Auto-Connecting Pumpjacks

[dood]

Would it be possible to have a special kind of pumpjack that auto-connects with all other pumpjacks in range to form one single fluidbox without the need for piping?

Tapping into oilfields is one of the most tedious tasks in the game and I'd gladly never have to do that again.

[eradicator]

Nope. You can't magically merge fluid-boxes. You can make a pump-jack with huge mining-range though. But that has other problems :P. There are (were?) mods that make the oil-patches be aligned to some grid to make them blueprintable if that's something you could live with.

[dood]

What about tiny pumpjacks or pumpjacks with actually consistent pipe positions so you can blueprint a barrel assembler onto them without it breaking as soon as you rotate it?
Or are pumpjacks hard-coded to have broken pipe output positions?

[eradicator]

Nah. You can change size, shape, pipe positions etc just fine. You could probably just c/p the fluid box positions from an assemler if you want them centered or whatever you consider "not broken" :P.

[Pebble]

TBH, I get people wanting to be able to do realistic things in the game, but the desire to make I-win-button items for every aspect of the game that wave away the difficulty and complication doesn't appeal to me - and that's something like 90% of all mods.

[darkfrei]

Would it be possible to have a special kind of pumpjack that auto-connects with all other pumpjacks in range to form one single fluidbox without the need for piping?

It's possible to make new pipe entity into pumpjacks. If you try to make it in pumpjack prototype, you get nothing But you can have four outputs

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/OmniPumpjacks

[bobingabout]

it might be possible to change the output fluid box pipe connection to input-output type to allow fluids from a neighbouring pumpjack to flow into it, however since the "height" of the output fluid box is raised to try and FORCE fluids to flow out of it, as well as the entity's fluid box being designed to be an output only, it might not function as expected.

Some people have tried to do this on assembling machine type entities (like the chemical plant) and have found strange results.

[dood]

whatever you consider "not broken" .

I'd want them to at least not flip sides each time you rotate a pumpjack so I can blueprint them with a barreler and rotate the thing to squeeze it onto an oilfield for a horrible, bot based oil delivery build.



No other building does that.
Btw I am actually waiting to this day for the patch that finally fixes that but apparently everyone is okay with this?

[darkfrei]

it might be possible to change the output fluid box pipe connection to input-output type to allow fluids from a neighbouring pumpjack to flow into it

The pumpjack works, but you get no through flow, or just destroying all fluids without output.

[eradicator]

Some people have tried to do this on assembling machine type entities (like the chemical plant) and have found strange results.

That "some people" was me (unless there were other threads than the one i remember) and the result for assembling machines is that fluid can only flow through while the assembling machine is working. Which will look a bit weird but if you never look at it it should work fine if it's the same for pumpjacks.

Btw I am actually waiting to this day for the patch that finally fixes that but apparently everyone is okay with this?

I don't remember if this was actually ever said officially, but it's supposed to be just another puzzle element you have to deal with. And as i said it's trivial to mod the output positions.

Code: Select all

data.raw['mining-drill'].pumpjack.output_fluid_box.pipe_connections[1].positions = { {1, -2}, {2, -1}, {-1, 2}, {-2, 1} }

[shanemadden]

I was thinking of making a mod that'd lay ghosts for pumpjacks and pipes arranged automatically to hook up a whole field (since it's a similar task that a mod I've already written does) after the tedium of hooking up a few giant oil fields in a railworld map, but the geometry problem to create an algorithm to reliably plan a working pumpjack/pipe/power/(beacon?) layout for any arbitrary oil field efficiently is.. intimidating.

[bobingabout]

Some people have tried to do this on assembling machine type entities (like the chemical plant) and have found strange results.

That "some people" was me (unless there were other threads than the one i remember) and the result for assembling machines is that fluid can only flow through while the assembling machine is working. Which will look a bit weird but if you never look at it it should work fine if it's the same for pumpjacks.

Angel did it too.

[eradicator]

I was thinking of making a mod that'd lay ghosts for pumpjacks and pipes arranged automatically to hook up a whole field (since it's a similar task that a mod I've already written does) after the tedium of hooking up a few giant oil fields in a railworld map, but the geometry problem to create an algorithm to reliably plan a working pumpjack/pipe/power/(beacon?) layout for any arbitrary oil field efficiently is.. intimidating.

I usually do mine like a tree, i.e. all wells form horizontal branches that convert onto a vertical tree trunk (stem). If you place automatic blueprints you can also "cheat" by having a custom underground pipe that has 1000 connection length, is .placed_by = 'pipe' but ghosts can only be placed by your script (hm...bleh, but you'll have to deal with ppl blueprinting the ones on the field then).

[MostlyNumbers]

the geometry problem to create an algorithm to reliably plan a working pumpjack/pipe/power/(beacon?) layout for any arbitrary oil field efficiently is.. intimidating

I seem to recall someone had written a script for this, that took a blueprint of the pumpjacks as input.
I've been meaning to implement that in a mod eventually.

edit: found it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... _outposts/