Factorio Forums

Hello, I have a question.

Some things have been changed in this patch 0.15.
Small pumps used to have very small speeds, in order to keep up with a regular pipe (that wasn't stretched out) you would need 5 small pumps in series. You use this in order to keep fluid pressure in areas wich you desire, its obviously great to use on storage tanks, I had some good builds that I used and worked just fine.
The thing is if you dont use the pumps once you run out of fluid, you see that on the tanks and rest of the pipes you have small "leftovers" that when you are using pumps does not happen, and in the bigger picture its quite a lot of a waste that fluid being stuck.

The question is what are the speeds? And its still worth it to use pumps outside of its normal common use? Or the normal pipes now have better flow?
Whats the speed now? Maybe you only need 2 in series to keep up with the normal speed of a pipe?

Every fluid amount increased 10 fold. My guess is that fluid speed is also increased by 10x (Fluids move by comparing differences in level between pipes which is a multiplicative operation. I doubt that a multiplier on the amount would change the speed for this reason). Now, pumps used to handle 30 fluid / sec, so a direct translation would be pumps handling 300 fluid/sec. But they got nerfed to 200 fluid/sec. So, where 5 pumps would have been enough, you will need close to 8 pumps.

I'm rather new to the community, but thats what I know.

Konrad wrote:The thing is if you dont use the pumps once you run out of fluid, you see that on the tanks and rest of the pipes you have small "leftovers" that when you are using pumps does not happen, and in the bigger picture its quite a lot of a waste that fluid being stuck.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing or a good thing (aside from aesthetics, i suppose). What matters is that your consumers are getting all of whatever the producers are putting into the pipe. One way to determine if pipe throughput issues are affecting a build (which in my experience is very rare until super late game with mass beacon setups) is if you see backed up outputs on producers AND consumers not getting that input.

The stuff sitting in a pipe (or on a belt) represents a very small fraction of what even a modest size factory will produce over a few hours. It's the factory's working capital.

In 0.15, the pumps are actually much better. They max out at about 1200 units/second, just like the offshore pumps, so I can't imagine many times where they would be a bottleneck (unlike the pumps in 0.14 and earlier)

Mehve wrote:In 0.15, the pumps are actually much better. They max out at about 1200 units/second, just like the offshore pumps, so I can't imagine many times where they would be a bottleneck (unlike the pumps in 0.14 and earlier)

So Offshore Pumps and Small Pumps have 1200 Units/s...

... but what about the pipes themselves? Also capped at 1200 or are they capable of handling more?

I don't know, but I'd suspect a soft cap, just like in 0.14, where you could hit 150/s, but you could only maintain it for half a dozen blocks or so before you needed to re-pressure.

In the absence of any rework of fluid-flow mechanics, plus the simple multiplying of fluid values by 10, would we be in a similar situation, where you'd have a hard time getting past 1500/s?

Mehve wrote:I don't know, but I'd suspect a soft cap, just like in 0.14, where you could hit 150/s, but you could only maintain it for half a dozen blocks or so before you needed to re-pressure.

In the absence of any rework of fluid-flow mechanics, plus the simple multiplying of fluid values by 10, would we be in a similar situation, where you'd have a hard time getting past 1500/s?

Would seem sensible... but it could also be tested using a Nuclear Power plant...

The pipe surely supports 1200/s or otherwise I wouldn't be able to sustain 20 Boilers, 8 Exchangers and 20 Steam Turbines with a single Offshore pump and pipes.

One might try increasing the amount of consumers and offshore pumps and force it all through a single pipe... like lets say 2 Offshore Pumps, 40 boilers, 16 exchangers and 40 Steam Turbines. I bet it won't work.

So who can spot the problem with my quick pump test? :/



Yeah. I have no excuse. At no point did I consider that just maybe, the pump could now exceed the offshore pump's output. Turns out the pump's throughput can be MUCH higher in the right circumstances. See this thread for better info.

The tooltip for the pump has been updated to 1200 units now >.>, was 200 when I checked.

FrodoOf9Fingers wrote:The tooltip for the pump has been updated to 1200 units now >.>, was 200 when I checked.

You mean 12000/s? The tooltip before didn't specify that it meant 200 per tick, but it still was 12000/s