[MOD 0.15.13+] Smaller Fluid Wagon & Barrel 0.0.4

[Mooncat]

Type: Mod
Name: Smaller Fluid Wagon & Barrel
Description: Reduces the capacity of vanilla fluid wagon and barrel. Also reduces barrel's stack count. Some additional adjustments like weight, crafting materials and crafting time reduction for fluid wagon. The barrel change also works on modded fluids.
License: GNU LGPLv3
Version: 0.0.4
Release: 2017-05-25
Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.15.13
Category: (Balancing)
Tags: fluid wagon, barrel, capacity
Download-Url: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Mooncat/ ... and-barrel
Website: viewtopic.php?f=97&t=47859

License

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Long description

It is my attempt to balance the efficiency of fluid transportation using fluid wagons and/or cargo wagons with barrels.
As stated here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=46845&start=20#p274057
I have a strong feeling that the vanilla fluid wagon is too OP. Graphically, it just doesn't match its insane capacity, which is x3 of a single storage tank. It also makes long fluid train to be rare, since 1 or 2 fluid wagons are already enough.
Therefore, I nerfed it. But that thread also showed that it is necessary to also nerf barrel.

Here are the changes introduced by this mod:

• Fluid wagon:
  • The capacity of fluid wagon is reduced from 75k to 30k (10k for each tank). So now you need longer trains to transport fluid.
  • Due to the above change, the weight of each fluid wagon is reduced from 3000 to 1000, which becomes the same as a cargo wagon.
  • Only 1 storage tank is needed to make a fluid wagon instead of 3. This reduces the total crafting time and raw materials needed from 1.4ks and 243 iron ore to 915s and 153 iron ore respectively. A cargo wagon takes 845s and 140 iron ores.
  • Crafting time is reduced from 1.5s to 0.5s, which becomes the same as cargo wagon.
• Barrel:
  • The capacity of each barrel is reduced from 250 to 100.
  • Stack size is reduced from 10 to 5. As the result, each cargo wagon can now only hold 100x5x40 = 20k fluid.
  (It is intentional to make the max fluid capacity of cargo wagon to be smaller than that of a fluid wagon.)

Optionally, you can turn on "Slow pumping speed" in mod settings to make the pumping speed of pumps slower. As the result, the fluid loading and unloading time on fluid wagons are longer.

Version history

Version 0.0.4 (May 25, 2017):

• Added 2 mod settings for customizing the barrel capacity and barrel stack size.
• The default barrel capacity is decreased from 120 to 100.
• Factorio version is now required to be 0.15.13+.

Version 0.0.3 (May 22, 2017):

• Added a mod setting to decrease pump's pumping speed from 12000/s to 1800/s, making the fluid loading and unloading speed on fluid wagons slower.
  • This is disabled by default.

Version 0.0.2 (May 19, 2017):

• Further decreased the capacity of each barrel from 230 to 120.
• Increased the stack size of barrel from 3 to 5.
• As the result, the total fluid capacity of each cargo wagon is decreased from 27.6k to 24k.

Version 0.0.1 (May 18, 2017):

• The first version.

[Optera]

Probably the only feasible way as the wonky fluid mechanics don't like increasing pipe throughput by 10 times or more.

I would make Barrels hold 120 liters and stack to 5 to have nicer numbers.
That makes 600 fluid/stack and 24k/cargo wagon.

[Mooncat]

Probably the only feasible way as the wonky fluid mechanics don't like increasing pipe throughput by 10 times or more.

I would make Barrels hold 120 liters and stack to 5 to have nicer numbers.
That makes 600 fluid/stack and 24k/cargo wagon.

So it is fine to further decrease the capacity of barrels?
Would stack size = 3 and capacity = 200 be a better combination? I guess this will still make robot useful for transporting barrels for short distance.
Just wonder whether it is fine to have only 24k capacity in cargo wagon while fluid wagon can hold 30k.

[Nexela]

Just wonder whether it is fine to have only 24k capacity in cargo wagon while fluid wagon can hold 30k.

Tossing up the realism argument one could say the extra space needed for barrels means a wagon holds less

[Optera]

Probably the only feasible way as the wonky fluid mechanics don't like increasing pipe throughput by 10 times or more.

I would make Barrels hold 120 liters and stack to 5 to have nicer numbers.
That makes 600 fluid/stack and 24k/cargo wagon.

So it is fine to further decrease the capacity of barrels?
Would stack size = 3 and capacity = 200 be a better combination? I guess this will still make robot useful for transporting barrels for short distance.
Just wonder whether it is fine to have only 24k capacity in cargo wagon while fluid wagon can hold 30k.

Barrels on belts provides way higher throughput than pipes. A yellow belt has 3 times the throughput of one pipe according to this post.
The only way to combat that is drastically reducing how much fluid is inside each barrel.

[Choumiko]

So it is fine to further decrease the capacity of barrels?
Would stack size = 3 and capacity = 200 be a better combination? I guess this will still make robot useful for transporting barrels for short distance.
Just wonder whether it is fine to have only 24k capacity in cargo wagon while fluid wagon can hold 30k.

For some reason i dislike stacksize 3, how about 5 and 120/barrel?

In my opinion a cargo wagon must have a significantly lower fluid capacity than a fluid wagon,

[Mooncat]

OK. Done!
Released v0.0.2 with even smaller barrels but increased its stack size to 5.

Changelog

• Further decreased the capacity of each barrel from 230 to 120.
• Increased the stack size of barrel from 3 to 5.
• As the result, the total fluid capacity of each cargo wagon is decreased from 27.6k to 24k.

Thought this can be done within a minute since it is just some changes on the numbers.
Opened Factorio to test.
CM was broken again.
Used another hour to fix it.

[leoch]

I like this rebalance, thanks!

Perhaps another thing worth thinking about is pumping speed? Not sure if it's worth changing, but the speed at which a fluid wagon can be emptied is insane.

[Mooncat]

I like this rebalance, thanks!

Perhaps another thing worth thinking about is pumping speed? Not sure if it's worth changing, but the speed at which a fluid wagon can be emptied is insane.

I have tried lowering the pumping speed, but it doesn't help much unless the speed is ridiculously low.
The original speed is 200 (12000/s), I lowered it to 50 (3000/s) but the loading time is still very similar. The optimized setup (3 pumps connected to 3 separated pipes with 3 different sources) was only slowed down by 0.5 seconds. For the setup that the pumps are connected to the same pipe, the loading time was the same. So it indicates that the bottleneck is on the pipes, not the pumps.
But I won't change the pipes because that will affect many things.

I also tried lowering it to 30 (1800/s), the optimized setup takes 3 more seconds to load. But then it is the same as the not optimized setup, i.e. no room for improvement.
Also, this may also affect the pumping speed on pipes.

One thing to note: although fluid loading and unloading is fast, item loading and unloading can be even faster if you use buffer chests and fully upgraded stack inserters.

Anyway, I will release an update with an option to lower the pumping speed. It will be disabled by default.


Edit: released v0.0.3

Changelog

• Added a mod setting to decrease pump's pumping speed from 12000/s to 1800/s, making the fluid loading and unloading speed on fluid wagons slower.
  • This is disabled by default.

[Optera]

I did some testing of Belt vs Pipe myself.
(assemblers run at 1000% speed though so it might not be that easily achievable without cheat modules)

Barrel capacity 100:
Yellow belts can't keep up with pipe with pumps at both ends.

yellow belt

2017-05-22-11-17-51-9149113.jpg (133.2 KiB) Viewed 4225 times

Red Belts have noticeably more throughput than the pipe constantly draining the right tank.

red belt

2017-05-22-11-16-43-4119931.jpg (132.84 KiB) Viewed 4225 times

To get red belt down to this test setups short pipe piece I had to lower barrel capacity down to 60.

A capacity of 40 would put the pipe at the throughput of blue belts. I didn't test this since even two 13.75x speed assemblers can't keep up with that.

[Mooncat]

Version 0.0.4 has been released.

Changelog

• Added 2 mod settings for customizing the barrel capacity and barrel stack size.
• The default barrel capacity is decreased from 120 to 100.
• Factorio version is now required to be 0.15.13+.

Thanks to Optera for the additional mod settings. Also decreased the barrel capacity to 100.
I think it is the minimum value or otherwise barrels will be really useless.
(And thanks for finding out the shortcoming. )