Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Circuit network can make a pump pump slower.

What ?

I would like to slow down a pump with the circuit network. Ideally, this screen would have another radio button, "control rate". Then if I hooked up a signal with 100, the pump would only pump 100 units a second, instead of 12000/s.

Why ?

This will be useful as you can then split up fluids. It can be used to make a balancer. If you build something like this currently All the fluids getting pumped in will get slurped up by the middle pump, but if I set all three to only pump at 4000/s then as long as the input was full, each output will receive exactly 1/3 of the flow.

I know that angel's addons includes a building which can balance fluids, but I think giving us building blocks to build our own balancers is more in line with the game philosophy.

Build a liquid tank. Put two pumps to drain it. Use wires to connect both pumps to the tank and set pumps activation condition to Any >= 400. Now you have a liquid splitter.

You can connect up to 4 pipes to a tank. At least one will be used to fill it. Therefore, you can build 1-to-2 and 1-to-3 liquid splitters.

Use a modulated pulse clock to turn the pumps on and off. If you want to pump only 50% you simply turn the pump on every odd tick. For a third every third tick, etcpp.

I couldn't find an existing suggestion for the current title of the thread so here goes.

Currently pumps can just be turned on and off but there is not way to directly modify their pumping speed which is always at the max. It's not that huge of an issue as currently you can setup a tank with a circuit condition to turn on and off the pump around a threshold. However, I still believe it makes sense to allow the player to directly set the pump's max speed between 0/s and the current 1200/s. This could have a slider like stack size in inserters or item requests and also allow for direct number inputting. Having a switch to set the pumping speed with circuit signals would be nice as well as logistic network interop like the inserters have.

Considering that after 2.0 pumps are primarily just a valve, allowing the player to directly control the throughput of that valve would be super convenient.
As with any suggestions I'm open to critique and potential other implementations if this is somehow not desired, although I'm not sure how it would cause any issues.

As shown by testing in 123458, I actually think that “1200/s” is slow, relative to the size of Fluidboxes and late-game crafting machines. In order to “throttle up” you need to add more pumps - not slow a single pump down.

For situations like Thruster Speed or Efficiency maximization it is “necessary” to use a Tank to meter the Fluid, and a Circuit condition to toggle the pump… but this seems to be well-solved using the existing mechanics.

eugenekay wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 9:59 pm As shown by testing in 123458, I actually think that “1200/s” is slow, relative to the size of Fluidboxes and late-game crafting machines. In order to “throttle up” you need to add more pumps - not slow a single pump down.

For situations like Thruster Speed or Efficiency maximization it is “necessary” to use a Tank to meter the Fluid, and a Circuit condition to toggle the pump… but this seems to be well-solved using the existing mechanics.

High quality pumps should just pump way more than they currently do. Legendary pumps are only like 2.5x a normal pump which like you said is still fairly slow.