Factorio Forums

This is arguably not even a bug, but thought it was worth flagging. I was experimenting with making the lightest ship possible and the current variation I've made has the chemical plant directly inserting fuel and oxidiser into the thruster and the idea is to switch between recipes.

It will input the first fluid just fine, but the second fluid will not insert into the thruster until the recipe is changed or the fluid will leave the chemical plant but not enter the thruster.

Fully understand if this is essentially intended functionality because this 74 tonne variant is not very viable, prone to deadlocking and the solving the conditions on when to set certain recipes is a test of my understanding of computer science. It's also not required by mod makers because they could easily just make a recipe that outputs both fuels in the correct alignment to support direct feeding.

It can also be solved by pumps with filters pointing into the thruster.

For the record, this is on Steam Deck

Did you empty the thruster? The thruster input will accept and pass through any fluid. It sounds like both of the thrusters tanks are full of the first fluid.

My first thought when reading this was that the only way it will work is with filtered pumps "sorting" the outputs of the single chem plant.

nathanwe3 wrote: Thu Nov 28, 2024 4:45 am Did you empty the thruster? The thruster input will accept and pass through any fluid. It sounds like both of the thrusters tanks are full of the first fluid.

I should have clarified that in the post.
When the chemical plant fills up, the thruster will power on briefly from the fluid being suddenly inserted when switching recipes.

When the chemical plant is outputting the fluid, it's not actually entering the thruster to be consumed.

Ok, I think I see what's happening. I was assuming that thrusters act like a building or a storage tank, but they seem to act like both. I was able to insert oxidiser and fuel into the two fuel inputs at the same time. and once the thruster was no longer storing the fuel, it started filling up the pipe with oxidiser and blocked the fuel from entering the thruster's inventory. So each input seems to be a separate component of the fluid network.

I placed some pipe and tried to place a thruster next to it and what was interesting is that I couldn't place a thruster with either input when the wrong fluid was coming out of another thruster. Same behaviour when placing an adjacent thruster.

Ok, maybe the bug should be that you don't have to offset thrusters when direct inserting fluid from chemical plants. It'll probably deadlock at some point, but very interesting.