Factorio Forums

Hello! Having kind of an odd situation with my chemplants that I can't seem to explain. I'm trying to produce plastic in a pair of them, and one seems to be getting petroleum significantly faster than the other for no apparent reason. They have equal distance from the last pump, and there's no shortage of coal, nor modules plugged in, one simply gets petroleum about 5-10 times as fast as the other. Picture below so you can see the layout. In this case it's the south chem plant that's feeding much faster. If it matters, I'm playing multiplayer on 11.6.




To further complicate matters, the same thing is happening with the sulfur plants, except it's the north-most plant. In this example they're in a series, so I guess I could see how it would make some sort of difference, but is that really how it's supposed to go? Picture below.

Factorio's liquid flow simulation is quite inaccurate. I have no idea if it's the result of an optimisation or if it's a naive solution that could (and should) be improved, but in every situation when dealing with liquid flow you'll have quite a lot of inequality. The only way to really "solve" this and get both chemical plants to work is to produce enough of the gas to fill both of the plants at once.

I know this isn't on par with your question. It's more of a side note... You really only need 1 plastics plant. I never found a reason to have more than one.

Canyew wrote:I know this isn't on par with your question. It's more of a side note... You really only need 1 plastics plant. I never found a reason to have more than one.

Only need one plastics plant for what? I've seen people on here discussing "One missile defense every X minutes" factories, and I'm pretty sure those guys are running more than one.

The main reason for having two in my case is going to a train station, it ensures that pretty much all of it gets loaded in time, even if it technically loses a little bit of efficiency over a single chemplant once the wells run dry.

Thanks for the input guys, we'll just sit on it I suppose until there's an improvement. That fancy liquid splitter is indeed fancy and would probably do the job but I don't think it's serious enough to require all that much work being put into it, at least in this instance.

Tinyboss wrote:

Canyew wrote:I know this isn't on par with your question. It's more of a side note... You really only need 1 plastics plant. I never found a reason to have more than one.

Only need one plastics plant for what? I've seen people on here discussing "One missile defense every X minutes" factories, and I'm pretty sure those guys are running more than one.

I guess my problem is I am still new to the game. I have used 1 plastics plant to process to 4 T2 circuit boards being produced out of T3 assembly plants and the belt never seemed to run out of plastic.

I can ensure you the day you'll start building level 3 modules, your 4 red circuit assemblers will reveal terribly insufficent

Well, yes, as soon as you need "a few more" advanced circuits, you will need much more plastic. Even creating 1 of each level 1 module in an assembler should need more than 4 advanced circuit assemblers.