Remove Fluid Barreling

[dpacbach]

Seems that people rarely (or never) put fluids in barrels... perhaps that concept should be removed from the game. Is there any reason to ever do it?

[5thHorseman]

Robots find carrying barrels far easier than the fluids they contain.

(That said I don't personally use barrels and haven't since they added the fluid train wagon)

[Kyralessa]

I use fluid barrelling all the time so robots can carry the fluids.

[JimBarracus]

Barrels were needed because the fluid wagon was added later.

Back then you had to barrel oil in order to transport it.
But I think it is not neccesary to remove a perfectly working feature.

I often use barrels for uranium mining. No need to carry a full tank of acid, when its enough to block 8 slots on a cargo waggon.
Or when you want to jumpstart coal liquification.
Or when you use bot based production.

Something I don't like, but: the mods.
There are some crazy mods out there that have a lot more than the base game and they need that feature.

[SupplyDepoo]

Barrels can be loaded into cargo wagons which you can also use for other items. So for an outpost resupply train you can have 1 cargo wagon with all essential supplies, including oil for flamethrowers.

Or add sulfuric acid barrels to your uranium mining train as mentioned already.

You can have shorter & faster trains this way. Fluid wagons can be overkill for these situations.

And because you can put barrels on belts, it's easy to measure fluid throughput/consumption.

I think fluid barrels are a cool concept and even if it doesn't get used much it should stay in the game.

[Amarula]

I do not think barrels should be removed.

As the wiki says, https://wiki.factorio.com/Barrel, it is more efficient to transport fluids by tanker (25K), than by barrel (50 per barrel x 10 per stack x 40 stacks = 20K).

In addition to the benefits noted by SupplyDepoo, if you are storing fluids, barrels are much more space efficient:
one fluid tank = 25K, takes 3x3 space;
one steel chest holds 48 stacks = 24K, takes 1x1 space;
nine chests take 3x3 space (or 9x1 or whatever shape works for your build) and holds 216K.

Having the option to barrel fluids may not be used a lot, but it is a pretty neat feature.

[dpacbach]

Thanks all for the answers, I agree now that they should stay in the game.