Build a mining drill partially on uranium ore and partially on iron ore. The drill will happily mine the iron ore for a while, but eventually it'll decide to mine the uranium instead. It even shows me that it needs sulfuric acid. But if I incorrectly feed it with the wrong fluid (water), the drill will happily fill up anyway, and then not give me any indication of why it's not working. (Yes, the sidebar will show you the required fluid, but only if you hover over the ore. The sidebar is unhelpful if you hover over the mining drill.)
This is not the way any other fluid consumer works. If, for example, I feed water to an assembly machine that isn't making water barrels, it won't accept the water.
- Drill.png (856.36 KiB) Viewed 1166 times
I have a couple different ideas on how to handle this better. One is just some flying "Wrong Fluid" text, like the "No Path" text on trains. Flying "No Fluid" text would go along well with this.
The other is (I expect) much more complicated:
1a) The mining drill fluid box will accept anything when mining non-fluid-requiring ores.
1b) Better, but likely impossible: The mining drill fluid box will preserve its contents but accept nothing when mining non-fluid-requiring ores.
2) The mining drill fluid box will accept only the correct fluid when trying to mine a fluid-requiring ore.
3) If the mining drill fluid box contains the wrong fluid when trying to mine a fluid-requiring ore, it will empty itself so the box can either fill with the correct fluid or display the needed fluid.
This option also improves the situation if a drill happens to manage to cover multiple types of Angel's infinite ores. (Different infinite ores require different mining fluids.) Currently, such a mining drill is completely useless. Even if you feed it both fluids, the fluid box will pick one and then the drill will jam up when it tries to mine the other ore. If the fluid box auto-empties itself (either by pumping itself empty or by just dematerializing the fluid into the ether) you can actually use such a drill, if that arrangement ever comes up in your map. Either method of emptying seems fine to me. Pumping-empty needs extra logistics, to make sure there's capacity to allow the drill to unload when it switches ores. With into-the-ether you don't need the logistics, but you do lose a bunch of fluid instead.
