Fluid systems mix when placed in ghost mode

[uhthomas]

Hi,

I recently discovered that fluid systems can mix if placed in ghost mode. I first did this on a space platform, where I accidentally mixed rocket fuel and water. All of the thruster fuel became water. I also tried doing this on Nauvis with bots, which transformed water into oil.

Please see attached screen recording.

Best,
Thomas

[uhthomas]

I have looked around the forums and found 103155, though I am sceptical. Is it really intended behaviour for fluids to become entirely different fluids? Is it worth revisiting the intended behaviour, given space platforms are usually very resource constrained? Losing 50k worth of thruster fuel was a huge pain and may take an hour or so to get back.

[uhthomas]

Okay, I actually looked into it a bit further and it looks like all the 50k thruster fuel was somehow shoved into the pipeline. So, it is inaccurate to say that the fluid transformed, sorry. The thruster fuel is impossible to recover though, hooking up a pump with a filter to the pipeline doesn't work.

This is a pain and really easy to do on space platform or remote view as they are inherently building with ghosts. There is no protection here like there sort of is on Nauvis.

[robot256]

Your video does not show how much oil and water were in the tanks at the beginning. They both look pretty empty. At the end you show the fluid network containing 25 oil and 100 water. Since the icons show oil, that means the water is "stashed" and you can either flush it manually with the delete button in the GUI, flush the oil to have the water reappear in the tanks, or you can pump all the oil out and then the water will reappear on its own.

This was confusing a lot of people because the stashed fluid was hidden until the pipe emptied and "transformed" into the stashed fluid. So in 2.0.16 it changed so the stashed fluid is just deleted. That means if you mix fluids you might lose something you wanted.

It was decided a long time ago that putting fluid mixing blocks on robot construction had too many corner cases because pipes could be built in any order. It's possible that logic would be simpler now that fluid networks are merged.

[uhthomas]

Appreciate the quick reply.

The tanks in the video were very empty as it was just for a demonstration, but the incident on the space platform has 2 two tanks worth of fluid instantly flush into the pipeline. It's very confusing and takes a lot of effort to recover from if you care about retaining the fluids. In my case, I really do care as the water is for a nuclear reactor and coolant on a space platform, and the thruster fuel is also valuable.

I agree there's not necessarily a simple solution, and build order is not guaranteed on space platforms either, but it feels way too easy to accidentally do and the consequences are such a bad experience, especially because there are space constraints, not just resource constraints.

What are your thoughts?

[boskid]

In 2.0.16 there was a change about the stashed fluids: this mechanic was removed for being overly confusing. Because this bug report does not mention exact game version i am going to assume it is 2.0.15 (stable at the time of writing this) in which case this is a duplicate. No links provided because changelog for 2.0.16 does not link to any topics.

[uhthomas]

Yep, just to confirm I am on 2.0.15.

[robot256]

What are your thoughts?

I recommend my mod, https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RGBPipes , to make compact pipe networks simpler and more colorful