Factorio Forums

I've been playing my current factory for about 50 hours now and use 50+ steam engines to run it, they are in banks with the ratio 1 pump, 14 boilers and 10 engines. However the water coming out of the pumps is only about 1 unit, which means the engines run at very low capacity. I only just noticed this happened when I accidentally ran out of fuel for my engines. Usually just manually stoking the boilers gets things running again (and getting the fuel sorted obviously).

I'm using bob's mods so I have access to his pumps to produce water out of thin air, which I did (with a separate solar power supply, while these worked fine, the water still didn't seem to increase further down the pipes, it's almost like I had leaky pipes!

Does anyone have any suggestions to what might be causing this and how to fix it?

each pump only pumps 30 water/sec. you need two small pumps for 10 steam engines

Each bank of 10 engines have their own pump.

You say your using bobs special pumps that dont need to have a water source, have you tried using more of them? The 1/14/10 ratio only works when the pump is a vanilla offshore pump.

Can it be that Bob's pump is subject to electricity death spiral? I.e. making less electricity means making less water in addition to laggy non-burner inserters.

Bob's pumps are powered by a separate solar panel setup, not connected to the main power network.

Their output might be the issue though, I'll have to check.

Seems like I needed 2 pumps for each bank of engines, might be due to using mk2 boilers and engines from bob's mods, but I swapped them out ages ago!