Factorio Forums

Top left and bottom right corners are lacking pipe access points. If this is based on a non-arbitrary reason someone please tell me. To me, this is the single most annoying and frustrating part of the game, and why I give up on the game constantly. Setting up pipes in oil fiends is annoying enough, without (seemingly) arbitrary restrictions on where those pipes can and cannot connect to.

guy smiley wrote:Top left and bottom right corners are lacking pipe access points. If this is based on a non-arbitrary reason someone please tell me. To me, this is the single most annoying and frustrating part of the game, and why I give up on the game constantly. Setting up pipes in oil fiends is annoying enough, without (seemingly) arbitrary restrictions on where those pipes can and cannot connect to.

Without some restrictions the game would be too easy

It will be interesting to use this connection for water entry. With water (or salted water) production is some higher.

I have never felt it's a problem and for me it's easy to hook up the pump-jacks (would be more interesting if it was harder). Don't forget that you can rotate pump-jacks.
There are plenty of other things that are annoying like trees and moving chests full things a tile...

Lubricus wrote:Don't forget that you can rotate pump-jacks.

Yeah, that's why I specifically indicated on that image, the points you can't rotate to.

Klonan wrote:Without some restrictions the game would be too easy

To me, it's not about easy or hard. Right now, I am working on a massive train map. Space, is not a concern I have currently. So the idea of a restriction on which corners pumpjacks can have their pipe attachment points rotated around to, is nothing to do with optimising for space. Everything to do with, the fact that, right now, I look at an oil field and cringe. More often than not, I save and close the game, and do something else. Because I don't want to have to deal with that.

Doing that stuff (pipes to pumpjacks, etc.) right now is just really clumsy and annoying. It's not fun, for me anyway. But ok, the devs have spoken, so I will just continue to only really sample a small section of the game.

What about blueprinting a jack with pipes all around it? If you spam these over your oilfield most should directly be connected and the rest should be easy to hook up.

I always thought pumpjacks were a little quirky because of that, but not defective.

Do you have any examples of an oil field where you are unable to harvest all of the oil patches because of how the pumpjack rotates? As it is, this complaint sounds a bit childish - you really can only "sample a small section of the game" because of how a single unit rotates, without any evidence (so far) that the lack of full rotation prevents any functionality?

I have been playing this game for almost two years now, and have never been unable to harvest an oil patch because of how pumpjacks rotate (or any other reason). While I agree pumpjacks are a bit odd, I fail to see a problem here.

For some reason the quirky rotation is so off-putting to him that he restricts himself to red+green science.

I don't think our posts are going to help

I also hate that about the pumpjack pipes...

in theory, it could easily be modded where those missing pipe locations are added in, though I'm not sure how easy an 8 step rotation would be, it might be a case of having 4 rotations, where there's 2 output connections on each.

"Rotating" might not be the best term to describe it for Pumpjacks since the output pipe flips on the diagonals. However, I've never found it to be a problem, it's actually neater than rotating in most cases - in the OP's image, say the pumpjacks output downwards from the bottom left (and is thusly rotated), to rotate the pipes near the other pumpjack would have them pumping in to each other, so you'd be forced to run the pipes further.

Piping of oil fields is annoying but it is enough to pipe few hundreds of pumpjacks even for a large base. If you do not like it, use coal liquefaction instead. One small oil field can produce enough oil to research it in reasonable time and then you can forget pumpjacks permanently.

there is one reason to add more connection points for pumpjacks though: to make blueprints with pumpjacks mirrorable by mods.

Impatient wrote:there is one reason to add more connection points for pumpjacks though: to make blueprints with pumpjacks mirrorable by mods.

How it works? Up switched to down and right is switched to left?

I'd rather suggest that you should be able to place a pumpjack in a 5x5 or 7x7 area around its oil patch. Two or more oil patches might be used with one pump jack, though several pumpjacks should reach a higher yield (and depletion).

darkfrei wrote:

Impatient wrote:there is one reason to add more connection points for pumpjacks though: to make blueprints with pumpjacks mirrorable by mods.

How it works? Up switched to down and right is switched to left?

This would be possible if the pumpjacks hat outlets like the oil tanks.

Impatient wrote:

darkfrei wrote:

Impatient wrote:there is one reason to add more connection points for pumpjacks though: to make blueprints with pumpjacks mirrorable by mods.

How it works? Up switched to down and right is switched to left?

This would be possible if the pumpjacks hat outlets like the oil tanks.

Try this mod:
Omni Pumpjacks

darkfrei wrote:

Impatient wrote:

darkfrei wrote:

Impatient wrote:there is one reason to add more connection points for pumpjacks though: to make blueprints with pumpjacks mirrorable by mods.

How it works? Up switched to down and right is switched to left?

This would be possible if the pumpjacks hat outlets like the oil tanks.

Try this mod:
Omni Pumpjacks

that doesn't do what he wants though (going by screenshot only), he wants access points at the top left, and bottom right corners.


Another interesting thing though, it could be possible to configure them like the sulfuric acid on the mining drill. Have multiple output points that are always connected, but it's one big pipe-style fluid box, so it can flow from one pumpjack to another. so if they were all touching, you'd only need to connect to one, and the oil would flow though all the others to the pipe.

@bob, that's actually a good idea. Don't U mines need to line up perfectly or is that just visual?

I was actually thinking of writing a mod to automatically hook up oil fields using some sort of greedy algorithm, it's just so annoying to connect them (and I always go OCD on it, which is probably half the problem).

I had an idea to make oil fields more like common resources - the area, which has a total yield as opposed to per-tile distribution for ores. And it would be player's choice how many pumpjacks he would place and combo them with beacons. The only limitation is that pumpjack should touch the deposit (just like mining drills do). You might however limit minable area to a center point of pumpjack to prevent mixed resource mining like drills have. A player will still think how to fit pumpjacks best into the random patch shape.

This actually makes sense as generally oil deposit is a single underground lake where you bore your pumpjacks.