Factorio Forums

Steam turbines work very strangely. I built a reactor with output to 4 heat exchangers and 8 steam turbines respectively. The first one works as it should. I put the second one through copying. The second does not work half of the steam turbines, just do not produce anything. And I have a t-shaped pipe coming out of the heat exchanger and right and left turbine. For example, the right one works, but the left one does not work. And if you remove all the pipes and all the turbines, rearrange the heat exchangers, the error repeats. And if I put the turbine on the right, it always works, and if I put it on the left, it always does not work.

This is probably going to be impossible to diagnose without pictures.

Heat and fluids (should be the same thing on a technical level) don't distribute equally in all directions if it's not "necessary". The direction a fluid takes depends on entity update order, which depends on build order. If you have several "outputs" and the first in update order can consume all the fluid/heat then it will and the fluid will not go anywhere else. But that also means the other entities aren't necessary so you can remove them. But only if the first to update will continue to be able to consume it all of course. How much it can consume depends on the throughput limit, how full it is and how many downstream consumers are active for it. So once (heat)pipes fill up, electricity demand goes down or steam buffers etc fill up the fluid/heat will back up and start leaking into the 2nd to update entity etc.