Factorio Forums

Seems that people rarely (or never) put fluids in barrels... perhaps that concept should be removed from the game. Is there any reason to ever do it?

Robots find carrying barrels far easier than the fluids they contain.

(That said I don't personally use barrels and haven't since they added the fluid train wagon)

I use fluid barrelling all the time so robots can carry the fluids.

Barrels were needed because the fluid wagon was added later.

Back then you had to barrel oil in order to transport it.
But I think it is not neccesary to remove a perfectly working feature.

I often use barrels for uranium mining. No need to carry a full tank of acid, when its enough to block 8 slots on a cargo waggon.
Or when you want to jumpstart coal liquification.
Or when you use bot based production.

Something I don't like, but: the mods.
There are some crazy mods out there that have a lot more than the base game and they need that feature.

Barrels can be loaded into cargo wagons which you can also use for other items. So for an outpost resupply train you can have 1 cargo wagon with all essential supplies, including oil for flamethrowers.

Or add sulfuric acid barrels to your uranium mining train as mentioned already.

You can have shorter & faster trains this way. Fluid wagons can be overkill for these situations.

And because you can put barrels on belts, it's easy to measure fluid throughput/consumption.

I think fluid barrels are a cool concept and even if it doesn't get used much it should stay in the game.

I do not think barrels should be removed.

As the wiki says, https://wiki.factorio.com/Barrel, it is more efficient to transport fluids by tanker (25K), than by barrel (50 per barrel x 10 per stack x 40 stacks = 20K).

In addition to the benefits noted by SupplyDepoo, if you are storing fluids, barrels are much more space efficient:
one fluid tank = 25K, takes 3x3 space;
one steel chest holds 48 stacks = 24K, takes 1x1 space;
nine chests take 3x3 space (or 9x1 or whatever shape works for your build) and holds 216K.

Having the option to barrel fluids may not be used a lot, but it is a pretty neat feature.

Thanks all for the answers, I agree now that they should stay in the game.