Factorio Forums

I have a long pipe. There is lubricant in it. I have a pump at the far end, and no sources connected to the pipe. Hovering shows 0.0 lubricant exists in the pipe.

However, lubricant still shows in the glass windows, and water cannot go into the pipe.

I think this is because the game is internally keeping more decimal places than are displayed. I propose a simple change: If a pipe containing more than 1.0 units of water is next to a pipe containing less than 0.1 units of lubricant, then the water should replace the lubricant, destroying it. (This should apply to any pair of substances, lubricant / water is just an example.)

This allows the player to re-use long pipelines without rebuilding the entire pipe.

That would be one way.
Another way, that works already is to use the pump to pump the lubricant away to some storage tank, that should empty the pipe in quite a short time.

kovarex wrote:use the pump to pump the lubricant away to some storage tank, that should empty the pipe in quite a short time.

The pump will only empty a few sections near it. The rest of the pipe shows 0.0 but is not empty. The other end of the pipe makes this clear:

I can confirm that the pump only empties sections close to it, other more distant sections still have small quantities left in them, blocking any other fluids from entering that part of the pipe.

Yeah, I remember that this was a PITA when I was playtesting the game. The proposal to "destroy" the water on the pipes boundary sounds good.

The mechanism of "fluid pushing" has been done for the 0.9.1. How it works is that when there are two fluids next to each other and quantity of one's is much higher then quantity of other's then the second one is pushed away (or destroyed if there is no place to push). Currently at most 1 liter of fluid can be pushed (1 /10 of the pipe volume). I played around with this for a while and eases the changes in the fluid setups a lot (though sometimes a manual intervention is still required).