Version 0.16.8

[Zavian]

Right, but it also nerfed belt transport of fluid almost equally. By reducing the capacity of the barrel, if you want to transport say, 1,000 liquid in barrels, you now need 20 barrels instead of 5, which means more belt space and more belts needed.

As far as fluid throughput on belts it is still to much. 2000 fluid/s on blue belt. To make this value balanced gameplay wise it ought to be cut to at least 750.

How can you say that? One pipe is 1200, you need to bring back empty barrel so you need two belt for the 2000 f/s while 2 pipe goes for 2400 with no design ....

My designs recycle barrels, many empty oil barrels carry on distributing all the products and only few goes to barrel distribution center. Empty products barrels join the line later. It's a beautiful replacement system where amounts of belts does not increase just to cary empty barrels.

I just want to see that please.
For me it is like math. I you bring and full barrel somewhere to use it you need to to care of the empty barrel or sooner or later it will stuck your chain ...

My understanding of his post is he empties the crude oil barrel, then fills it with something else (eg petrol). So there are very few empty barrels to belt away from the refineries. (Later when he empties the petrol barrel, that does get sent back to be filled with crude or something.

[Engimage]

Right, but it also nerfed belt transport of fluid almost equally. By reducing the capacity of the barrel, if you want to transport say, 1,000 liquid in barrels, you now need 20 barrels instead of 5, which means more belt space and more belts needed.

And do you really think that 10,000 per second on a belt was fine? (40 * 250/sec) While pipes have much less throughput.
I think barrels are just a backup solution if you are lazy enough to fit pipes around and want to go bots. Barrels on belts made only sense cause they had more throughput than pipes and THAT did not make sense at all.

[lindahartlen]

Seems all my requester chests that ask for filled barrels have stopped being supplied after the patch, had to go and manually clear the request and put in a new. Almost as if it was asking for say a barrel of acid but the new ones didn't match it due to the change. Or something I don't know. Kinda annoying.

[Godmave]

Seems all my requester chests that ask for filled barrels have stopped being supplied after the patch, had to go and manually clear the request and put in a new. Almost as if it was asking for say a barrel of acid but the new ones didn't match it due to the change. Or something I don't know. Kinda annoying.

See: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=55850

[yohannc]

Wrong. It's not that it will be harder, it's that it will be significantly worse than the easier alternative of using a fluid wagon, which pretty much points the player in the direction of only one option. I love the fact that Factorio has many ways to play and multiple options for ways to do things and this kind of ruins that. Barrels are harder to setup and keep running than pipes and a fluid wagon, so shouldn't the player be rewarded for doing that method, or at least make it equal to the easier method? Making the alternative worse just means you are being limited to pretty much one option.

For me now it look like that :
- Carry barrels by drone : adaptative (you can ask multiple sort of fluid with one chest) and slow but easy to use
- Carry barrels by belt : adaptative (multiple fluid on one belt), more volume than drone, but more difficult to achieve
- Carry by fluids wagons : not adaptative (only one fluid per wagon, per lane of pipe etc, can't filter) difficulty : the easiest solution (even if it takes more space to transport differents type of fluid you don't have to deal with barrels)
Currently (16.6) i'm using wagons only. On >=16.7 i don't know, i think for long distance i will still use wagons, and for shorter one barrels maybe ? but only on belt (only use drone as a supplement, for small volume)
So i still think there is many efficient way to transport fluid. But to see if it's realy balanced then we have to wait and read the forum, and see if some are saying "barrels are better" and other "no fluid wagons are".

[rldml]

How does that make sense? Barrels are more complicated to set up than a fluid wagon and pipes and take more to keep running due to the constant need for empty barrels and such. It is clearly more complicated, which is fine. But should't the player be rewarded for choosing the more complex alternative instead of punished?

That's what i meant with "Barrels are not intended to replace the fluid waggon, tanks, pumps and pipes..."

Barrels can be a solution if you have not enough space for a big train station and the need to transport more than one fluid in one wagon. They can be a solution for transport small amounts of fluid to hot spots without setting up belt- or train-infrastructure (e.g. supporting a very small field of uranium ore with acid through robots).

Barrels can help you to build up a coal liquidation-station with the help of a blueprint, which need an initial amount of oil (someone wrote this in another thread). Or to transport an amount of water in a car to reach a distant outpost to initiate a coal based power plant.

If you need to transport great amounts of fluids, a fluid waggon and pipes has to be the more efficient option.

That is not my point at all. I would not play Factorio if that was the case. I enjoy the challenge and obviously gameplay takes priority over performance. My issue is with the way the change was implemented. There was at least one other way to do it that would have accomplished something similar without hurting performance at all. Even the Devs themselves have said how important performance is to them, so I'm puzzled as to why it was done this way.

If you leave the capacity of a barrel as it was with 0.16.7 and set the stack to 2, you have a proper configuration for trains, but you can still move HUGE amounts of fluids with the help of belts and robots. I decline this as a good solution. The performance issue isn't that much because of the advancements in 0.16.x

Greetings, Ronny

[ForlornWinter]

I don't think it's unfair to say that fluid handling is the least fun part of Factorio. Barrelling allowed people who would rather not engage with the opaque and frustrating mechanics of pipes and fluid dynamics to opt-out of that system in the areas where it became most frustrating: long distance transport and multiple fluid management. Making the least fun part of Factorio dramatically more difficult for no reason at all is an insane change. The removal of functionality from fluid wagons was a bad decision. This nerf to balance barrels against it is a bad decision on top of a bad decision. The fact that it breaks bases (in a huge way, not the normal post-update "find a new place for this" way) is just another bonus on top of the pile of 0.16 stinkers. I really hope, once the holidays are over and you've got belt compression fixed, you take a hard look at this change and revert it.

[Gnark]

How does that make sense? Barrels are more complicated to set up than a fluid wagon and pipes and take more to keep running due to the constant need for empty barrels and such. It is clearly more complicated, which is fine. But should't the player be rewarded for choosing the more complex alternative instead of punished?

That's what i meant with "Barrels are not intended to replace the fluid waggon, tanks, pumps and pipes..."

Barrels can be a solution if you have not enough space for a big train station and the need to transport more than one fluid in one wagon. They can be a solution for transport small amounts of fluid to hot spots without setting up belt- or train-infrastructure (e.g. supporting a very small field of uranium ore with acid through robots).

Barrels can help you to build up a coal liquidation-station with the help of a blueprint, which need an initial amount of oil (someone wrote this in another thread). Or to transport an amount of water in a car to reach a distant outpost to initiate a coal based power plant.

If you need to transport great amounts of fluids, a fluid waggon and pipes has to be the more efficient option.

That is not my point at all. I would not play Factorio if that was the case. I enjoy the challenge and obviously gameplay takes priority over performance. My issue is with the way the change was implemented. There was at least one other way to do it that would have accomplished something similar without hurting performance at all. Even the Devs themselves have said how important performance is to them, so I'm puzzled as to why it was done this way.

If you leave the capacity of a barrel as it was with 0.16.7 and set the stack to 2, you have a proper configuration for trains, but you can still move HUGE amounts of fluids with the help of belts and robots. I decline this as a good solution. The performance issue isn't that much because of the advancements in 0.16.x

Greetings, Ronny

You are dreaming.
Barrel won't be used anymore. It is not that hard to set up a tanker to initiate coal liquidation, it will be even easier than barreling as you won't barrel anymore your oil so you won't have the infrastructure, you won't produce barrel. If you need long train just set up a long train of tanker. A tank wagon don't need to be alone.

For for uranium mining I just use a tanker wagon as the tank itself. Even on big mine the acid in the pipe are enough for the time the tanker refuel ...

I am sad. Barreling was and interesting part of the game, not needed, but challenging and rewarding. We lose a great gameplay.

My understanding of his post is he empties the crude oil barrel, then fills it with something else (eg petrol). So there are very few empty barrels to belt away from the refineries. (Later when he empties the petrol barrel, that does get sent back to be filled with crude or something.

Ho well want to see that. If you are using the empty barrel for an other line then you will still need at the end to have a loop. And you will be facing issue if your line don't need the same capacity ... witch is almost always the case.
Those enjoying this nerf doesn't seem to really play with it ...

And then again it doesn't solve the robots issue. Just built 5 time more of them.

There is a robots issue because they have no limit in term of moving capacity. They should nerf that by setting a limit on how many robots can serve a line. But what they have done here is nonsense.

[Sniperfuchs]

My 2 cents regarding barrels:
1) There are many possible solutions but non is perfect. This is one, there might as well be others with other benefits and downsides (barrel stack size as an example). However, I find it very hard to agree to this way to argue as if your own suggestion is without flaw. If anyone thinks there should be a different solution, make a mod, that would be the best solution for everyone. And while I am all for a healthy discussion what the players think is best, I would like to quote the head designer of MTG: "Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at fixing them". Even though Factorio is very transparent, we don't know nearly everything about what's planned or if this is final (experimental, just wanna remind you all) or what else they are working on regarding fluids, so even if a solution seems very obvious to us, it might just not be the best.
Of course devs are not always right (far from it), but as much as I like this early access thing with input from the community, there is a point where devs can (and should) step in and turn the game into THEIR vision, not just the players'. So if they just don't want barrels to be this strong and they like this approach more, then that is a legitimate reason, period. Again, doesn't stop anyone to convince them that their ideas are better, but with every single update this is more and more turning into "Your way is bad, do it our way instead".

2) Arguing around game performance is also pretty difficult for multiple reasons: First of all, it's holiday season so we don't get a lot of information. For all we know, after the decision for these changes have been made, the dev team might have a fluid system revamp or at least optimization on their priority list. And that is actually part of the next reason: Yes, bots will always be superior with performance and therefore throughput with megabases. However, it boggles my mind how the logic conclusion to this should be "Well pipes are bad for performance, so we are forced to use bots so don't nerf them". I think the way some people are thinking about this is completely backwards. Barrels are used to circumvent the "broken" fluid system (just like bots instead of belts), so why continue with a "broken" system and a work-around instead of actually fixing the issue as much as possible and then go back to evaluating the position the game is in?

The first conclusion should be to make intuitive solutions like fluid wagons and pipes work and perform better (in terms of UPS, not necessarily in-game performance). Of course just like belts that will only go to a certain point since there is just a lot more going on than with bots, but seeing how many ways the devs found (at the beginning of this year they showed off with a 10-15 UPS gain just because of a huge belt optimization), there are definitely ways.

3) And last but not least: I seriously don't understand why some people have to be so passive aggressive in these past few forum posts regarding this update. "Thanks for breaking my factory". Complaining about an experimental build of an early access game, brilliant. Might as well complain to God for the unwanted rain on your birthday, except valuable criticism could actually help in this situation instead of being whiny.

[rldml]

You are dreaming.

I just told you the arguments other people in this forum posted after i gave the suggestion to remove barrels completely from the game. I don't use barrels by myself, so i had problems to understand the situations where barrels have an advantage

Barrel won't be used anymore. It is not that hard to set up a tanker to initiate coal liquidation, it will be even easier than barreling as you won't barrel anymore your oil so you won't have the infrastructure, you won't produce barrel. If you need long train just set up a long train of tanker. A tank wagon don't need to be alone.

Have you read my arguments? You CAN use barrels, you CAN use a fluid waggon. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. That's what i describe as a good constellation for a game. Your desired changes would punish the decision not to use barrels too much.

For for uranium mining I just use a tanker wagon as the tank itself. Even on big mine the acid in the pipe are enough for the time the tanker refuel ...

For an uranium field with a capacity of max 20k near your base? Building a train stop and setup trains would be overkill. In a situation like this you just build some miners, set up an assembly to empty acid barrels and set a requester chest to deliver acid barrels to the mining site and a provider chest for the uranium ore.

I am sad. Barreling was and interesting part of the game, not needed, but challenging and rewarding. We lose a great gameplay.

No we don't. Barrels are part of vanilla game, so you can use them as you wish.

And then again it doesn't solve the robots issue. Just built 5 time more of them.

There is a robots issue because they have no limit in term of moving capacity. They should nerf that by setting a limit on how many robots can serve a line. But what they have done here is nonsense.

That's not the way robots searches for their path. There are no "lines", so it would'nt be THAT easy as you think.

[DanGio]

Can't wait to test this.
to Factorio devs :
About barrels, well...
Are you detained in the office against your will?
I woke up this morning, still filled with despair about this unexpected nerf...
Blink twice for yes, and thrice for no. Well don't blink for no
And now that I have seen the whole change log, it seems now reasonable to me.
If you're upgrading the shit of this game of your own free will :
Anyway, this holiday debate about barrels is one of the coolest 0.16 features
Go to sleep already, your game is fine!

[aober93]

I dont think the barrel nerf is so bad, both the increase in logistics and performance. But i also think that the fluid waggon wasnt too big, especially with raw oil. Perhaps lubricant waggons but who cares if a train doesnt move if you tell it to. Maybe the reduce stack size of barrels would be a thing to counter problems. Also a waggon of barrels is often only half filled with the other half filtered empty barrels. So barrel waggon is essentially 10k vs fluid waggon 25k

My suggestion were to meet somewhere in the middle.

[Conventia]

Except that now it takes about 5x as much bots/belts to move the same amount of barrels as before, which means worse performance. That completely goes against what the devs have said before about want to increase game performance.

This is a design decision. In my opinion a very good one.

You can increase the game performance if you lower the costs for products.
One iron for a rocket is a good idea, isn't it? It would increase the overall performance a lot...
But that's (hopefully) not the way the devs will go.

That is not my point at all. I would not play Factorio if that was the case. I enjoy the challenge and obviously gameplay takes priority over performance. My issue is with the way the change was implemented. There was at least one other way to do it that would have accomplished something similar without hurting performance at all. Even the Devs themselves have said how important performance is to them, so I'm puzzled as to why it was done this way.

As a software engineer who has an interest in performance, I think you're misunderstanding how software engineers and game programmers think about performance and the context in which the devs continually desire to increase performance. Performance and functionality almost always go hand in hand in any sufficiently interesting/complex software. There are definitely tradeoffs to be made. In most cases, improvements in performance are desired most when they can happen without impacting the result in any way. Some performance improvements require game design changes (like having logistics bots act like the new smoke) and the question then is whether the game design is impacted in a significant way or not and whether the change is worth it overall. Some game design changes will lower the perceived performance of the game, in that they require more work to be done, but as long as they don't significantly change most gameplay sessions, I wouldn't consider it hurting performance. Technically, marathon mode changes perceived performance significantly, but it doesn't hurt game performance, it's just a different set of options and inputs to the same fundamental code.

Anyways, trying to use this game design change that should have a fairly small impact on the perceived performance of most Factorio players as justification for the devs somehow not caring about performance is unwarranted and unfair.

Note: I'm intentionally not discussing the game design aspect of the changes cause I don't feel strongly about them but do feel strongly about defending the devs and their commitment to performance.

[Mr. Tact]

There is a first for everything. The barrel nerf is the first change I've seen since since I started playing back in early 0.12 which I feel is a mistake. I guess all good things must come to an end...

[rldml]

At least please don't forget: Almost everything of the changes can be taken back within a mod!

If you really think, the fluid waggon changes and the barrel changes are game breaking, just make a mod to fix that your way. Especially creating new or changing existing objects is not that complex.

Greetings Ronny

[aklesey1]

Storage chests can be filtered.

Pls add lifters for all common chests
We can set filter on toolbelt, we can set filter in inventory, why we cannot set filter in common chests? Its illogical

[Serenity]

However, it boggles my mind how the logic conclusion to this should be "Well pipes are bad for performance, so we are forced to use bots so don't nerf them". I think the way some people are thinking about this is completely backward

Yeah, the way some people think about this is really painful

[Mr. Tact]

At least please don't forget: Almost everything of the changes can be taken back within a mod!

I do realize that and frankly, this might be the trigger to make me sit down and learn how to make such a mod -- assuming someone doesn't beat me to it....

Name suggestions for all you mod makers:

Better Barrels
Bigger Barrels
Original Barrels

[logiccosmic]

As a software engineer who has an interest in performance, I think you're misunderstanding how software engineers and game programmers think about performance and the context in which the devs continually desire to increase performance. Performance and functionality almost always go hand in hand in any sufficiently interesting/complex software. There are definitely tradeoffs to be made. In most cases, improvements in performance are desired most when they can happen without impacting the result in any way. Some performance improvements require game design changes (like having logistics bots act like the new smoke) and the question then is whether the game design is impacted in a significant way or not and whether the change is worth it overall. Some game design changes will lower the perceived performance of the game, in that they require more work to be done, but as long as they don't significantly change most gameplay sessions, I wouldn't consider it hurting performance. Technically, marathon mode changes perceived performance significantly, but it doesn't hurt game performance, it's just a different set of options and inputs to the same fundamental code.

Anyways, trying to use this game design change that should have a fairly small impact on the perceived performance of most Factorio players as justification for the devs somehow not caring about performance is unwarranted and unfair.

Note: I'm intentionally not discussing the game design aspect of the changes cause I don't feel strongly about them but do feel strongly about defending the devs and their commitment to performance.

I had to register just to reply to this.

As a Software Engineer, I don't know any of us who isn't interested in performance. I don't care if you learned in a basement and are pushing LAMP for scam sites, or working at Google; you should be concerned about performance.

In this case, there are several ways a user can interact with fluids. However, the current release has made it so the only attractive or perhaps even efficient method to interact with fluids is pipes. This is fine; it's their game. However, pipes are the WORST method for fluids, performance wise. Combined with the massive belt overhaul leading to belts becoming roughly as good as bots as you scale up; this seems insane. It's one step forward, two steps back. Fluids are already a massive drag on performance, especially when you get into nuclear power, or fluid heavy mods like Bobs and Angels. Unless there is a fluid overhaul coming down the pipe, this is a massive negative change, with only 'balance' or 'nerf' the reason.

In short; I consider this to hurt the gameplay experience. This is literally the only change that I've had a negative reaction too; frankly, I likely won't update to it until a mod fixes it.

[malventano]

Right, but it also nerfed belt transport of fluid almost equally. By reducing the capacity of the barrel, if you want to transport say, 1,000 liquid in barrels, you now need 20 barrels instead of 5, which means more belt space and more belts needed.

As far as fluid throughput on belts it is still to much. 2000 fluid/s on blue belt. To make this value balanced gameplay wise it ought to be cut to at least 750.

As a counterpoint, perhaps it is not that a blue belt of barrels is too overpowered, but that a single pipe run should flow significantly >1000 fluid/s so that the belt+barrel option is seen as inferior.