Factorio Forums

Hello,
I'm not 100% certain this is a bug, but the water temperature in on of my boiler series fluctuates between ~69 and 100°C every couple second. No solar panels, stable electricity expenditure. Version 0.2.9 alpha.

Please find the screenshots attached:

This is "kind of bug"

The fluid moving algorithm is not perfect, and you have some oscilation of the speed there probably.
What if you change the setup, so you have no "circles" just a tree.
Pumps -> boilers -> steam engines.

So yeah, if I dedicate one of the boiler series to a separate series of engines, rather than mixing the water together, it stabilizes.

Well, I got this bug too. And the actual reason for that is boilers can accept only 5 units of coal from inserters which means every time boiler uses one coal it resets its umm... gui flames so it produces no heat for a short time. That how this bug works on my pc. ^^

Ghost5231 wrote:Well, I got this bug too. And the actual reason for that is boilers can accept only 5 units of coal from inserters which means every time boiler uses one coal it resets its umm... gui flames so it produces no heat for a short time. That how this bug works on my pc. ^^

I didn't manage to observe closely what is happening, but this could explain a lot.
(I think I observed strong temperature oscillation as a result of recent creeper attacks - the boilers that are not consuming coal during the non-attack times could have got synchronized or something...)

I am right now experiencing an oddity where one of the same powerplant structure (1 pump -> boilers -> 8 steam engines) requires 11 boilers instead of the usual 10. The first boiler heats the water to 24 degrees instead of 26 degrees, and goes up to 80 something instead of 100 degrees as the others do. I'm not sure if the game is supposed to be like this or not.

Well the engines only use heat when they need to.
Did you add some electric stuff ? Because if the demand is higher, the engine will consume more hot water, so the water will flow faster. If it flows faster, then one boiler can't heat it as fast as before.

I'm not really sure how pipes work, but what I think how they work is the following:

- the pipes could be imagined as a very, very fast belt, which changes the direction automatically into the "needed" ways. In this case from pump, to boiler and from boiler to steam engine.
- one "piece of water" is taken from the lake and the first boiler catches it up and heats it for one micro-unit of energy (some degrees)
- then it looks, if there is colder water than this, and if yes, the inserted wate ris replaced with the colder.
- and so on. The cascade of boilers will warm the water up.
- now the water comes to the steam engines. They just take any piece of water and make electrical energy out of the inserted

I mean, that the whole process can stuck, if there there are different ways for the hot water to come to the steam engines, because the "belt-pipes" have to turn their direction depending on the "need". Differently heated water can make this algorithm go wrong decisions. This would explain, why setups with different ways of flow produce chaotic energy output.

I would say, the players need to see, how the "pieces of water" really flow through the pipes.

I suggest a mode (alt-key) where the pieces are drawn above the pipes, burners and steam-engines.

or use long straight pipes, they have some "glass windows" so you can see the flow

Nirahiel wrote:or use long straight pipes, they have some "glass windows" so you can see the flow

Yes, I mean I suggested that already anywhere, but I mean that is not enough, when we come to oil industry anytime.

azoundria wrote:I am right now experiencing an oddity where one of the same powerplant structure (1 pump -> boilers -> 8 steam engines) requires 11 boilers instead of the usual 10. The first boiler heats the water to 24 degrees instead of 26 degrees, and goes up to 80 something instead of 100 degrees as the others do. I'm not sure if the game is supposed to be like this or not.

To address the poster's actual problem:
You actually need 12 boilers to fully power 8 engines. 11 boilers will *almost* fully power, but not quite.
The Boilers:Engine ratio for providing maximum possible output is 1.4:1 up to 14:10.

I've read somewhere it's 1.5 to 1, are you sure it's 1.4 ?

It seems to have been tweaked recently, (think I read it in a dev post actually,) and I went through the process of setting up engines and boilers to find the points they stopped providing at.
It's now 14 and 10 for the upper limits.

I'm one of those that verified the 1.5:1 ratio as well