Factorio Forums

Adding my support to the thread, and I wanted to offer some further thoughts. (apologies if this counts as a necro)

I like Starholme's idea, but if the devs don't want to implement gasses, a simple smart pump would do the trick of allowing only steam out of the boilers. Would make pumps more useful in the base game too. A smart pump wouldnt be hard; one mod (Alpha Mod) already does this and much more.

Ideally though, the best solution would be to split gas and liquid, and here's why: gasses don't act like liquid. What difference does this make? Well, a gas will rapidly fill it's container, no matter the size. This means that the devs could code gas as 'sections', where each continuous pipe/tank set unbroken by boilers, generators, or pumps is a single vessel or 'section', and gas fills it uniformly. What this means is that the game no longer has to run fluid simulation on all of these sections for the gas; it instead works kindof like train blocks. Rather than having 300 pipes to simulate, you now have 10 'storage tanks' for purposes of the gas. With this huge simplification, you could even add gas pressure. A gas and liquids could even both occupy the same section at the same time (if desired), where the amount of space taken up by the gas in a given pipe is a fraction of the total in the the section. On top of that, it shouldn't create any more load due to the simplified system. If anything it might improve performance!

With the addition of pressure (which could even be calculated as how much of the total volume is occupied), all sorts of fun possibilities emerge!

I agree that fluids needs to be enhanced, but I don't think conversion between gas and liquid as described is the way to do it. Treat fluids and gases as separate items with temperature values, and only be able to convert between gases and fluids in machines (boilers, engines, chemical plants, etc) at set rates, quantities, and energy use.
For example, the Dytech mod has lava heaters/coolers, which will heat or cool 'w' units of lava to 'x' degrees at a cost of 'y'/tick over the course of 'z' seconds.
Applying that to this situation, a steam boiler will convert 'w' units of water to 'x' units of steam at a cost of 'y'/tick over the course of 'z' seconds, and a steam engine will convert 'w' units of steam to 'x' units of water and produce 'y' electricity. I suppose you could also heat the steam further for superheated steam for more energy produced.

If you really really want to get temperatures involved, then you start including a machine being able to read what the temperature of the fluid/gas it's receiving is, and calculating the temperature of the fluid that results when input is a different temperature than what it already has stored. If that's not as difficult as I think it is, then cool (no pun intended) and you can start saying that 'x' units of fluid require 'y' energy per tick to heat 'z' degrees in fluid definitions, and reduce crafting time. But until containers like pipes and tanks can handle multiple different entities at once, I think allowing steam to condense into steam in a pipe or a tank due to heat loss a bad idea, if not impossible.
That said, you could still give fluids and gases temperatures, just prevent gases from being able to be passed through an uninsulated pipe or being stored in an uninsulated tank, then you won't have to deal with gases condensing back in to a liquid and having to deal with multiple items in a pipe/tank. For the sake of balance, insulated pipes and tanks would be a little more costly, or else they'll replace regular pipes/tanks altogether.
It would be interesting to see the different kinds of pipe that would result from this. Insulated pipe, cooling pipes, heated pipes.

I think it is an interesting idea, to treat gas like the electric power network: It's everywhere, no resistance, no flow, has everywhere the same temperature and pressure (that's how the electric power works currently).

Because that would enable to make interesting stuff!

Example:
- Heat water. When it is over 100 degrees it becomes steam.
- If steam is heated, it will expand. Pressure rises.
- if steam is cooled, it will shrink.
- if steam is pressured it will heat, and if relaxed it will cool.

I dunno, how to use this idea, but I think it would add something to the game.