Factorio Forums

Crafting recipes that only use fluid ingredients will continue producing until the output stack is full. By comparison, recipes that use item ingredients are limited by the inserter logic: Inserters will stop inserting items into an assembler if either the input slots have twice or more of the recipe's ingredients, or the output slots have twice or more of the recipe's results. (Limits increased with speed modules in play. Thanks for that change, by the way!) If item ingredients are inserted by hand, the assembling machine continues producing until the output slot is full.

Since fluid-only recipes cannot be limited by the inserter logic, they will consume input fluids until the output stack (or output fluid reservoir) is full. Fluid-to-fluid recipes such as Oil Refining and Cracking are limited by the small size of the output reservoirs. The only fluid-to-item recipes in Vanilla are Sulfur and Solid Fuel production, so you can almost always see a Chemical Plant with a stack of 50 in its output. 50 Sulfur or Solid Fuel is pretty cheap to make, so this hasn't really been worth talking about.

On the other hand, several mods increase the stack size of these intermediates to 200, and some of them add new fluid-to-item recipes where the fluid costs are much higher, and the full output stack in the Chemical Plant (etc.) represents a much greater value of inputs.

Basically, I want to know if it's reasonable to limit fluid-to-item recipes to two times the recipe output. (More, if speed modules are in play, similar to how they now affect the inserter logic.)

If the recipe has a item in it's ingredients the inserterts will stop inputting when the fluid output is 2x that of the recipe. If the recipe takes only fluids in it's ingredients there is no limit except for the fluid stack size - that's intended since the fluid flow system can't and doesn't do any of the checks like inserters can do.

Rseding91 wrote:If the recipe has a item in it's ingredients the inserterts will stop inputting when the fluid output is 2x that of the recipe. If the recipe takes only fluids in it's ingredients there is no limit except for the fluid stack size - that's intended since the fluid flow system can't and doesn't do any of the checks like inserters can do.

Well... yes. This is what I already described.

It sounds like the inserter logic is the special case that limits the machine output.

However, what it feels like when you're actually playing is that fluid-to-item recipes are the special cases that don't have a limit.

Fluid-to-fluid recipes are limited by the output reservoir, which is usually small. Fluid-to-item recipes are limited by the output stack size, which is large (and when mods are in play, can be even larger and more expensive to fill).