Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Offshore pumps can be placed over land as wells, but they take a large amount of energy to run and work significantly slower.

What?

Currently, an offshore pump can be placed on the border of a body of water. It then takes no power and produces 1200 units of water per second. When the player places a landfill over the pump, it continues to function normally. The devs have previously explained that these are not a bug and that the pumps automatically turn into wells. With this proposal, however, once the player researches Landfill (or perhaps another new research depending on it), they also gain the ability to directly place offshore pumps on pre-existing land, as well as still being able to landfill over regular pumps. The tooltip when hovering over these will automatically change to "Groundwater well" or similar, and wells could indeed have a separate texture from pumps. The well should also have water output on 1 side. However, the primary difference here is that as opposed to the offshore pump, the well will consume a significant amount of power and simultaneously produce water much more slowly. The exact numbers might have to be tweaked, but as an initial suggestion, 9 MW for 400 units/second may work; a steam engine set-up using wells would be rather inefficient. Once again, if I'm misunderstanding the numbers, they can be modified such that players would still have reason to keep offshore pumps, while still not being so expensive that players would never want to use groundwater wells. I apologize that I am unable to provide illustrations, but I am not currently on my system with Factorio installed on it.

Why?

This suggestion would better integrate the idea of a groundwater well, so it won't be seen as a bug. Additionally, players would no longer be constrained by pre-existing bodies of water as long as they already have power, allowing more modular base design. Finally, offshore pumps and groundwater wells would have different use cases, due to the latter's relative cost.