These are the most important things to know:

1. Try click and hold LMB; If you can't figure out why something isn't working, try clicking and holding the left mouse button - there are parts of the UI that require confirmation (accepting contracts is the big one) and this is how you do it.
   
2. ESC does three very important things: pauses the game, shows you the menu and displays the research UI and tech tree.
   
3. Take note of the warning icons to the right of your Power/Water control sliders, near the on/off button. There's one for low fuel and one indicating a mechanical failure that are important to watch for.
   
4. Shift+LMB buys research if it's available for sale
   

1. Save your game using the icon in the top left of the ESC menu, often.
   
2. Save before you make any changes to your plant.
   
3. The game doesn't autosave.

1. There's tons of stuff that isn't intuitive in how the controls, engineering parts and numbers work. You'll have to read the rest of the guide or figure it out yourself.
   
   Or like, call your Dad and ask him. I don't know. It's your life, don't ask me, I spend my time writing guides for niche steam games that appeal to non-neurotypical folks' hyperfoci.

Look, maybe I'm an idiot and this game is actually easy and all of my advice is obvious. But if that's the case then you still read my guide so... take that. Why not flick through? You've got nothing to lose but your chains.

TBH I failed during the tutorial and couldn't work out how to get it back for a long time, so maybe some of this is explained there. Maybe that happened to you too, if so, expect more of this, this game doesn't come here to play.

The in-game guide is not what I'd call comprehensive, but it is what I'd call helpful. It covers maybe 50% of stuff in the game, and it's very short. To get to it hit escape, and click the light bulb icon in the top-left corner.

There's three screens (the mortarboard hat icons) and another golden button that might toggle the tutorial on or off. Maybe. I don't know, look, you've got the game, go try it and tell me. Jesus.

Hey, you made it to the guide proper. Nice! I'm going to try and cover every mechanic from the beginning of the game to the end. Once I actually reach the end - it's a hard game.

The first thing you get asked to do is build your first Power Generating Unit. Seems like a good time to talk about building.

The "Architectural Menu" is where you do this - I didn't know it was called that till I read the in-game help just now. It's the hammer icon in the bottom right.

• You should take the time to turn off layers you don't need at first so you can understand better what is happening. Turn off everything under visibility. This gives you a clear view of the essentials.
  
• You can use the demolition tool at this point to clear trees - it even gives you free timber to use for fuel.
  
• Now turn on the grid, plot, power and water overlays. Leave the sky off for the moment.
  
• Place your Power Unit somewhere that isn't red (it needs clear space, land you own, power and water connections.
  
• Once you've placed the Power Unit, turn off the overlays for Power, Water, Grid and Plot and turn Sky back on if you like (this gives the day/night cycle and weather effects).
  
  
  Tips
• Grid overlay is very helpful when building, the rest I rarely use.
  
• You won't need to modify the starting water pumps and pipes or electricity towers for a while, so leave them be.
  
• You can't build anything else yet, so move on to the next section.
  
  
  

Next up we have the fuel button, just to the left of the hammer icon in the bottom right corner.

• Click the "plus" button 5 times to order the maximum amount of wood fuel.
  
• Delivery will occur after the small progress bar fills, when we un-pause time soon. It takes some time to deliver fuel so if you run out completely your plant will likely go cold for a bit.
  
• You must also manually re-order fuel for now. Watch out for the "low fuel" warning indicator, just to the right of your control sliders.

• You can choose fuels from three categories, Solid, Liquid and nuclear. Each uses their own dedicated storage but shares with resources from the same category.
  
• At the start you only have access to one fuel type from the solid category, and only have 50 storage available.
  
• If you click "plus" or "minus" buttons once your order starts to delivered it resets the progress of the delivery. This can be significant as better fuels take longer to arrive.
  
  
  Advanced Logistics
  Eventually you will unlock the ability to automatically order fuel. An "=" button will appear, toggle it on to maintain your current stockpile.
  
  
  New fuels
  Different fuels become available with research. Switch by clicking the PORTAIT OF THE FUEL TYPE you want the plant to run on. A circle will indicate the active fuel.
  
  Different boilers work best with different fuels and research further modifies this.
  
  Warning: switching fuel with a running plant can make it instantly explode.
  

Now it gets interesting. Sort of. At the beginning there is only really one right answer to how to layout your engineering sectors but it soon opens up with a bit of research.

• Your first Power Unit comes with one 4x4 "sector". My screenshot shows a total four sectors, you'll unlock these as you research.
  
• To start with place a boiler and three turbines into your sector using the "+ Gear" button.
  
• The arrangement within sectors makes no difference aside from aesthetics.

While you're here, familiarise yourself with the rest of this panel because you'll have it open most of the time.

• You may have already noticed that the Architecture, Fuel and Engineering panels share the same area of the UI. You can only have one open at a time, but the Engineering panel is so useful that you'll want it open always.
  
• At the top, you have tabs numbered 1 to 5. These allow you to access sectors beyond the first four. It is very important to note that the tabs DO NO CORRESPOND TO GENERATING UNITS. Instead the game simply shows all your sectors across all your Power Units, collapsed into as few tabs as possible. For example, if you had 2 Power Units (buildings) each with 3 sectors, for a total of six sectors, you'd see 4 sectors on the first tab and two on the second.

From left to right, top to bottom we have:

• Power generation - shows how much power each sector is making right now.
  
• Radiation - locked for now.
  
• Pressure - shows how much pressure is in each sector right now.
  
• Temperature - shows the "temperature" of each sector right now.
  
• Maintenance - set schedule and level of periodic maintenance, and issue immediate repairs if required.
  
• On/Off - allows you to enable/disable heat generation and water feed to each sector individually.
  
• Add Parts - allows you to buy and sell parts and move them around.
  
• Inspect parts - hover over parts with this tool for detailed info.

In the below section I'll break down how to use these tools.

These are used to monitor the vital statistics of your sectors. You want to watch your temperatures and pressures at all times (and listen for the alarm). You need to monitor that you do not exceed your plant's maximum pressure and temperature, but also that you don't run your parts over their individual maximums for an extended period or risk more frequent failures and expensive maintenance. Or maybe you do - you can overpressurise some turbines to make more power, and make more money, and just pay the repairs as they appear. What's a few maimed workers in the context of shareholder returns and bonus payments for the board?

You can use the sector Power/Water controls to game the system and move heat and pressure around your plant to generate more power. In the beginning you probably just want to make sure that these are turned on for all sectors and left alone.
Warning: playing with these settings with a running plant can make it instantly explode.

You can use the maintenance section to set your scheduled repairs (how often they occur and how effective they are) here. There's also another wrench icon for "emergency repairs" but this really just means "do the next scheduled maintenance now and reset the timer". It's expensive, don't click it accidentally. You only need this button if the "failure warning icon" lights up in the control panel.

Reduce failures by having more thorough maintenance and running your equipment within specification. Or improve profits by not. Easy choice, right comrade?

You can use the "add parts" tool (that's what I call it - the game's tool-tip says "New Detail") to buy, sell and move parts.

• Install new parts by choosing them from the catalogue (left click) and dropping them either in a free or occupied slot.
  
• Right-click sells a held part for most or all of it's value (I'm not sure).
  
• You cannot make changes to hot parts - shut the sector or plant down and allow it to cool. A sizzling sound reminds you of this if you try.

Warning: playing with parts with a running plant can make it instantly explode.

• I've never used this until today but it tells you about the hovered over part.

Now we're finally ready to turn the plant on and make some marks (money).


The control panel has three buttons in the top right:

• Plant on/off.
  No idea why this even exists. Turn it on at the start of the game and ignore the button.
  
• Alarm mute.
  The alarm goes off for only two reasons (I think): Pressure exceeding the 3 o'clock mark or temperature exceeding the 3 o'clock mark. If either hit the next marker, boom(unless you have ablators installed, but what kind of coward does that?)
  
• Ventilation.
  Ventilation is not unlocked immediately. It provides rapid cooling of the plant for use in emergencies (or for endgame hardcore power plant over-clocking?). I've never really used it. YMMV.

The control panel has four sliders in the top left:

• Power.
  
• Water.
  
• Heat Exchangers.
  
• Neutron Reflectors.

1. Sliders are moved with dragging or the scroll-wheel (Chads only use shift-scroll, try it).
   
2. To run the plant, first set your heat exchanger slider to 100% (just trust me on this for now).
   
3. Set your water feed to a moderate level (try 50%).
   
4. Now gently increase your Power setting to say 25%. Observe the effect on the gauges and on the individual sectors in the engineering panel which you should have open.

Keep increasing your power slider and you should begin to generate power once your sectors exceed 100*C individually. You can get detailed information about your power output by holding shift and hovering over the "Power" gauge.

If you have a decent understanding of thermodynamics you'll no doubt be confused as hell. If you don't, then you'll probably intuitively understand that heat and pressure are related - more heat means more pressure, more water means less heat, more pressure means more electricity which means more money.

• To maximise profits, run at the highest pressure you can safely achieve without overheating your plant by adjusting your power and water sliders. See below for very serious advice for board members and CEO:
  
  
  This will of course shorten the life of your equipment (and your engineers - probably - but they know what they signed up for).
  
  Not to worry, when a mechanical failure occurs and your needles suddenly dive, just hit the emergency repair button and continue like nothing happened! No mess, no fuss. It's good to be the king, but remember, you rule only at the pleasure of the shareholders.

You're surely by now sitting in your leather chair behind your mahogany desk, chomping your cigar and thinking to yourself "this is all very nice, but when does someone pay us for all this?"

Well, don't worry, it's time to stop being an economic girly-man and turn some of those mega-watts into mega-bucks.


The contracts UI is opened from the bottom left group of icons. You'll want to leave it open most of the time so you can monitor your active contracts.

To consider a contract, you click one of the available offers on the left side of the contracts window and you'll be presented with the paper contract in centre screen. To begin with, chose contacts that specify power in terms of MW or GW rather than MW x d or GW x d.

You should select one contract with a power supply requirement that is less than your maximum generation capacity. VERY IMPORTANT: Also consider the power loss that is listed above the contracts UI, you must add this to the values in the paper contract. It is shown circled in red.

Once you have decided which contract you want, accept it by HOLDING DOWN THE LEFT MOUSE BUTTON Jesus this took way to long to Google the first time I tried this.

There is no penalty to declining unaccepted contracts despite the wording in the tutorial.

The actual contract itself contains some very important info but requires us to use math, so I'll cover that in a later section. For now, we're just going to make sure we have enough generation capacity to fulfil the contract without getting fined into oblivion.

It might be okay to choose a contact that's slightly out of our reach if our power storage gauge is full, the extra energy may cover the shortfall.

There's one more UI feature to note here which is explained in the screenshot above. As you advance time, you'll notice there are two pale bars that overlay the contract's icon.

"New" contracts have a vertical progress bar which sweeps upwards as the contract gets closer to expiring. New contracts can also be "pushed out" by fresh contracts - to avoid this happening to a contract you prefer, use the "lock" feature on the contract. This won't stop the expiry bar though.

On "Active" contracts (those you have accepted) two vertical bars are indicated. The left half of the bar indicates the time left until the contract is considered complete. The right half of the bar indicates the amount of time you have spent meeting your obligations. Ideally these bars increase at a similar rate. If the right hand bar is significantly less than the left hand bar when the contract completes, you can expect the result to a penalty overall rather than a payday and your wallet balance will reflect this. The cash animation is also different for incoming/outgoing transactions.

While we're on the topic of contracts, we should mention the banking and cash balance sections of the UI.

At first you'll have limited access to banking features. There's a credit account where you can borrow and repay (expensive) loans if needed. There's also a savings and expense account that need explaining.

The expense account collects all the bills you accrue during operations and must be paid at the end of each year. You can also elect to pay it early. If you cannot pay, the game ends. Note that the expenses do not include things like part purchases or fuel orders, it just simulates wages, taxes and office expenses.

Once unlocked, you can deposit money to earn a small amount of interest. However the cap on investing is very low for a long time and interest isn't paid once you reach the cap. The savings account is useful for keeping some cash in reserve to help pay the expense account by turning on the little star button on the savings tab ("prefer to use savings").

The balance of your cash reserves (not counting liabilities or assets such as loans or savings) is shown in the bottom left corner of the screen at all times.

To progress, you have to research and unlock new technology. There are several steps and the process is not intuitive.

1. To get started with research, select your chosen tech by clicking on it in the tree, then clicking the "Start" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. You should notice moving conical flask icons near the selected tech to indicate it's the target of your research.
   
   
   Setting a budget
2. Now you need to set your research budget. To do so, close the description of the technology you have selected with the X icon, and then click the plus/minus buttons to set your desired budget. Hint: always set max it out. While you're there, enable the = toggle button.
   
3. Now hit ESC and advance time.
   
   
   What to do next
4. At the end of each month you'll see a progress bar appear centre screen with indicating your research progress. When it fills there is a loud chiming noise, and you should select another research target immediately by pressing escape.
   
5. Before you select a new research target, check the one you just finished, because they often have an "implementation cost" you have to pay by clicking the Start button in the bottom right corner of the research screen. The benefits of your research only apply once you've paid this cost (if there is one).

• If you click another tech, the research target will NOT switch (unless you click start), but you have to click back on your research target to check the progress.
  
• If you change your research target any existing progress is conserved.
  
• The research progress can be checked in the bottom right corner of the research screen with a progress overlay on the Start button.
  
• Sometimes you can sell your new research by clicking the same Start button. I don't think there is any penalty to doing this, it just gives a little reward for researching advanced tech early.

More to come soon, but basically, you can build energy storage buildings to hold extra power - think "big batteries". The unit to measure stored power is T/G/MW x d or "-Watt days". Your initial Power Unit already comes with some basic level of storage.

Your generator produces power in instantaneous units like T/G/MW.

To convert between these see the maths section.

This section to be written up soon. TBH there's not much to know, aside from reservoirs need to be placed in touching the green tiles around a lake or other water source.

This section is going to be a bit more ad-hoc but hopefully helps some folks out.

You will probably notice fairly quickly that the main pressure and temperature gauges aren't very intuitive once you add your second Power Unit.

• Pressure and Temperature are cumulative across the entire plant (all sectors and units add together to give the total value), rather than averaged as you might expect.
  
• Heat exchangers are a game changer when unlocked because they allow many other ways to configure your engineering parts in your sectors.
  
• Heat exchangers lower your total heat value (shown in the control panel) but heat the sector they are in by the same amount.
  
• You can however game this system to your advantage. The first way to do so uses heat exchangers. Try having a room with only heat exchangers in it, and water delivery turned off. Once you have the second tier of heat exchangers, you can run turbines without a boiler in some sectors.
  
• Don't forget to actually turn your heat exchangers on with the slider!

This section is going to be a bit more ad-hoc but hopefully helps some folks out.


You will notice that contracts essentially come in two types:

• Supply a fixed amount of generation capacity for a fixed time period
  
• Supply some quantity of T/G/MW x d for a fixed time period

Both contracts have a duration in months, a fixed payment at the end and a fine that scales depending on how well or poorly you meet the agreement.

In our example contract shown here we agree to supply 731.3TW x d (Terra-Watt days). The wording implies you can supply the above power any time within 15 months, but the reality is you have to supply it at the rate the customer wants.

The rate will always be such that each month is equal, essentially making both types of contracts functionally identical. The other type of contract just requires less math to understand so we'll basically ignore it here.

Let's say you know your Power Plant can put out 1.8TW of power running flat out. Is it going to be enough? One way to find out is to accept the contract, wait till it starts in one month then check your power balance. This is not very good though as some contracts will be far above what we can produce and the penalties are extremely harsh even for a partial fine.

To work it out we can either convert our generation capacity into time-based units and calculate:

810 TW x d > 731.3 TW x d so we can accept the contract - or can we?

Oh no, we forgot to consider the extra capacity needed for line loss due to distance. Here it's quoted as 487.5GW. Let's do the math:

Oh no, that's too much to supply indefinitely, even with my investment in voltage and storage upgrades. I hope our batteries are charged! Sometimes the transmission losses can be really significant and if you forget to account for them it can really hurt.

This is the other way to do it:

So essentially, we're short by 0.3TW of capacity. All is not lost however if my batteries are charged. I'll need:

I check my batteries and find I have 140TW x d stored > 135TW x d so we're good.

Another way:

There we are, hopefully I've presented the most complete guide available to Reactor Tech^2 at the time of writing. If I've missed stuff or got it wrong, please comment so I can update it.

There's a lot of comments about the UI of this game being not good floating around, but I think it's more of a failure of people's assumptions combined with a UI design that's functional but not intuitive.

I think once you get past a few key pain points it's a fun incremental game with a lot to to like, and it's on sale right now. Pick it up and give it a try - one-person game developer teams could really use a little positivity and support. Even if you don't like the game, try to soften the blow a little when you comment - be kind to each other. The world is a rough place right now and you're speaking to a real person with your feedback - remember they've almost always put their heart and soul into a game like this, often for years at a time.