Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Ideas that are too old (too many things have changed since) and ones which won't be implemented for certain reasons or if there are obviously better suggestions.

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wpirobotbuilder
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Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by wpirobotbuilder »

The ability to have an inserter remove fuel from a boiler was added back in 0.9.2. I would like to be able to use inserters to remove coal from oil refineries which are set up for Coal Liquefaction.

I did not see anything like this when searching through the mods -- I assume this is because until 0.15, there was no reason to want this, since oil refineries only took liquid inputs.

The reason why I want this is that I have become obsessed with Coal Liquefaction. I have built design after design, looking to discover the highest petroleum production per tile setup possible, and which scales up to a 10k SPM level of production. I discovered a design which scales incredibly well, and I've built an oil processing area with it which consumes 150k coal per minute and produces 860k petroleum per minute. I am very happy with the setup. However, as the picture shows, it uses a lot of bots to deliver the coal to the oil refineries. Currently, bots operate in "bubbles" around the train stops, which sets a bound on how far bots usually travel. As the design scales out, the number of bots needed grows slightly more than linearly -- there is some non-linear scaling as the supply of coal fluctuates at each train stop. However, it's still a lot of bots (I keep 4000 in there, with ~200 free at any given moment).
Great scaling,  but tons of bots
Great scaling, but tons of bots
Many_Bots.jpg (5.38 MiB) Viewed 3356 times
I had an alternate design in mind which was dashed when I realized that inserters can't remove items from oil refineries. Below is what it might look like. Here, inserters pass coal between refineries to transport them down the line. These inserters are only enough to supply a few refineries, so requester chests are placed intermittently to top up the input of coal. This setup would require far fewer bots
Slightly more compact, fewer bots needed
Slightly more compact, fewer bots needed
Fewer_Bots_Needed.jpg (4.77 MiB) Viewed 3356 times

Engimage
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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by Engimage »

Coal in a refinery is not a fuel but is just one of the input components for a recipe.
And the game does not let inserters remove any of the input components from any of the machines. In this case this makes no sense.
When it is a fuel it makes sense as the machine (boiler for example) keeps working if you remove fuel from it but this is not true for any other machines which need those materials to finish crafting cycle.

mrvn
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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by mrvn »

While your explanation is right your reasoning is flawed. A machine consumes all its input items needed for a full cycle when it starts the cycle and it keeps finishing the cycle if you manually remove all extra input items.

The problem is rather that if inserters where allowed to remove input items then they would put them into chests or onto belts mend for the finished product.

In the burnerfix mod there is something special done for fuel in furnaces that allows burner inserters to remove fuel for their own use or to feed another furnces while not putting fuel into a chest or on a belt. You would have to do something similar to allow inserters to pass along input items between machines but not allow them to put them into chests or onto belts.

wpirobotbuilder
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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by wpirobotbuilder »

mrvn wrote:A machine consumes all its input items needed for a full cycle when it starts the cycle and it keeps finishing the cycle if you manually remove all extra input items.

The problem is rather that if inserters where allowed to remove input items then they would put them into chests or onto belts mend for the finished product.
In the case of the oil refinery, there is no ambiguity about what the inserter would do -- there is no output inventory slot to interact with, since the refinery only produces fluids, and the only input slot for physical inventory is for coal. This behavior sounds like a boiler, and since boilers can pass inventory between them via inserters, why not allow the same for refineries?

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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by Klonan »

wpirobotbuilder wrote:
mrvn wrote:A machine consumes all its input items needed for a full cycle when it starts the cycle and it keeps finishing the cycle if you manually remove all extra input items.

The problem is rather that if inserters where allowed to remove input items then they would put them into chests or onto belts mend for the finished product.
In the case of the oil refinery, there is no ambiguity about what the inserter would do -- there is no output inventory slot to interact with, since the refinery only produces fluids, and the only input slot for physical inventory is for coal. This behavior sounds like a boiler, and since boilers can pass inventory between them via inserters, why not allow the same for refineries?
It depends on the recipe, There is no reason a oil refinery recipe cannot produce items

We won't be making this change to any crafting machines (Assembling machine, Chemical plant, Oil refinery etc)

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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by quyxkh »

By the way, you can do better than the inserters trick anyway. A max-boost refinery is crafting speed 8.55, output rate 11.115, and tiles to 12×12, even reserving one spot in a 4×4 tiling of that for a pair of roboports it's denser.

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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by mrvn »

Klonan wrote:
wpirobotbuilder wrote:
mrvn wrote:A machine consumes all its input items needed for a full cycle when it starts the cycle and it keeps finishing the cycle if you manually remove all extra input items.

The problem is rather that if inserters where allowed to remove input items then they would put them into chests or onto belts mend for the finished product.
In the case of the oil refinery, there is no ambiguity about what the inserter would do -- there is no output inventory slot to interact with, since the refinery only produces fluids, and the only input slot for physical inventory is for coal. This behavior sounds like a boiler, and since boilers can pass inventory between them via inserters, why not allow the same for refineries?
It depends on the recipe, There is no reason a oil refinery recipe cannot produce items

We won't be making this change to any crafting machines (Assembling machine, Chemical plant, Oil refinery etc)
How about a burner oil refinery and burner chemical plant? Can one mod those?

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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by Klonan »

mrvn wrote:
Klonan wrote:
wpirobotbuilder wrote:
mrvn wrote:A machine consumes all its input items needed for a full cycle when it starts the cycle and it keeps finishing the cycle if you manually remove all extra input items.

The problem is rather that if inserters where allowed to remove input items then they would put them into chests or onto belts mend for the finished product.
In the case of the oil refinery, there is no ambiguity about what the inserter would do -- there is no output inventory slot to interact with, since the refinery only produces fluids, and the only input slot for physical inventory is for coal. This behavior sounds like a boiler, and since boilers can pass inventory between them via inserters, why not allow the same for refineries?
It depends on the recipe, There is no reason a oil refinery recipe cannot produce items

We won't be making this change to any crafting machines (Assembling machine, Chemical plant, Oil refinery etc)
How about a burner oil refinery and burner chemical plant? Can one mod those?
Should work fine

mrvn
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Re: Inserters should remove coal from oil refineries

Post by mrvn »

In case it wasn't clear my suggestion is to make a small mod that adds a burner oil refinery that uses up one coal per cycle with a recipe with the coal removed.

Not sure though if you can limit a burner building to only accept coal as fuel.

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