Another suggestion for the expansion.

[Saphira123456]

I would like to suggest some kind of incinerator/vent/flare stack to be added to vanilla.

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids, when you do not have storage capacity for them and will not be using them. This can lead to a logjam where you need more Heavy Oil (for an example) but you can't get it due to your Medium and Light Oil storages being full. While you can exchange fluids for other fluids, for example changing Medium Oil and Light Oil to Heavy, in many cases this is impractical, so the only solution is to build more storages for the oils you can't use, and these can add up VERY quickly. A more practical solution is needed - that's where the flare stack comes in, allowing you to burn off products you don't have storage for. Later, when you do have storage, you can remove the flare stack.

Similarly with ore patches, sometimes you have a mixed ore patch and you only want one type of ore from it. In this case, an incinerator would be useful to remove the ores you don't want from the conveyor line without having to process them into unneeded products.

An incinerator or flare stack would be a practical way to enable you to destroy any unwanted byproducts, liquid or solid, that you do not have storage for at the current time. This would alleviate logjams and other situations, and keep storage required to a minimum.

[FuryoftheStars]

It should be noted that this particular suggestion already exists: Flare Stack (Vanilla)

[Illiander42]

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids,

I have never had an issue with unwanted fluid byproducts in vanilla. The only things where this is even possible is oil, and bases use so much petroleum that the others never jam.

for example changing Medium Oil and Light Oil to Heavy, in many cases this is impractical,

Cracking isn't impractical at all. If you have the water for advanced or liquifaction then you have the water for cracking.

Similarly with ore patches, sometimes you have a mixed ore patch and you only want one type of ore from it.

In vanilla, mixed mining only happens at patch borders. It's trivial to either place miners carefully, or just prioritise the mixed belts so they don't jam now that we have filter and prio splitters.

I frequently play with AngelBob, and don't need to use the flare stack/clarifier there all that much.

It's *really* not needed in vanilla. The recycler is only there to reroll quality.

[Saphira123456]

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids,

I have never had an issue with unwanted fluid byproducts in vanilla. The only things where this is even possible is oil, and bases use so much petroleum that the others never jam.

for example changing Medium Oil and Light Oil to Heavy, in many cases this is impractical,

Cracking isn't impractical at all. If you have the water for advanced or liquifaction then you have the water for cracking.

Similarly with ore patches, sometimes you have a mixed ore patch and you only want one type of ore from it.

In vanilla, mixed mining only happens at patch borders. It's trivial to either place miners carefully, or just prioritise the mixed belts so they don't jam now that we have filter and prio splitters.

I frequently play with AngelBob, and don't need to use the flare stack/clarifier there all that much.

It's *really* not needed in vanilla. The recycler is only there to reroll quality.

1. I play with Space Exploration, and a few other mods. Bases really don't use that much petroleum.
2. Also, cracking is not a solution as redirecting things can and will exacerbate problems. I frequently have to use the flare stack mod to remove excess from various tanks, and I only recently started using the incinerator to get rid of excess solid matter.

The recycler, for vanilla, is more to recycle old machines.

[FuryoftheStars]

1. I play with Space Exploration, and a few other mods. Bases really don't use that much petroleum.

Asking for something to be added to vanilla should be done from the perspective of vanilla. Otherwise, the answer to a problem being created by a mod is to have that mod present a solution (or use another mod).

[Illiander42]

1. I play with Space Exploration, and a few other mods. Bases really don't use that much petroleum.

So use a flare stack mod as well.

2. Also, cracking is not a solution as redirecting things can and will exacerbate problems. I frequently have to use the flare stack mod to remove excess from various tanks, and I only recently started using the incinerator to get rid of excess solid matter.

Cracking is absolutely the solution. In vanilla. Because you never need so much Lube that the others clog if you use the only two wires needed in vanilla.

The recycler, for vanilla, is more to recycle old machines.

I have never had more than a single box of machines I'd want to throw in it in a vanilla game.

At least not until I'm ripping up my steam power. And at that point the resources tied up in those machines is nothing.

[Tertius]

I would like to suggest some kind of incinerator/vent/flare stack to be added to vanilla.

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids, when you do not have storage capacity for them ...

From what I read from you in the fff thread, it seems you're not using all Factorio features up to their full potential. At one point you complain Factorio is an idle game and you need to let it run over night to get the items you need. And at some other point you complain you cannot get rid of byproducts.

Both issues are actually genuine game challenges the player is expected to solve one way or the other. It's possible to solve all these challenges with the vanilla 1.1 game already and without mods. This is an idea how to do that:

The game is not just about producing stuff. It's as much about ratios and logistics. The challenge is not only to produce some stuff, it's also to get the right amount of input and output items so there is no shortage about input and no overflow at the output.

About idle waiting: It seems you build too small (and it could be you forget building a mall, see further down in this post). If you need to wait 8 hours for enough items of some kind, consider duplicating that production line 8 times, so you only wait 1 hour. If the recipe says it needs 30 seconds to produce an item, build a production line with 30 assembling machines for the same item, and you get one item every second!

If you need several items as input for one thing, and these input items all have different recipe times, normalize to 1 second per item to get the desired number of assembling machines for each, so they are all producing the same amount per second or per minute.
This is especially needed for science pack production: red is 1/5s, green is 1/6s, grey is 2/10s, blue is 2/24s, purple is 3/21s, yellow is 3/21s.
Reducing to 1, this becomes:
red: 1/5s
green 1/6s
grey 1/5s
blue 1/12s
purple 1/7s
yellow 1/7s

So for research, build science pack production lines with these amounts of assembling machines: 5 for red, 6 for green, 5 for grey, (12 for blue, 7 for purple, 7 for yellow). This will give 1 of all science per second and will carry through the early game until you unlock red circuits.
Early mid game, starting with the availability of red circuits, double that setup to adjust for increased science pack requirement in research: 10 assembling machines for red, 12 for green, 10 for grey, 24 for blue, 14 for purple, 14 for yellow. This will give 2 science per second.
Late mid game, when blue circuits become available, triple that setup: 15 for red, 18 for green, 15 for grey, 36 for blue, 21 for purple, 21 for yellow. This will give 3 science per second.

This also requires you to constantly increase the number of mines, number of smelters and so on.

At the same time, you need a factory to create the items to build the factory. This is called a mall. If you wait over night, could it be you're waiting for the engineer to manually create the items you need for the factory to build?

Don't create items per hand except the few required starting items to get automation started! Instead, create a factory to create items that build up more of your factory. The thing is that you need to explicitly create all the intermediate items that are implicitly created if you manufacture by hand. But the challenge here to solve is to build a factory item factory and not produce anything by hand. Your engineer is 1 assembling machine, but the power of Factorio lies in the fact you can build as many more assembling machines as you like to produce many times more items the engineer is able to produce alone.

And this leads us to byproducts. If you design a mall and factories for all the intermediate items, you will see you need to produce items with the right ratio between them to neither clog nor starve the production. You're doing it right, if there are no byproducts that clog your factory and on the other hand no assembling machine is starving for items.

The first thing to clog is within oil production. You need a production lines that don't statically just refine oil, because this gets us oil byproducts in amounts that are not exactly consumed as they are produced. You need to employ light and heavy oil cracking, to get rid of the byproducts, but you need to balance this with a small amount of circuits, because you need some amount of light and heavy oil for producing other required stuff. This is also a genuine game challenge to solve, not a design omission that requires you to employ some incinerator mod.

In the end, you're doing it right if you're always busy expanding your factory and not creating any items by hand. There is always some some bottleneck. More mines, more trains, more smelters, more green circuits, more plastic, more red circuits, ... etc... Usually, you're never waiting. You're always busy building more. If you're waiting for some item, you need to build a bigger factory to produce more of the thing you're waiting for, so you don't need to wait for it any more.

[Saphira123456]

I would like to suggest some kind of incinerator/vent/flare stack to be added to vanilla.

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids, when you do not have storage capacity for them ...

If you wait over night, could it be you're waiting for the engineer to manually create the items you need for the factory to build?

I'm not. I'm waiting for science packs to stockpile - I don't build anything manually in my inventory.

I do manual construction work on my factory, no robots. But I do not build inserters, assembling machines, etcetera, manually in my inventory.

The only bottleneck, aside from fluids that I have encountered, is the long wait for science packs.

[Tertius]

I would like to suggest some kind of incinerator/vent/flare stack to be added to vanilla.

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids, when you do not have storage capacity for them ...

If you wait over night, could it be you're waiting for the engineer to manually create the items you need for the factory to build?

I'm not. I'm waiting for science packs to stockpile - I don't build anything manually in my inventory.

I do manual construction work on my factory, no robots. But I do not build inserters, assembling machines, etcetera, manually in my inventory.

The only bottleneck, aside from fluids that I have encountered, is the long wait for science packs.

In this case, I recommend my suggestion about setting up 10/12/10/24/14/14 assembling machines for red/green/grey/blue/purple/yellow science packs and making sure, every machine has enough supply to run continuously. First, only half of it. Then all. This is all just fast enough to get the next tech researched when it is needed to build the next stage of the factory.
Your bottleneck will be red circuits, then blue circuits, because they will consume huge amounts of the previous circuits tier, so the real challenge is to build big enough production lines for green and red circuits. And at the same time, you need circuits to get your mall producing enough items to expand your factory.

Extremely useful are two plugins: Bottleneck Lite for a direct visualization which assembling machine is stalled, and Rate Calculator for seeing how many items the current factory is trying to consume and able to produce, so you see how many assembling machines you need to add to balance out supply and demand of intermediate items.

You don't need mods to change gameplay - mods to get a better overview how your factory is functioning are a much better choice.

An example of how to balance out oil cracking, so you consume the byproducts seamlessly, can be seen in the Circuit network cookbook of the wiki.

[Saphira123456]

I would like to suggest some kind of incinerator/vent/flare stack to be added to vanilla.

I have found that in Vanilla Factorio, it is rather difficult to get rid of unwanted byproducts, such as fluids, when you do not have storage capacity for them ...

If you wait over night, could it be you're waiting for the engineer to manually create the items you need for the factory to build?

I'm not. I'm waiting for science packs to stockpile - I don't build anything manually in my inventory.

I do manual construction work on my factory, no robots. But I do not build inserters, assembling machines, etcetera, manually in my inventory.

The only bottleneck, aside from fluids that I have encountered, is the long wait for science packs.

In this case, I recommend my suggestion about setting up 10/12/10/24/14/14 assembling machines for red/green/grey/blue/purple/yellow science packs and making sure, every machine has enough supply to run continuously. First, only half of it. Then all. This is all just fast enough to get the next tech researched when it is needed to build the next stage of the factory.
Your bottleneck will be red circuits, then blue circuits, because they will consume huge amounts of the previous circuits tier, so the real challenge is to build big enough production lines for green and red circuits. And at the same time, you need circuits to get your mall producing enough items to expand your factory.

Extremely useful are two plugins: Bottleneck Lite for a direct visualization which assembling machine is stalled, and Rate Calculator for seeing how many items the current factory is trying to consume and able to produce, so you see how many assembling machines you need to add to balance out supply and demand of intermediate items.

You don't need mods to change gameplay - mods to get a better overview how your factory is functioning are a much better choice.

An example of how to balance out oil cracking, so you consume the byproducts seamlessly, can be seen in the Circuit network cookbook of the wiki.

Thank you for the advice, I'll take it under consideration. However, another thing I don't use is the circuit network. I've found it a bit too complicated for my tastes and the in-game tutorials really don't explain it.

To be honest, the base game needs a lot more tutorial scenarios beyond just the basics. And I'm not talking about the tips and tricks, I'm talking about the playable tutorial levels.

[Tertius]

However, another thing I don't use is the circuit network. I've found it a bit too complicated for my tastes and the in-game tutorials really don't explain it.

Using the circuit network for balancing light and heavy oil cracking was my first usage of the circuit network. You cannot really do without that. As far as I see it, it's the only challenge in the game given by the devs that really requires a very tiny part of the circuit network. Every other use of the circuit network is optional (but helps tremendously with fully automating border cases as well).

But don't fear: only very simple circuit is needed. No combinators, no computation. Only to give pumps a condition. It's just giving pumps for light and heavy oil the order when to pump and when to stop, so the pumps work as valves that open if there's too much light/heavy oil to get the surplus cracked away, and close otherwise. It's just a wire connection between the tank and a pump, and giving the pump a condition to work only if the fluid level is above some threshold.

And you're not alone. There's the community. Make a screenshot of your oil facility and post a help request in the gameplay section of the forum. Don't forget a blueprint, so we can reproduce your factory and see how it's actually set up. We can investigate and tell you how to set up the pumps with circuits to balance cracking. Or ask the same in Discord, it's more interactive than the forum, but also more superficial.

[Saphira123456]

However, another thing I don't use is the circuit network. I've found it a bit too complicated for my tastes and the in-game tutorials really don't explain it.

Using the circuit network for balancing light and heavy oil cracking was my first usage of the circuit network. You cannot really do without that. As far as I see it, it's the only challenge in the game given by the devs that really requires a very tiny part of the circuit network. Every other use of the circuit network is optional (but helps tremendously with fully automating border cases as well).

But don't fear: only very simple circuit is needed. No combinators, no computation. Only to give pumps a condition. It's just giving pumps for light and heavy oil the order when to pump and when to stop, so the pumps work as valves that open if there's too much light/heavy oil to get the surplus cracked away, and close otherwise. It's just a wire connection between the tank and a pump, and giving the pump a condition to work only if the fluid level is above some threshold.

And you're not alone. There's the community. Make a screenshot of your oil facility and post a help request in the gameplay section of the forum. Don't forget a blueprint, so we can reproduce your factory and see how it's actually set up. We can investigate and tell you how to set up the pumps with circuits to balance cracking. Or ask the same in Discord, it's more interactive than the forum, but also more superficial.

Thank you for the help, I will post in the help section should I need it. I don't use Discord, it's a security threat to my system and I'm not going to risk my high-priced gaming computer over a game.

[Tertius]

Discord is just a messenger, and it's just a webpage you can browse to. You don't need the the standalone Discord app. https://discord.gg/factorio

[Saphira123456]

Discord is just a messenger, and it's just a webpage you can browse to. You don't need the the standalone Discord app. https://discord.gg/factorio

No, thank you. I use Guilded.gg these days.