Factorio Forums

It always seemed a little bit odd to me that oil refining recipes work in batches (including basic/advanced oil refining, cracking, lubricant, etc) when other things (like pumps, boilers and steam engines) do a small amount of work constantly.

I suggest that oil refineries and chemical plants, at least for recipes that involve only liquids and no items, should also do work constantly.

For example (and this is probably clearer than what I said above), currently there is a recipe which consumes 1 heavy oil and produces 1 lubricant every second. If this suggestion is implemented, then if there are 50 updates in a second, it would consume 0.02 heavy oil and produce 0.02 lubricant every update.

Devices like water pump can have variable speed because there is no processing involved. In other hand processes like oil refining are based on chemical reactions. You have limited size of container, you pump in oil, do chemical processing, and pump out products. You can't do this continuously. That's why those recipes work in batches.

Architekt wrote:Devices like water pump can have variable speed because there is no processing involved. In other hand processes like oil refining are based on chemical reactions. You have limited size of container, you pump in oil, do chemical processing, and pump out products. You can't do this continuously. That's why those recipes work in batches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_production