1. What did you do?
Open the production statistics interface from Aquilo. Click on the fluids tab. Set the time duration to 50h. Look at Ammoniacal solution and Ammonia.
2. What happened?
In the recipe for the ammoniacal solution separation, the amount of input fluid is equal to the amount of output fluid. The production statistics view sorts items by quantity. When two items have an identical quantity (where one produces the other, so there's likely a tiny tiny delay before the volume of the produced item catches up to the volume of the ingredient), especially when overall volumes are quite large, the order of both items can end up being repeatedly swapped, sometimes very quickly. This is not ideal from a UX perspective. See the video snippet inline below, or a longer (~1 min) video attached.
3. What did you expect to happen instead?
The observed behaviour is quite likely expected, the production statistics shows very precise quantities and is refreshed very often. However when viewing production statistics with a long time range and/or very large volumes, the 1-1 ratio of the recipe makes the volumes of both liquids nearly identical, which can result in their sort order being swapped very rapidly. When it happens, the experience for the player is less ideal, but it should not impact gameplay in most cases.
4. Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
This issue is something I ran into well into my Space Age run. As it requires Aquilo unlocked, providing a smaller save file to reproduce the behaviour with a minimal example is not feasible easily for me.
In my save file (dropbox link - 67 MB), when viewing the production stats over the last 50 hours or less (which filters out my arrival on Aquilo, where I manually manipulated liquids leading to a volume difference during that time), the volume of both liquids are equal, though the flickering happens more when a longer time span is selected.
Based on the recipe for ammoniacal solution separation, I presume it could apply to anyone and may be worthy of opening a bug report. There are probably other similar use cases where this can happen, especially if considering other mods.
5. Fix idea
I thought about many possible ways this issue could be mitigated, and wanted to share the idea I think could work best: Reducing the rate at which the sorting of the production statistics is re-computed, but only for long time spans. When selecting 5s, 1m, or so, a player can reasonably expect the volumes will change rapidly and items will be reordered very frequently, but when looking at stats over an hour or more, it's much less common that the exact volumes for two or more items will be the same, and even if it is, I think that re-ordering them every second or so would provide a better experience than if it's done as often as possible.
6. What about Space Age 2.1?
When trying to reproduce this in the experimental build, it did not work, but not because the issue is not present... It looks like the save file upgrade process might not have carried over the fluid that was already inside offshore pump buffers. This led to an imbalance between the two liquids upon starting version 2.1.14, which means I would have to wait a long time (likely over 10 hours, maybe 50) before the fluid volumes become the same again in the last X time unit at a high enough total volume. This is possibly a separate very minor bug, however considering the offshore liquid resources are infinite, I don't think this causes a real issue, and will not affect players starting a new game in 2.1.
- 2.1 upgrade produces more offshore fluid.png (90.07 KiB) Viewed 208 times
