Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Barrels are pointless and not fun. Get rid of them.

What ?

Barrels and all barrel-related content should be removed from Factorio, since they are almost-never-used extra-hassle alternatives to fluid wagons and pipes.

Why ?

Barrels have long been obsolete since the advent of pipes and fluid wagons. They are essentially "bloat" at this point. Fluids don't need to be a discrete item that can be placed on belts any more than you need to be able to liquify iron plates to transport in a fluid wagon.

This is a relic of the development process of Factorio so far, and it would be awesome to cut the bloat on the path to v1.0.

My barrel-based space base would like to have words with you...

I've used barrels of heavy oil to kickstart coal liquefaction at times, and I've used sulfuric acid barrels extensively in all four full games I've played.

I have a have a hard time imagining a reason to barrel water or petrogas, but barreled H2SO4, heavy oil, and lube all have pretty obvious uses to me. I don't think lack of imagination is a good reason to remove them from the game entirely.

I wouldn't mind seeing barreling recipes only unlocked with the appropriate technology, though. Fluid Handling unlocking two recipes for every fluid in the game is a bit much and I wouldn't mind if it only unlocked water and crude; oil processing unlocking heavy, light, and petrogas; lube and sulfur their associated fluids.

Barrels have a very high throughput. Though that's more of a limitation of the fluid system

One simple use case is jump starting a coal liquefaction plant with some heavy oil

Not obsolete. I use them all the time. Great throughput when needed and for other reasons.

Barrel are very useful for robots, and fun to use !
You can store vast amount of liquid at no UPS expense
You can turret creep with flamethrower turret if you carry around a bunch or barrel.

Also one time i remember driving a car with water barrel to go to the sulfur plant to make explosives for cliffs explosive, to get access to another source of water closer for that very same sulfur plant. That was a weird game and i wouldn't advise, but it was fun enough that i remember it !

There also are mods that make use of barrels. In Cargo ships, for example, they are an ingredient in signal buoys and floating electric poles. Of course one could try and use (the tanks on) fluid wagons for this purpose, but barrels are much more reasonable.

They're, at worst, harmless with no maintenance cost to leave in the game? I'd understand suggesting their removal if there was a reason to believe that the barrels were some strain on the development effort... but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's the case...

Darinth wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2019 3:15 pm They're, at worst, harmless with no maintenance cost to leave in the game? I'd understand suggesting their removal if there was a reason to believe that the barrels were some strain on the development effort... but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that's the case...

Bring back pickaxes/item durability/mining hardness for mods ! *ducks*

Get rid of fluid system and all fluid-related content
(Using barrels only)

I employ this mod to make them more environmentally friendly:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BarrelRecycling

I'm not for barreling everything but they have some uses to get fluids to some hard-to-reach places.

Ranger_Aurelien wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2019 5:39 pm I employ this mod to make them more environmentally friendly:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BarrelRecycling
I'm not for barreling everything but they have some uses to get fluids to some hard-to-reach places.

OP can always install the No Empty Barrels - You don't need barrels mod locally, and have everything they ever dreamed of!

Actually, in seriousness, I have been tempted to install that myself recently because the fluid system is just ... headache inducing. Not that I can't do barrels, but they are more logistics than pipes. So, hashtag lazy and all that. I'm gonna do barrels for now though.

I find barrels quite useful for tasks that need only a small amount of liquid, such as making flamethrower ammo or mining uranium.

In the case of flamethrower ammo, I need to restock on it it so rarely, carrying a few stacks of barrels between my "miscellaneous crap area" and my refinery every couple of weeks is no real bother.

Reserving a couple of slots on your uranium ore trains for barrels of sulphuric acid and a couple more for empty barrels is a perfectly reasonable approach, given uranium mining doesn't really require that much acid for a given volume of ore mined.

And, of course, like others have mentioned, a couple of barrels of heavy oil are plenty to get coal liquefaction up and running.

BEEFE wrote: ↑Tue Jul 30, 2019 10:52 pm I wouldn't mind seeing barreling recipes only unlocked with the appropriate technology, though. Fluid Handling unlocking two recipes for every fluid in the game is a bit much and I wouldn't mind if it only unlocked water and crude; oil processing unlocking heavy, light, and petrogas; lube and sulfur their associated fluids.

I'd suggest tweaking the tech tree so fluid handling was a requirement for oil processing and making fluid handling just unlock barrelling for water, then oil processing unlocking barrelling for crude oil. Actually, split oil processing into "oil extraction" and "oil refining", with crude barrelling under extraction and barrelling for light and heavy oil under refining.

The requirement is already there :

BlueTemplar wrote: ↑Sun Aug 04, 2019 6:44 am [...]
car-barrelling oil is only a bad practice in mid-late game, once you can actually afford to research fluid wagons and lay down the rails.

As a reminder, some tech costs :

Code: Select all

(Engine : 100 R&G)
    Car : 100 R&G (you probably don't want a new player to skip that :
                   much more freedom than train when you don't know anything about trains !)
    Railway : 75 R&G
        Train Stops : 75 R&G
        Fluid Wagon : 200 R&G (note that you pretty much need train stops to be able to use fluid wagons,
                               hopefully the devs will fix that in one way or another...)
        (Train Signals : 100 R&G - pretty optional until MUCH later,
                                   also the tutorial doesn't unlock until you get blue science,
                                   hopefully the devs will fix that !)

And remember that for new players trains are even harder to deal with than pre-0.17.60 oil processing !
Now, this is extra 350 R&G research that could be instead used on :

Code: Select all

    Fluid Handling : 50 R&G (will need this, of course)
        Oil Processing : 100 R&G
            Plastics : 200 R&G
                Red circuits : 200 R&G
            Sulfur : 150 R&G
                Battery : 150 R&G
                Explosives : 100 R&G
            Flammables : 50 R&G
                Flamethrower : 50 R&G&Mil
                Rocketry : 120 R&G&Mil (&Explosives)
                (Lubricant : 50R&G - useless in R&G science.)

I have no worries about players switching to better solutions, in my experience, moving oil by car gets old really fast !
And if they stick to oil barrels in trains, who can blame them ? (Considering the extra hassle, they will probably set up a fluid wagon on their second oil patch...)
[...]

With barrels it is trivial to split the throughput 50:50 (or 25:75 or other power of 2 splits). Try doing that with the fluid system.

Best I can figure is to use 4 tanks and circuit logic. 2 tanks get filled until full. Then you switch over to emptying the two tanks (one for each output) and filling the other two. With barrels you simply place a splitter.

Barrels are far from obsolete. They are an option to treat fluids in an identical manner like any other solid cargo. That can be a great simplification of logistics, especially for keeping outposts supplied which need only a bit light oil or maybe steam.

Additionally it can be great fun to not use pipes outside of the refinery and the barrels look awesome.

You can't barrel steam. (It wouldn't be able to keep its temperature if you could.)
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/steambarrel

BlueTemplar wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2019 1:27 pm You can't barrel steam.

But you can barrel roll.
...
Sorry

Just not to be totally off topic, I do have occasional use of barelling at places where train delivery would not be practical, and I don't want to build a pipe maze for a low throughput need.

Hey! Stop that! Don't touch my barrels. Barrelling fluids is fun and in some cases usefull. If you don't need it, you don't have to use it.

Barrels are pretty good for compact LTN stations for multiple fluids.
I use them f.e. for stations, which provide Angels petrochem fluids, like naphta, fuel oil, base mineral oil, acid gas, etc. in potentially one station.