Lubricant: The only Flaw in the Fluid System.

[coppercoil]

My entire thought process behind this thread is just "Hey, lubricant is kinda odd compared to all the other recipes. Is this intentional? If not maybe fix it with a second recipe."

That's an ok question.

But you do already have your own answer for it. You made a suggestion, that's also ok.
So we came here and said our suggestions, because we do have our answers too. Is it ok?
Finally, we had a nice three four page conversation, this should be ok. This is how human beings communicate

[mrvn]

I didn't want to replace my electric furnaces with stone ones just so I could burn my solid fuel or something.

So it's not so much that there is no way out but that you simply don't like it.

You can also put solid fuel into boilers to make the power needed for, well, everything. Or use the solid fuel a train fuel.


So I fail to see a problem. There are ways out. Unless you make more solid fuel as waste product of lubricant than you can burn to generate power, which I doubt.

There is no problem for the gameplay ,
yes , there are ways to use solid fuel.
but after nuclear fuel , before rocket , with all electric furnace (with only trains consuming fuel) i had to run there many times. to add a tank
as it is my first game , i don't even know what rocket needs, and never looked until i came to that point

There are some people who play to create a build that works efficiently.
so,
whatever the product i use from the fluid system at whatever rate, there should be a way to build (no matter how complex it is) to balance out the by products of refinery.
this is what the requested suggestion is i believe

And balancing between solar / nuclear and solid fuel for electricity is the mechanism you can use.

can you share any methods / examples for that, if possible

Nope. I just use enough tanks to buffer lubricant and don't use as many blue belts.

Managing power is ugly since you can't set priorities or read consumption. All you have is an on/off switch and monitoring steam levels and accumulators.

Easiest setup with nuclear power is probably to generate steam from solid fuel and pup it into the steam storage of the nuclear plant. That way the nuclear reactor control (you have to have one) will stop throwing nuclear fuel into the reactor when the solid fuel is sufficient.

[ssilk]

Please, guys, try to quote only the needed lines. Thanks.

[Frosti85]

you can create a plant that convert coal into lube, without byproducts
you use coal liquidification

heavy oil -> lube
light oil -> solid fuel
petro -> solid fuel
solid fuel -> steam -> energy & coal liquidifaction

the solid fuel from this process burn all the petro and light oil, and the energy is enough to power the entire plant

basically, then you have a coal to lube zero energy module

[Ranger_Aurelien]

You can also add the recipe ( solid fuel+light oil > rocket fuel ) for train power (and use more oils) and it would take up less space.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_fuel

[Kyralessa]

you can create a plant that convert coal into lube, without byproducts
you use coal liquifaction

heavy oil -> lube
light oil -> solid fuel
petro -> solid fuel
solid fuel -> steam -> energy & coal liquifaction

the solid fuel from this process burn all the petro and light oil, and the energy is enough to power the entire plant

basically, then you have a coal to lube zero energy module

I found this intriguing, so I tried it in sandbox/cheat mode:

Coal Liquifaction

CoalLiquidPlentyOfFuel.png (1.49 MiB) Viewed 1704 times

Powering the coal miners too

CoalLiquidMinersToo.png (1.88 MiB) Viewed 1704 times

I had to bootstrap the setup with a bit of heavy oil for the refinery, of course, and a bit of coal to start the steam.

But now it's self-sustaining and then some. One single refinery running coal liquifaction and turning the light oil and petroleum into solid fuel produces more than enough power to run itself and enough coal miners to easily saturate it. There's a surplus of solid fuel, which can be used to power the rest of the factory.

Which, I guess, may not seem that different from the case without coal liquifaction (a surplus of light oil and petroleum), except that coal liquifaction produces a lot of heavy oil. Especially in the current (experimental) version, coal liquifaction takes in 25 heavy oil and spits out 90, producing 3.6 times as much heavy oil as was put in.

So, JackTheSpades, if you set up a bunch of coal liquifaction, turn the light oil and petroleum into solid fuel, and run your factory off that solid fuel, will you end up with enough lubricant?

I realize you may look at the solid fuel in this case as "waste", but I feel like if you're using it to run your factory, it's not really waste.