Factorio Forums

The other day I played with my oil refinery and got the water pipe and the light oil pipes cross connected. Water flooded into the light oil pipes since the light oil was all used up and the whole plant was ruined. There seems to be no good way to remove the wrong liquid from some pipe other than removing and rebuilding the whole pipe from start to finish. Prior to construction robots that is a real pain.

It would be nice if there were some way to spill a pipes content without removing and rebuilding the pipe. Maybe that could work a bit like the repair tool but use a barrel. If you apply the barrel to a pipe, tank, pump or fluid wagon it transfers the liquid into the barrel. Apply a non-empty barrel with shift and it empties the barrel instead.

That will teach u to double check pipes before attaching
Mixing fluids can really be a PITA !

if the whole pipe is flooded.just attach a pump and a storage tank to the pipe and u can suck it out.
Though that gets problematic if theres a mixed bunchof liquids in the pipe, (eg 1 segment water, then oil, then water, etc..)then your better of tearing it down and starting over ;P

My suggestion is that if two liquids are in the same pipe, they should cancel each other out. That way, whichever liquid there is more of will be the one that is left.

xyzyxx wrote:My suggestion is that if two liquids are in the same pipe, they should cancel each other out. That way, whichever liquid there is more of will be the one that is left.

It doesn't work like that. There can never be more than one type of fluid in a pipe anyway. The problem is having, e.g. 10 pipes of light oil, 10 pipes of petroleum gas, then another 10 pipes of light oil. In total you could have hundreds of fluid units in the wrong pipe. It doesn't really make sense that it would be canceled out / disappear.

Before 0.15 you could attach a steam engine to a pipe and (after disconnected producers like refineries) it would suck all of the fluid out of the who pipe system. It doesn't work anymore now that steam engines specifically require steam as input.

t-lor wrote:if the whole pipe is flooded.just attach a pump and a storage tank to the pipe and u can suck it out.

This is the same solution I use on distant, emptied uranium mines, to get back my precious sulfuric acid, that I want to use elsewhere. :)

t-lor wrote:if the whole pipe is flooded.just attach a pump and a storage tank to the pipe and u can suck it out.
Though that gets problematic if theres a mixed bunchof liquids in the pipe, (eg 1 segment water, then oil, then water, etc..)then your better of tearing it down and starting over ;P

I tried sucking it out using a pump and an empty tank. But I have 5 refineries connected to the pipe. So as soon as I sucked out some water one of the refineries pushed some oil into the pipe making it worse since then the pipe was mixed. I tried adding a second pump and tank to suck out the oil too. I stopped all the refineries so the pipe could be sucked completely empty but it didn't work. Or I was too impatient or something.


Overall this makes me wonder. A pipe can never hold two liquids. But does it consider the pressure of liquid from a connected pipe? Say I have 3 pipes, A-B-C, A holds 100 water and B and C hold 1 oil. Does all that water push the oil from B to C?

If there were two pipes connected with different liquids liquids could simply disappear. Or they could react and both pipes would explode without damaging other stuff around.

It would not be realistic behavior, but in my opinion replacing contaminated pipe lines is not entertaining playing and would not give any good things in the game. It is just annoying.