Crafting machines with only fluid input never sleep

[Optera]

This probably is known and working as intended. However does seem inconsistent from my user perspective.
After the informative post of Rseding about how sleep works I reworked my whole factory to first starve input before turning off power.

2018-11-24-09-48-56-5741403.png (945.39 KiB) Viewed 998 times

As you see on the left this works fine for coal liquefaction.
The refineries on the right however never go to sleep. This happens with any crafting machine taking in only fluids.

[posila]

In 0.16, there is no mechanism for pipes to wake up machines (or even properly flow fluid through fluidboxes in inactive entities), that's why they can't be put to sleep. It might change with pipe optimization.

This probably is known and working as intended. However does seem inconsistent from my user perspective.

As for user perspective - entity sleeping is internal engine optimization of the simulation, and general users (players) don't need to know it exists. If you do care about it existing, you are some kind of power user, and if it is important to you enough, you need to learn all the different behaviors of the engine; not request consistency through bug reports.

[Optera]

Thanks for the insight about this behavior.

I agree this may not really fit into bugs, but it also doesn't fit into suggestions. Since there is no board to ask in depth questions about game mechanics, maybe general discussion?

[posila]

Unfortunatelly, I don't have good solution for this. By posting to Bug reports you are forcing a developer to respond (and having to deal with report, that admits it probably is not a bug in the first sentence, might make the developer grumpy), but if you post elsewhere, you might not get any response.