Factorio Forums

Oops, meant the cold leg.

This was quite the learning experience, as I forced my reactor to suffer a 50% satisfaction deficit for a good hour. Something I've never done before, as I usually tackle the declining power before it happens.
Because of this, the vast amount of water required to keep it running forced a major upgrade to the number of water pumps required. But also shows the issue with the fluid mechanics, as liquid travels quite slowly over long distances.

With the way fluid takes time to travel through long pipe lines, I've been in the habit of creating a small island with water just a few squares away from the reactors, lots of storage tanks with fast pumps connected to the outlet to ensure the pipes are maxed. However, with the 50% deficit it was burning the water way too quickly, leaving the storage tanks dry in just a few minutes and then naturally killing the steam. Were it not for the water being so close by, it would have been a pain in the ass to keep the pipes filled where it needed it most.
With a sufficient water supply finally satisfied even at a severe deficit, the reactors never ran dry and the steam remained at a stable 3k the entire time.

So if I were to make a guess, your reactors are too far away from a good source of water and the pipes aren't filling fast enough due to this. Fast pumps help fill the pipes, but they're also affected by electricity and length as well. Keep an eye on the water level in the Cooling Tower Water Source Tank, as a stable flow will keep the water level above 100 at all times, which is necessary to prevent drying out.

Hopefully this is the root cause of your issue, otherwise I'll leave it to the man himself.

(It has now been 2 hours as of writing this and it's still going strong, now I understand why people complain about how much water these things can burn when they suddenly suffer great strain.)

Yeah, I might need to completely revise my layout using the 144MW reactor. It's quite probably that my water production is not dense enough to handle the demand.

As for the full demand on the turbine/cooling towers, this layout seems to be pretty stable:
Although needing two reactors for only two turbines seems a waste.

If the reactor has more then 1k units of pressurized water you can have some issues


After I figured all this out you should be able to have 1 72mw reactor run 2 setups (1 pump, coolingtower, steam thingie) on each side.

ledzilla wrote:

Hot Leg

That right there is your issues. You have too much liquid in the reactor such that you have poor flow and thus poor heat removal. Fluid mechanic in Factorio is not fluid mechanic in the real world. There must be room for liquid to "flow."

Light wrote: (It has now been 2 hours as of writing this and it's still going strong, now I understand why people complain about how much water these things can burn when they suddenly suffer great strain.)

Water wise, the cooling tower needs about 150 unit/s when running flat out. If you have two turbine-generators, you will need about 300 units/s to generate 70 MW. With this amount of water, vanilla steam-engines will only produce 25 MW. So it is safe to say water consumption is 35% of what it would take to generate the same amount of power using vanilla solution. That is quite the saving no?

Keridos wrote:Does this affect both input and output liquid? So do I just have to toggle the output secondary hot liquid or shall i not pump out the primary cold output (from the reactor) out beforehand?

And a suggestion: Can't you make the heat exchanger output a logic signal when the cycle is finished? That would be a neat way to solve the issue completely.

Only the output for hot liquid. The input does not matter since you always have liquid there...at least that is what should be happening. One of the best ways to use the heat exchangers is to put a storage tank behind the output for the hot liquid. Then recirculate that into one of input. Since the storage tank has 2 more input, use one for fresh cold water, and one to output to the vanilla steam-generators. You will want to limit the amount of liquid in the storage tank by limiting when the off-shore pump should be working.

As for your suggestion, Factorio does not fire an event when a crafting cycle finishes...It does not have any way to subscribes a sub-set of entities to this monitoring. I've tried to convince some developer of adding this but have so far failed. The interim solution, outside of what I already did, is to monitor the crafting cycle and predict on which tick it will finish then apply the code to modify the liquid. The issue with this approach is that while this is good for a steady-state situation where the entity is always crafting so you quickly approach a steady-state solution, it does not handle well situations where the entity irregularly halt during the cycle. The extra logic will end up eating more ticks than my current solution. While it is possible to eliminate the irregular halting by using storage tank, this is not intuitive to the player. Thus this is the reason why I said I do not currently have an elegant solution to the problem.

Some question; the heat exchangers in pressurized water to pressurized water, which sides are which on the S big boiler? When I connect it like the press. water to water exchange (cold liquid input at blue tank and hot input at red marking) I get 15°C water out of the secondary side output.

I don't understand your question? Could you maybe use a screen shot and draw on it to demonstrate what you want?

On which sides are which inputs/outputs in the pressure water to pressure water switching? There are some markings on the tanks, two grey ones and a blue and a red one.

The blue side takes cold input that is to be turned into hot output. The red side takes hot input to be turned into cold output. The inputs and output are counter to each other. This arrangement was to emulate counter-current heat exchange. I hope that helped?

I currently use this setup but the output at the secondary output is always 15°C this way. Or did i misinterpret something you said?

No, here is an example setup. It doesn't need to be this way but this is one way to mitigate the problem you are having.

Thank you, that worked for me

Will there be an official update to 0.14?

Yes, I am working on it. It appears 14.x will become stable soonish...so yes.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-162

the changes in the FFF 10x more fluid and other changes how will that affect you/your mod.?

I don't know yet. We'll see. I might have to do some adjustments to the recipes and prototypes.

I can't reply to your PM, probably because I'm a new user. If you use reddit you can message me on the same username.

I don't know what MC means, but decay heat should just drop over time. Make it equal to 5%, and have it drop maybe 1% per day or something? (Actual would be around 1% after an hour)

Hiddencamper wrote:I can't reply to your PM, probably because I'm a new user. If you use reddit you can message me on the same username.

I don't know what MC means, but decay heat should just drop over time. Make it equal to 5%, and have it drop maybe 1% per day or something? (Actual would be around 1% after an hour)

MC is monte carlo. I don't use reddit at all. I didn't know new users can't use the PM messaging system...This is rather unfortunate? Does it say why you can't use it?

As for decay heat, I think for game play, hour is better than days...

I gave it a few hours of testing in a previous save that utilizes 6 turbine reactors with dedicated self-sustaining power production and there were many issues that came up.

- Placing a turbine crashes the game
- Low Pressure Steam doesn't disappear
- Multiple fuel rods have almost no effect on reactor temperature
- Expired rods continue to function at full effect until they're removed
- Multiple rods expire at the same rate as just a single one
- The high pressure steam burns exceptionally fast to the point it's impossible to keep running at >50% potential
- Recirculating Pump is always maxed at 600 units

Now for the story.
As I started up my game, I noticed there was an almost immediate blackout despite satisfaction being met quite well. Since the low pressure steam didn't escape I had to forcefully put water into the cold leg, but even then the amount of steam generated was vastly burned up far quicker than it could produce even at full water. I corrected the amount of pressurized water since the recirculating pump seems to store 600 units which almost emptied the reactors but it still ate steam too quickly.

After adding a lot more solar power, the steam generators seemed to calm down when they were at around 12MW each, despite having a full batch of 4.7% rods, which prompted me to test a single rod vs 15. I noticed the single rod generated 328'C compared to the 15 at 348'C when stress tested at 100% performance, but that all 15 rods seemed to deplete at the exact same rate as just the single.

After babysitting the single rod in its final moments, when it died the other reactor chest looked like this:


So they burned out at almost the exact rate, despite both reactors being taxed the same amount. Plus the spent fuel continues to operate at full strength until it's removed from the chest, then it does not work anymore.

Recreating fuel seems to work fine, but considering the reactor can't function beyond half its capacity without burning out all its steam, I couldn't test the rate at which rods decay nor how it affects temperatures.

Just to also confirm, Bob's and Angel's Oxygen/Nitrogen/Hydrogen does not interact with your mod, so your recipes are the only option to create them. Angel's Methane Gas does replace petroleum so there's no incompatibilities present in recycling fuel rods, although oxygen is a pain to create and nitrogen just eats storage space until you learn that it's a liquid which can be void in the steam engines. Could we not bump up oxygen just a tiny bit more?

Last thing to mention, is there something you're supposed to do with the vitrified waste besides store it in a chest? Since it stacks in 10, it stores quite fast, so I guess you're supposed to shoot it every now and then.
I'll test the creation of MOX assemblies later today, but I imagine it works just fine.

Turbine crash message:


Edit: Also tested in vanilla with no mods, same issues occur.

Thank your for helping test the mod. I've fixed some more issues (all simple). Replace your control.lua with this. -Fixed low-pressure-steam not condensing
-Fixed reactor energy calculation
-Fixed on_built_entity error

-Spent fuel should not have energy potential. Check if that is true with new control.lua
-Decay is randomly applied on a rod once per second. This is simple decay model. While decay is constant, the amount is proportional to the amount of power output. Check if this is true for new control.lua
-Recirc pump always will try to fill its fluidbox first and keep it that way. This is a vanilla behavior.
-Regarding H2,N2,O2, I will deal with mod-compat after all these bugs are fixed. For reference though, I want the prototype names for all of these fluids from their corresponding mods.
-Vitrified wastes are meant to accumulate. You can turn them into small-nuke-shells if you are scrunching for storage room. I plan to reprocess them further in 0.7.x for breeding fuel.

- Condensing functions again
- Placing turbines doesn't crash anymore
- Expired rods stop supplying heat

The change in energy values has helped incentivize using more rods than just the single champion rod.
But the steam generator now continues to rapidly lose steam when at 70% or greater production, despite receiving enough water to keep going. (Improved from >50%)

I did not notice that the pump only held 100 water before and was changed now to 600. Any reason why this was increased?

Removing the steam generator or turbine now generates two different errors, seems to happen randomly when picking up.