Factorio Forums

Seeing a bug on Heat pipe elements where the Temperature is not properly calculated and can soft-lock fuel insertion.
See attached blueprint:
Heating Tower is configured to insert fuel at < 503C, however Heat Exchangers and Heat pipes are not properly drawing Temperature off of the Heat Pipes, so the Temperature never goes below 503C at the Heating Tower.
The first Heat Exchanger in the set shows it is working, but is not actually producing any steam, the neighboring Heat Exchangers further downstream on the Heat pipes show Low temperature even when 501C is present on the attached Heat pipe.



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Heating Tower Temp First attached Heat pipe Temp Second Heat pipe Temp Closest Heat Exchanger 'working' while producing nothing Third Heat pipe Temp Fourth Heat pipe Temp Second attached Heat Exchanger not working

What part of this behavior do you think is a bug? To me it looks like there's a 1° minimum temperature difference to transfer heat, which means the heating tower needs to be above 512° before all the heat exchangers in the screenshot can exceed 500° and make steam. Under load it will need an even higher temperature (probably around 520-530°) for the farthest heat exchanger to stay hot enough, since the temperature drop between each segment of heat pipe increases as more heat is used by the heat exchangers.

Can you please post a save file showing this issue?

Almost certainly not a bug. I think the easiest way to interpret this result is that the display of 500.00 degrees in the boiler is rounded up from the actual temperature of 499.999 degrees. The only reason you notice is because the circuit network is also rounding up from 502.999 to 503 on the heating tower and the inserter never activates. I think the most obvious answer to this is "just don't do that", and set the fueling threshold to 550 or 600 degrees so there is enough heat to get all the way to the end of your line of boilers.

Rseding91 wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2024 10:32 pm Can you please post a save file showing this issue?

Here's one where I replicated the shown setup.

I take back my previous claim. Using "/c game.print(game.player.selected.temperature)", the boiler reports exactly 500 degrees and the heating tower reports exactly 503 degrees. Also the boiler still says "Working" even though it is producing no steam.

Looking at the logic, the heat exchanger is extracting such a tiny tiny amount of energy (because the temperature is JUUUUUUUST above 500C that it's too little to heat any amount of fluid. So it extracts something like 0.000000059604644775390625 energy and produces 0 heated water.

It's technically working but it's not a useful kind of technically. The fix is simple: you just need to provide more heat.

So does it idle forever at "technically"enough fuel to not go cold?