Solar 22

Lore & Background

In the industrial sprawl of Factorio's unnamed planet, solar panels are the quiet backbone of every megabase that outgrows fossil fuels. They sit in neat rows across flat terrain, their dark glass faces tilting toward a low, amber sun that never fully sets in the game's endless day. Players who push past the early game discover that solar energy is clean, infinite, and entirely dependent on the sun's position—making it both liberating and maddening in equal measure. The community has long since outgrown the base game's six solar tiers. Mod packs like 'Solar Panels 7' and 'Solar Panels 8' extend the ladder, and players share sprawling blueprint designs under arbitrary names. 'Solar 22' fits that pattern: a number large enough to sound impressive, attached to a subsystem every base-builder knows intimately. It carries no official lore, no NPC dialogue, no in-game codex entry. Its story is simply the story of a player who wanted more panels and named their save file accordingly. What is canonical is the feeling: the low hum of a fully powered base at dawn, the slow dimming as the sun dips, the desperate scramble to switch on battery buffers before the lights flicker. Solar 22, real or imagined, lives in that feeling.

In Their Own Story

The cursor hovers over the empty plot of red dirt, and the blueprint ghost flickers to life—two hundred and twelve solar panels arranged in a tight hexagonal grid, each one a small dark mirror waiting for light. The player types 'Solar 22' into the blueprint name field, half-joking, half-hoping the number will make it feel like a real project rather than another Tuesday afternoon of clicking. The sun is high. The panels drink. The energy meter climbs in long green bars, and for a moment the whole base breathes easy, no steam hissing, no coal cart rattling across the conveyor. Then the sun slides behind the ridge to the west, the bars stutter, and the player curses softly, already planning where the battery buffers should go. The ghost blueprint lingers on the screen, patient and silent, waiting for the next dawn.

Reader's Guide

Because 'Solar 22' is not a verified technology in Factorio's research tree, there is no official research cost, prerequisite chain, or unlock condition to report. What does exist is the canonical solar ladder: Solar Panels (unlocked via the Solar Energy technology), then Solar Panels 2 through 6, each requiring the previous tier and progressively higher research costs. The chain sits in the late-game renewable-energy branch, typically researched after electric engines and battery accumulators so that stored power can bridge the night cycle. If 'Solar 22' refers to a community blueprint, the save/share mechanic works as follows: a player selects a region, presses the blueprint key (default B), and the design is copied to the clipboard or uploaded to the Factorio wiki's blueprint library. Another player pastes it, and the game checks whether the required items and technologies are available. Blueprints do not alter the tech tree; they are purely a construction shortcut. Notable community solar designs tend to focus on maximizing panel density per tile, minimizing the footprint of battery buffers, and arranging panels in patterns that reduce the number of connected poles needed. For modded play, packs like 'Solar Panels 7' or 'Solar Panels 8' extend the ladder with higher-efficiency tiles, and community blueprints built for those mods will not paste correctly into a vanilla save. Always verify that the blueprint's required items match your current tech level before attempting a paste.

Did You Know?

• Factorio's base game caps out at Solar Panels 6; any 'Solar 22' label must come from a mod, a community blueprint name, or a player's save-file naming convention.
• Solar panels in Factorio produce zero energy at night, making battery accumulators and the day/night cycle a core design constraint for any solar-heavy base.
• The game's day/night cycle is approximately 10 minutes long in real time, meaning a purely solar base without storage will lose power for roughly half of every cycle.
• Blueprints in Factorio are stored as a compact binary blob in the save file or on the wiki; they do not contain any lore text, only item positions, rotations, and entity types.