly 
iron and titanium.
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The full set radiation resistance of 1.0 reduces incoming radiation by 89.99%.
Steel Ranger Armor
Main Page: Steel Ranger Armor
The 
steel ranger armor is a power armor set which has a capacity of 2.5MHE per piece, and charges at a rate of 10kHE/t. It is the most expensive one amongst the three requiring 9 niobium ingots to make it's armor platings, 4 
desh motors and a bunch of iron.
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The full set radiation resistance of 1.29 reduces incoming radiation by 94.98%.
Preparations & Tips 
You can use various machines to make your work easier or do some stuff. Either it be automating, making everyday tasks easier or just efficiency in the things we already built.
- Make a
servo set and put it in your armor, it improves your movement and speed which is pretty useful. - Upgrade to electric tools such as the impact drill and electric chainsaw as they are much faster and better. Desh tools are also a great option as they can also provide many abilities, won't need electricity, and have infinite durability.
- When you kill a mob with an electric chainsaw, they drop 1-2 tiny pile(s) of
nitra. Those tiny piles can be turned into nitra which can be used to make an ammo container which provides you some ammo for maximum 3 weapons in your inventory. You can farm nitra by killing mobs and use some basic guns without having the hassle of crafting bullets! - If you haven't already, try using a builder's jetpack as it allows you to. It helps in building and mining in ravines. It's not that expensive!
- You can replace your oil derrick with a
pumpjack, it does the same job but the difference is that the pumpjack is faster and uses more electricity. - The power armor sets are ridiculously better than vanilla type armors as they provide buffs. You can also search for vertibirds or silos to get the T-51b armor, but those structures are hard to find.
- Noticed that glyphids are showing up next to your base/factory? This is might be caused by a high pollution amount. You can connect your machines to a smokestack using exhaust pipes to reduce the amount of pollution produced, improving chances of not having the native environmentalists bothering your progression.
ZIRNOX & PUREX 
ZIRNOX is going to be the first nuclear reactor you will be able to construct, due to its low cost and minimal supporting components. It serves as a gentle introduction to the basic mechanics surrounding operating a nuclear reactor. You can use it to produce power for early mid-game power because soon power shortages will become a thing.
It requires boron, concrete, rubber bars and integrated circuit boards.
| Details | Recipe |
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| ZIRNOX Nuclear Reactor Duration: 30.0s |
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The PUREX (Plutonium Uranium Reduction Extraction) is a machine that can reprocess depleted nuclear fuels into various materials. Most of its recipes require both 
nitric acid and 
kerosene to function. We will use the PUREX to process depleted ZIRNOX fuel.
It mostly requires rubber, steel, and integrated circuit boards.
| Details | Recipe |
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| PUREX Duration: 15.0s |
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We will talk about how to use the ZIRNOX and how to make nuclear fuel in the next guide.
Next Step 
Now you should be pretty much prepared for the mid-game, true pain.