D.I.G.E. POWER CALCULATOR

Wuling thermal power on Talos-II is one of those systems where the numbers look manageable on paper until you actually build it and watch a whole row of Production II machines brownout because the network averaged out wrong. A Thermal Bank burns Wuling fuel in pulses — a fixed wattage for a fixed duration, then the bank waits for the next fuel unit — while the consumers downstream draw continuously. Getting the cycle math right is the difference between a base that hums along on two fuel grades and one that stalls every time a belt jams or a delivery falls behind by a few seconds.

D.I.G.E. — full name 帝江号严选精细化集成工业系统能源生产及存储管理系统设计器, the Dijiang Integrated Industrial Energy System — is the community calculator that does the cycle math for you. You input a target wattage, your available fuel grades (Source Ore through High-Cap Wuling), a minimum battery reserve, and a waste tolerance, and the calculator returns up to five optimized Thermal Bank configurations ranked by complexity and stability. Each scheme comes with a splitter diagram for the oscillation cycle, a power-over-time chart, and a fuel-consumption summary so you can pick the trade-off you want rather than the trade-off you accidentally settled for.

The tool itself is built and maintained by Palmcivet, who also runs the awesome-arknights-endfield collection and ships D.I.G.E. under MIT. The Endfield Hub team is hosting an embedded view of the calculator below so you can run a few numbers without leaving the site, and we have written this guide to fill in the parts the embedded interface assumes you already know — what a thermal pool actually is, how each fuel grade trades off against the others, what the minimum battery reserve actually buys you, and why recycling lines fail when they are wired into a belt instead of a storage container.

If you are still building out the rest of your industrial grid, pair the calculator with the placement-side tools at the tools hub — the AIC Planner for AIC layout math and the Industrial Planner for factory floor plans. D.I.G.E. tells you which generators to build and how to wire them; the planners tell you where to put them. The three tools sit cleanly side by side because each one solves a layer of the same problem.

How to Use the D.I.G.E. Calculator Below

Open the calculator below and start at the top of the input panel. Set the target power generation in watts to match the sustained draw of whatever you are powering — a small Production II line is in the low thousands, a Wuling smelting chain can push past ten thousand. Pick your primary fuel grade from the Source Ore through High-Cap Wuling list, then optionally pick a secondary grade for the oscillation cycle. Set the minimum battery reserve (the conventional sweet spot is fifteen percent), and finally cap the waste tolerance — the share of generated wattage you are willing to throw away to keep the math simple.

Hit calculate and the panel returns up to five viable schemes. Each one lists the Thermal Bank count, the splitter and battery configuration, the cycle chart, and the projected fuel consumption per minute. Schemes are ordered from simplest to most efficient, so the top result is usually the one you want when you are new to Wuling cycle math; veterans tightening up a Source Ore supply chain will scan further down the list. Read the splitter diagram next to your chosen scheme carefully — the recycling line wiring matters more than the generator count, and a misread diagram is the most common reason a correct-on-paper scheme browns out the moment it goes live.

Once you have picked a scheme and copied the layout into your base, the rest of this page covers the mechanics underneath it. The next sections walk through what a thermal pool actually is, the five fuel grades and what each one really costs, why the calculator ranks its solutions the way it does, what the minimum battery reserve buys you in practice, and the single most common wiring mistake that takes a perfectly correct scheme and turns it into a brownout cascade the moment it goes live.

Quick Answer

D.I.G.E. solves the Wuling thermal pool math for you so that the power network averages out to the wattage your consumers actually draw, not the wattage your generators happen to produce in any given second. It combines base generation — Thermal Banks that always burn fuel — with oscillation generation — Thermal Banks gated by splitters to fire on a managed cycle — and the calculator returns the cheapest combination of the two that hits your target with a stable battery and an acceptable waste percentage. The simplest scheme is almost always the right pick unless you are squeezing a tight fuel supply.

Plug in your target wattage, the fuel grade you actually have stockpiled, a fifteen percent battery reserve, and a waste tolerance you can live with. Pick the simplest scheme the tool returns unless you are deliberately optimising for fuel cost. Wire the recycling lines through storage containers, never directly into belts. Those four rules cover roughly ninety percent of D.I.G.E. usage, and the rest of this page is the rationale behind them — useful when an edge case appears or when the simplest scheme is not stable enough for your supply chain.

Wuling Thermal Pools, Explained

A thermal pool, in Wuling terminology, is the buffered power network that sits between your Thermal Banks and your consumers. The banks themselves do not produce power continuously — they burn one unit of Wuling fuel for a fixed duration and at a fixed wattage, then idle until the next fuel unit arrives. A High-Cap Wuling fuel pulse, for example, generates 1,100 watts for forty seconds before the bank needs another pellet. If your factory consumers draw 1,100 watts continuously, that single pulse covers exactly forty seconds of demand and not a second more.

The thermal pool's job is to absorb that pulse pattern and present a smooth wattage curve to the consumers. Batteries on the network charge during the part of the cycle where generation exceeds consumption, then discharge during the part of the cycle where the next fuel pulse has not landed yet. Done correctly, the consumers never see the pulse — they see a steady wattage that happens to be the time-weighted average of generation minus losses. Done incorrectly, the consumers see brownouts every cycle, and every Production II machine on the network resets the moment the wattage dips below its operating threshold.

The mechanic D.I.G.E. is solving for is how to combine two different generation modes to flatten that curve. Base generation is straightforward: a Thermal Bank with a continuous fuel feed produces wattage on a fixed cycle forever. Oscillation generation is more subtle: splitters gate fuel delivery to a second set of banks so they only fire when the base generation is in the trough of its cycle. Layered correctly, the two modes phase-shift into a much smoother combined output than either could produce alone — and that is the scheme the calculator is hunting for when it returns "base + oscillation" results.

The Five Fuel Grades and What Each One Costs

Five fuel grades feed Thermal Banks on the Global server build of Arknights: Endfield, and each one trades off raw wattage against fuel availability and supply-chain complexity. Source Ore is the entry-grade fuel — every player has it from the start of the Talos-II economy, and a Thermal Bank running on Source Ore produces fifty watts for eight seconds per pellet. The Wuling grades step up from there, each one stretching the burn duration to forty seconds while scaling the wattage from 220 up to 1,600 depending on grade.

The Source Ore line is the simplest scheme the calculator will return, and it is the right answer for early-game bases where you are still bottlenecked on Wuling refinement throughput. The wattage is low, but the fuel supply chain is short — you mine ore, you feed banks. Once your refinement chain is online, Low-Cap and Mid-Cap Wuling become the workhorse fuels: 220 and 420 watts on a forty-second burn cycle, long enough that the cycle math is more forgiving than Source Ore's tight eight-second pulse, and cheap enough per pellet that a small Wuling supply chain can sustain a mid-sized factory without dedicated infrastructure behind it.

High-Cap Wuling and the Low-Cap Alt grade are the late-game fuels and the ones where the calculator earns its keep. At 1,100 watts per pulse, a single High-Cap Thermal Bank covers most factory wattage targets on its own, which is why the calculator's solutions for high-demand consumers tend to converge on a small High-Cap base layer plus an oscillation cycle of cheaper Wuling. The 1,600-watt Low-Cap Alt grade has the highest output of the five but trickier supply economics — production cost per pellet is meaningful enough that D.I.G.E. will only recommend it when waste tolerance is tight and the target wattage genuinely needs the burst.

How D.I.G.E. Ranks Its Solutions

The calculator does not return a single answer because power planning has real trade-offs and the "right" answer depends on who is asking. A four-bank constant-feed scheme is dead simple — every bank is always burning, every belt carries fuel non-stop, and nothing oscillates — but it wastes a meaningful share of generated wattage between cycles and only works at all if your fuel supply is consistently healthy. A two-bank splitter-managed oscillation scheme uses less fuel for the same effective output but is harder to debug if anything in the network goes wrong, because the failure mode is no longer "no power" but "intermittent power."

D.I.G.E. ranks its returned schemes by three axes: complexity, fuel waste, and battery stability. The simplest scheme — typically the one with the fewest splitters and the most forgiving cycle — sits at the top. Schemes further down trade complexity for efficiency, until the bottom of the list usually carries the tightest fuel budget and the most precarious battery margin. Each result also flags whether the scheme is "constant feed" (banks never pause) or "oscillation" (banks gated by splitters on a cycle), so you can match the scheme to the kind of network you are actually comfortable maintaining over a long play session.

The right pick depends on where you are in the campaign. New players should take the simplest scheme even if it is theoretically wasteful — paper-perfect schemes are no help if a single belt jam sends the whole grid into brownout. Veterans optimising for a tight Source Ore supply pick further down the list because the fuel savings compound across an extended play session and the network is well-tuned enough to handle the tighter margins. Either way, copy the splitter diagram exactly — small wiring deviations are the failure mode the calculator cannot warn you about in advance, and they explain most "the math was right but the base died anyway" outcomes.

Setting the Minimum Battery Reserve Correctly

The minimum battery reserve setting is a safety buffer, not an optimisation target. Wuling fuel pulses produce power in bursts — 1,100 watts for forty seconds, then nothing until the next pellet — but consumers like Production II machines draw continuously. A non-zero battery reserve ensures that if a fuel delivery arrives late (because a belt jammed, because you forgot to top up the input chest, because the upstream miner ran out of ore for a few seconds), the network has a few seconds of headroom before any consumer browns out. The reserve is the slack in the system, and the slack is what survives real-world hiccups.

Set the reserve too low and you get paper-perfect schemes — the math averages out beautifully on a calculator that assumes nothing ever goes wrong. In practice, the first time a belt jam or a depleted ore vein interrupts fuel delivery, your battery dips below the consumer threshold and the brownout cascade kicks in. Five percent is far too lean for any real base. Setting the reserve too high is the opposite failure: you are paying for battery capacity you never actually use, and the calculator will recommend extra banks to keep the over-sized reserve filled even though those banks are not strictly necessary for the target wattage.

Fifteen percent is the conventional sweet spot, and it is what experienced players use across most builds. It absorbs a few seconds of late fuel without leaving so much capacity idle that the scheme over-builds generation. Push it up to twenty or twenty-five percent only if you know you have an unreliable supply chain — a Source Ore vein that occasionally runs dry, a long belt run with multiple intersections — and only after you have audited the supply chain itself. Fixing the upstream bottleneck is almost always cheaper than oversizing the reserve, and the calculator cannot diagnose a flaky supply chain for you from the inputs alone.

Why Recycling Lines Must Connect to Storage Containers, Not Belts

The single most common D.I.G.E. failure mode is not bad math; it is bad wiring. The recycling line on a Thermal Bank returns unused fuel pellets from the bank's output port back into the input port so the cycle can pick them up on the next pulse. That return path needs somewhere to buffer the pellets that have not yet been re-consumed, and the only entity in the game that can absorb that buffer without applying backpressure is a storage container set to storage mode (or simply left unpowered, which has the same practical effect).

If you connect the recycling line directly to a belt, the belt has a finite throughput and a finite buffer capacity. When the bank's output rate exceeds the belt's intake rate — which happens constantly during the active part of the burn cycle — the belt backs up. Backpressure propagates upstream until the pump on the return line stalls, the recycling loop jams, and the bank loses access to the recycled pellets it was counting on for the next pulse. The math the calculator returned is now wrong, the cycle slips, and the brownout is on you to diagnose from in-game symptoms instead of from the splitter diagram.

A storage container in storage mode acts as a deep buffer that absorbs surges without ever applying backpressure to the upstream pump. The bank's recycling pump runs at full speed regardless of how much fuel is currently sitting in the container, and the next burn cycle pulls pellets back out as needed. That is the wiring the calculator's splitter diagrams assume. Wire it that way the first time, even when it looks like an unnecessary detour for two or three pellets — every D.I.G.E. scheme that fails in the wild fails first at this exact point, and the fix is almost always "swap the belt return for a container."

When to Use D.I.G.E. vs the AIC and Industrial Planners

D.I.G.E. solves the Wuling thermal pool generation problem and nothing else. Xiranite Pylons, Electric Pylons, and Relay Towers operate under completely different rules — radius coverage, infinite uptime, no fuel cycle — and they do not need cycle optimisation, so they fall outside the calculator's scope. If you are planning a full base grid that mixes Wuling thermal with Xiranite radius coverage, D.I.G.E. handles the fuel-and-generator side and you pair it with one of the placement-side planners on the site for the spatial layout. The two halves of the problem are independent enough that the tools stay clean.

For Wuling-specific factory floor plans, the Industrial Planner is the companion tool — it covers the physical placement of belts, splitters, and machines that consume the wattage your D.I.G.E. scheme is producing. For higher-level AIC layout decisions — which AICs to build, what their output chains look like, how Wuling fuel feeds into them — the AIC Planner covers the math one layer up from individual factory floors. A typical planning session moves between all three: AIC decisions first, then factory floor placement, then the D.I.G.E. cycle math to actually power the result.

The full tool list lives at the tools hub, including adjacent calculators for character progression and gear that share the same Wuling economy on the back end. If you are still figuring out which characters to feed the resulting AIC output into, the character progression planner sits naturally downstream of any D.I.G.E. configuration that powers a Production II line. Treat them as a stack — generation, placement, throughput, character spend — and the planning workload spreads evenly across the four rather than piling up on whichever tool you happen to open first.

Frequently Asked Questions

The D.I.G.E. calculator above is the place to start every Wuling power decision, but the surrounding context matters too. Cross-reference your scheme with the AIC Planner for the factory-floor side of the equation, the Industrial Planner for spatial placement, and the rest of the tools hub for the longer Talos-II economy chain that the power network is ultimately feeding.