Factorio Forums

Me and my friend were having a debate over what setup is best out of the 2, these are our designs:


The requester chest is requesting 100 coal each, it just hasn't been filled yet, (also, we have a whole load of steam in backup, so that is not a problem)
Please post your opinion on what setup is best and the pros / cons of each one, we couldn't settle it between us!

The one on the left. Because there is no coal in the chest on the right .

The requester chest is requesting 100 coal each, it just hasn't been filled yet, (also, we have a whole load of steam in backup, so that is not a problem)

I'd go with Computer's design. Unlike your setup it can self start from an empty heavy oil tank.

neither, just use pipes and a pump always on, the pipe's own capacity is enough as a buffer.

I'm with M44v on this one, the left one won't prime from the liquid bus and the one on the right has superfluous pumps and has a potential lockup state if less than 1000 is in the tank

cbhj1 wrote:I'm with M44v on this one, the left one won't prime from the liquid bus and the one on the right has superfluous pumps and has a potential lockup state if less than 1000 is in the tank

Yes but where do you place the pump. Which design would you place the pump? Would you make the like the left where it is open to get oil in the loop for external sources or would you do the left one where the oil in the loop is only the oil made from the refinarys?

Computerboydude wrote:

cbhj1 wrote:I'm with M44v on this one, the left one won't prime from the liquid bus and the one on the right has superfluous pumps and has a potential lockup state if less than 1000 is in the tank

Yes but where do you place the pump. Which design would you place the pump? Would you make the like the left where it is open to get oil in the loop for external sources or would you do the left one where the oil in the loop is only the oil made from the refinarys?

Lets go with the left example and try to fix it from there. the pump only works when heavy oil is greater than 100. Fluid mechanics basically equalize in % for every pipe in the system. if you read 100/25000 total capacity of the tank as a means to have the heavy oil forced out, the pipes only get like 2.5/100 heavy oil staying inside them at best. Your Best bet is to just just change the circuit of that single pump into a higher value, like (heavy oil >2000)

Compared to the one on the right, the one on the left at least allows ease of self feeding, so thats the one i'd rather fix.

I don't really like either of them, neither of them tiles well, and this problem is simpler to solve by having storage nearby and using pump controls at the input/output points of the storage: (apparently the boards don't want to preserve my ASCII art.....)
Then all you need to do is use pumps to give the appropriate things priority: for example, you want a pump on the 'to coal liquefaction' part because you want that to be fed before other HO users. You can also decide if you want coal liquefaction to have priority over other HO production (basic/adv. oil processing) or not. Whichever you want to have priority should have a pump on it's input to storage, you can also use combinator settings to control when things are allowed to put into and take from storage this way.

The right one, because the left one can starve itself.

But both setups have too many redundancies imo.

Computerboydude wrote:

cbhj1 wrote:I'm with M44v on this one, the left one won't prime from the liquid bus and the one on the right has superfluous pumps and has a potential lockup state if less than 1000 is in the tank

Yes but where do you place the pump. Which design would you place the pump? Would you make the like the left where it is open to get oil in the loop for external sources or would you do the left one where the oil in the loop is only the oil made from the refinarys?

If have yet to get into coal liquefaction, but it looks to me like the one on the right would still work fine if you took out the storage tank, one pump and the circuit network. If any other source of heavy oil is going through the output pipe, the pump can snag some from there to self-start, liquefaction always makes more heavy oil than it uses, so I don't see how starving could happen as long as the pump is looping it back preferentially, and every single pipe segment holds enough oil for 4 batches, which seems like a generous buffer. And obviously the pumps automatically stop when the pipes are full.