Factorio Forums

I decided to set up a massive power plant to take care of all of my energy needs for the foreseeable future and came across this bug. I set up two pumps each connected to five boilers and linked up as many steam engines as I could before the temp started falling off. Then I hooked up five more boilers on each line and more steam engines. I have an empty line in the middle for running in coal and inserters on each side to pull in the coal for the boilers. I was about to hook it up to my coal supply when I noticed that after the five new boilers the engines after all run at 98%-100% even without coal in them. It seems like the boilers are programmed to not drop off any heat as water goes through and then they're passing it on to the engines as if it's being heated by those boilers.

Screenshot:

At the moment I took it the symbol wasn't on them to show they have no fuel but the ones in the middle have none. There are currently 24 steam engines running on 10 running boilers and 10 not running. Unsure if it could be reduced to 2 not running but I'm keeping it like this so that it can continue working when the bug is fixed.



Save File:

http://www.mediafire.com/?j22qvpis9dv1n0q

The current logic is, that the stem engines do not cool the water, they just use it (take it away)
So once the temperature is at 100, there is no need to add another boilers.

kovarex wrote:The current logic is, that the stem engines do not cool the water, they just use it (take it away)
So once the temperature is at 100, there is no need to add another boilers.

If I understand this correctly, the water pipe doesn't have a limited flow throughput? So if you put more steam engines in series, it will need water FASTER, and since a single boiler can only warm, let's say, 1 °C*m^3/s, I will need to chain the boilers if I want higher throughput?

I don't have a problem with it in the actual game, but I'm curious about the mechanics of it.

Yes this is the way it works, boiler workes exactly the same way as pipe, it just heats the water that is inside.
The flow is not unlimited, but it can be very big currently.

So can I close this as not a bug?