Friday Facts #430 - Drowning in Fluids

[JigSaW]

"Just" being able to toggle the fluid system is completely infeasible, sorry.

I'm 99% sure that it is only "completely infeasible" because devs didn't have the player choice in mind from the start. It's not physically impossible to implement, you/they just didn't account for that and now it's too hard of a task to bother.

The old system is gone, reduced to atoms.

Weird, i still have it on my current version of the game

[morse]

Nice change. As much as I didn't like the idea of magical pipes that teleport liquids, I understood that it would be rarely noticeable in real gameplay, where your production is either higher than the demand, and you won't notice the "magic" since your pipes will be always full, or lower, in which case the throughput won't be your problem, your consumers will starve anyway.

And now this solves the problem of the long teleporting pipes, which is the one usecase where the magic indeed gets noticeable.

And you lifted an idea from the "pipe visualizer" mod. Which is a good thing since the download number suggests it's needed.

[linktothepast83]

It is fascinating, how everyone here believes they know it all (but ofc don't) and ignore literally everything one says...

A little bit oversimplified: A storage tank won't fill to 100% if the pipes to and from it are not also 100% AND assuming there are no weird flow quirks like in the current system.

So you will definitely need to use pumps to fill tanks to 100%, and also to empty them, let alone to control the flow.

It is amusing how you think Tanks are separate from Pipes somehow, which they are not. Tanks are just a bigger Pipe segment by now, and if the pipes leading to and from tanks are 100 percent, then so is the Tank, because they are all merged into ONE entity.

Yes, you already showcased your fabulous ability to neither read nor understand anything, it's fascinating,
but unfortunately I can't waste time with people like you, be it genuinely not understanding or really sluggish trolling attempts, I do not care.

In case you're not trolling, try read into this and actually understand it, mechanics in factorio are fun, once you get a hang of them!

Taipion the new fluid system made all pumps almost entirely useless until this change since there was no need for them. You got up to 6000/sec flow from pipes provided you had the input instantaneous as well without a single pump. Now you need them sporadically at least if your base is too big since you get an instant cutoff at least. They were almost completely worthless before this change. If i am wrong someone who played the beta please correct me.

Also no offence but i hope this thread is not spammed only with your messages.

[mmmPI]

Let's get you all a more practical example of why limiting even pumps to 1200/s breaks reactor designs to the core!

See? You believe it's right to make the call on a certain number of steam "missing" to start the new fuel cycle...
...well, if you're ok with 2nd best solutions, go ahead, I fail to be able to care anymore...

You keep misunderstanding i'm afraid, i never mentionned any steam "missing" , you implictly did, when you said the tank can't be filled at 100%.

I said you need to have enough room to store the steam that would be produced when you refuel all the reactor and power consumption stops.

It's quite well known that this is the critical case one plant need to handle to be lossless.

There are many ways to achieve this, which to me is to core of nuclear reactor design and is not affected by the pump limitation speed which is pretty unconsequential compared to the revamp of the fluid mechanic as a whole.

[Theikkru]

[...]Iit's just ridiculous how dense people are around here[...]

The IRONY I CAN'T—
If we really are all that dense around here, o esteemed one, then mayhaps it would serve everyone better if you were to explain, in terms even the densest of us could understand, your reasoning. Surely you're not too self-important to answer such simple questions as the following?

[...]Why would you want the tank filled to 100 % ? [...]

[Myriapode]

So ...

[Agamemnon]

I get the distinct impression that the real issue is that all the "bigbrain efficiency" reactor designs invented for dealing with the old fluid-system's quirks are now becoming obsolete and thus nobody will any longer appreciate the mental prowess of those that designed them.

And even worse, the old designs will now work worse than the simple solution of reactor regulation that needs zero pumps and minimal logic.

I don't have a problem with that. I will take the easy solution on this and overengineer something else instead.

[Seelo]

Of all the ways to limit omni-pipes, arbitrary 250x250 grid has got to be the least intuitive one.

I'd much rather have a limit of total volume of a pipe network (pipes + actual lengths of undergrounds). Or the longest possible path between two points in the pipe network. Those are things that can be easily displayed when placing new pipes, easy to explain in a tool-tip, with some sort of pipe-network highlight - possibly even easy to debug by the player.

Honestly when I saw the previous FFF about pipes I was so happy. Fluid handling is easily my least favorite part of Factorio (I am not a hardcore expert player though).

[thermomug]

...but you will still need pumps, likely as it is now, 2 pumps per tank to make full use of its capacity because that's just how the fluid mechanics work.

What does the capacity of tanks have to do with needing to use pumps? You have infinite throughput without pumps. And especially for a reactor setup you can keep the steam network size easily below the 250 limit.

Ok, you probably have no experience in building efficient reactors, so let me explain this to you:

#1: to make a reactor efficient, you need to be able to buffer 1 fuel cycle, either in heat or steam, whereas steam is cheaper and gives you more control
#2: you need storage tanks to buffer steam
#3: to make full use of the storage tanks capacity, and ignore current fill lvl in the pipes and ignore fluid mechanics, you do need to use pumps, actually 2 per storage tank

Because I cannot ignore this dumb discussion anymore ...

DUDE! Please stop these disrespectful statements.. Don't act like you are the godfather of nuclear reactor design. I also don't understand why this topic is so extremely important to you. If you think everyone else is a total idiot, maybe get some distance, take a deep breath, sip a drink and think about if maybe, just maybe you also have a part in this.

I don't know everything about the expansion (you seem to already do ), but I have confidence in the devs that It will be lots of fun and there won't be any game-breaking issues. Also I think the newest iteration of the fluid system is the most promising of them all.

If factorio for you is all about building the absolute best, "most efficient" nuclear plants, why don't you stick with version 1.1 and give a shit about all new changes? People always want stuff to be "better" but once actual changes come, they complain about stuff not being like they used to ...

Cheers!

[Milo_Thatch]

Now I can put my reactors wherever I want, I'm not dependent on a lake anymore, it's great. I always wanted to feed them with trains
As far as I can tell, fluid train throughput is 50% better now thanks to the fluid wagon buff, which makes the lower pump speed values irrelevant to me.
The 250x250 tile limit is a huge area, even bigger than a radar-aligned cityblock. Bigger blocks than that requiring a dozen pumps is fair. I also like how platform reactors are a bit more feasible.
I'm more interested in making a big base that can run on my computer, than a small and realistic base. I get more fun that way. Fun over realism is successful here, imo.
Good job everyone

[mmmPI]

So ...

Yes !

( also without pumps it's infinite if distance < 250 )

[Theikkru]

did i got it

Yes.
(Or, at least, the math is correct. In that specific picture, the pumps would be pointless because just connecting the pipe across them would give more unlimited flow)

[kitt159]

Having endless pipes is definitely not good. But having a 250x250 area limit seems weird to me as well. It's not even close to being realistic. I can build a pipe 250 tiles long and break the whole system by adding a single pipe, even as a dead end through which nothing flows. But the electrical grid mechanism is similarly unrealistic. I can hook up a whole nuclear power plant through one small pole. Thinking about how to solve this problem, I came up with a way to make the mechanism quite realistic, but also simple to use.

How about unifying the behavior of pipes and the power grid - even in the real world, the behavior of electricity is explained by fluid flow. We would have two kinds of pipes - big and small, just like we have big and small (or medium - that's a bit of an exception) poles. Large pipes/poles would have unlimited throughput. They would serve as a backbone network - just like an oil pipelines in the real world, which can be hundreds of kilometers long (I don't have to defend unlimited throughput of poles because it's the current state). Small pipes and small/medium poles would have limited flow. The specific way to achieve flow restriction could be determined as, for example, maximum pressure resp. voltage minus distance (which I thought of quickly now but still consider it a better solution than restricting to 250x250).

This system would automatically guide the player to organize pipes and poles so that it is not possible to connect the whole factory with one small pole to the power plant, and also so that liquids are not transferred via spaghetti pipes, so it will be more manageable.

edit: By the way prison architect uses similar mechanism of pipes.

[TheFrizz]

This thread is almost performance art.

I was one of the people expressing my doubts about the fluid teleportation introduced in the previous FFF. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that the change wouldn't be too bad and was totally understandable. Pretty amazing that Wube has managed another iteration on fluids before 2.0 addressing some of the issues. I'm thrilled at this FFF, I feel like its almost a canary for the quality level the team is striving for.

It seems to me that the area limit will make the local problem of piping up chemical plants and refineries limited to a placement, area packing problem similar to belts without added complexity, but then switch to a different puzzle on the macro scale for larger bases. I like it. Yes the size limit is arbitrary but many Factorio puzzles are rooted in the completely arbitrary (inserters can only place on the far side of belt, you cannot connect a belt sideways into another belt unless you can add one more belt piece on the other side to force it into a side load, etc). I expect that after playing with this a bit, if the game design is good, it will no longer feel arbitrary and will simply feel, Factorio.

I think probably the main concern with this change that I haven't heard is new players and blue science. Blue science definitely feels like the first "boss" after the initial tutorial gameplay. Number of red chip assemblers, chemical plant, spacing, mixing pipes and belts and inserters, 12s crafting time. The player must have been learning during green and red science or else it is a steep challenge. I'm curious if the 250 limit was carefully chosen to essentially allow an underground connection to a pumpjack setup of the closest oil patch to almost reach back to base but need one pump near the protection of the base as kind of an introduction to the game mechanic. How many undergrounds do you take to hook up your first oil, 50?

[DarkShadow44]

First, I love the pump changes, and the visualizer! (Belt and Circuit visualizer when?)

The 250x250 limit that blocks flow completely sounds weird though, I love this suggestion:

Instead of using a 250*250 bounding box as the limiting factor the number of pipe segments should be the relevant number. It is far more realistic (which I know is not that important in game design) but it being realistic also makes it more intuitive.

Also instead of either 100% or 0%, the output should be a function relative to the number of pipe segments. For example 100% for 1-50 segments and then dropping near 0% at 300 segments. It might be worth to consider counting underground pipes and fluid pipes as multiple segments to balance long distance pipelines with distribution pipelines.

The all-or-nothing approach really doesn't fit with factorio IMHO, and forcing pumps prevent bidirectional flow, so this allows a compromise. Counting segments seems easier to understand to me than a bounding box. Of course, an underground pipe would need to count the underground tiles as well.

[Koub]

I find a little disturbing that these two contraptions are equivalent

sorry for the big zoomed out picture

2024-09-27 20_28_54-Window.jpg (1.02 MiB) Viewed 1435 times

I'd have preferred a number of pipe+tank entities instead of an area (or maybe I missed something crucial).

[XeonEvolved]

I'm trying to understand the new changes. So you are maxed at 6000/s throughput / max 5 pumps? So would BP below be a viable max flow fluid bus?

5 pumps x12 = 6000/s each line
5 lines x 6000/s = 30,000 throughput, each span 250 wide, each row offset.
https://factoriobin.com/post/pkigJQgn1-yEVUmv-EXPIRES

[Danjen]

One thing I like about Pipe Visualizer is that it tints the screen which makes it easier to view busy/complex setups. Eg, Seablock. I also like Orphan Finder. It seems like vanilla will supersede these mods:

I hope it "feels right" because when QOL mods get integrated into a game, both they and the game tend to not get updated

[Danjen]

Pretty amazing that Wube has managed another iteration on fluids before 2.0 addressing some of the issues. I'm thrilled at this FFF, I feel like its almost a canary for the quality level the team is striving for

Factorio is one of the most polished and optimized games I've ever played. Everything just works, its stable, and even runs on a toaster.
I suck at stuff like circuits and megabases, so I dont have much intellectual or emotional stake on the major changes coming for the expansion. I figure with the community's high expectations and Wube's attention to detail, we'll end up with a satisfying expansion

I know some people were annoyed by quality, for example, but I love the mechanical depth it could offer mods (oh god, Seablock) but I like the idea of upgrading everything. Maybe thats my OCD / RPG brain talking

[Theikkru]

I'm trying to understand the new changes. So you are maxed at 6000/s throughput / max 5 pumps?[...]

No. The 6000 hard limit is per flow operation, and flow operations only happen between machines and machines, or between machines and pipe segments. There is no flow within pipe segments, so as long as you stay within the new 250-or-whatever size limitation, any flow through a pipe system will be limited by the machines at either end, not the segment itself.