Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Skip the fluid simulation, but only if the player takes the time to set it up right

What ?

Imagine that the existing pipe segments and tanks have a little bit of elasticity, so can store kinetic energy and a little bit more fluid than 100% of their normal capacity if you have a strong enough pump. When all of the pipes in a segment are completely full, further fluid can be forced into a shared buffer (at increasing power costs for each 0.1% over the pipeline's total capacity it gets) by special pumps, and any machine drawing from that pipeline first pulls from the buffer. While in this state, the full line is skipped during fluid simulation, so its UPS impact can be reduced (and not scale with the number of pipe segments at all!).

Why ?

The fluid sim has long been talked about by devs and players alike as a difficult problem, so an excuse to do less of it in the megabases where it matters most would make it less of an issue without costing a programmer months more misery with a high chance of failure.

sounds like a long line of pumps. Maybe full pumps in series could be calculated like fully saturated belts?