liquid filtering for pumps, tanks and wagons

[AileTheAlien]

If you're playing without mods, then you have to work around the limitations of the game. For fluids, that means keeping all your tanks, pipes, and fluid wagons clean and separated. If you mix two pipes together by accident, you quickly learn to not make that mistake again, after draining all the pipes slowly (or just removing them and re-placing them). Train stops with dedicated pumps, pipes, and tanks, plus dedicated fluid wagons/trains, are the only guaranteed way in vanilla to keep your fluids un-contaminated. :)

[ssilk]

Plus: The pump shows in alternative view a clearly visible liquid-type. So - even when the pipes are currently not empty, you know what should flow inside.

A more intelligent pipe-system can then also display the corresponding pipes (in most cases with pumps it is very clear in which direction it flows) in different overlay colors and highlight not matching liquids in such pipes.

[ross]

How do you keep all your trains and chests from eventually filling up with empty barrels? Do you just remove your barrel assembler after a certain point?

[FactorioParadox]

If you're playing without mods, then you have to work around the limitations of the game.

The whole point of having an Ideas and Suggestions forum is so we can give feedback on what those limits should be.

[BlakeMW]

How do you keep all your trains and chests from eventually filling up with empty barrels? Do you just remove your barrel assembler after a certain point?

There are various strategies. One good one is to use the logistic network to manage barrels then have a barrel assembler that makes barrels when empty barrels falls below a certain amount. It's also important to limit production (or unloading from trains) of full barrels in some way, otherwise your logistic network could end up clogged up with full barrels of some kind.

Note that barrels are a natural fit with the logistic network, because they are exceptionally efficient to be carried by bots: a single barrel holds the equivalent of roughly 25 ore so a bot with a cargo size of 4 is carrying the equivalent of 100 ore - two whole stacks of ore!

For trains specifically there are two possible approaches:

1. Filter half the slots to empty barrels and half the slots to full barrels.
2. If you want to use 100% of the wagon capacity, then completely fill it with empty barrels, then at the destination remove all the empty barrels and completely fill it with full barrels. Only let the train depart with a full load. Done carefully this means no empty barrels build up inappropriately.

[ross]

Note that barrels are a natural fit with the logistic network, because they are exceptionally efficient to be carried by bots: a single barrel holds the equivalent of roughly 25 ore so a bot with a cargo size of 4 is carrying the equivalent of 100 ore - two whole stacks of ore!

How do you determine an equivalence between a fluid and an ore, and which ore / fluid combination are you using for the calculation?

[JohnyDL]

I assume he means oil but he might be talking about coal liquefaction.

[BlakeMW]

How do you determine an equivalence between a fluid and an ore, and which ore / fluid combination are you using for the calculation?

Obviously it's a little vague and subjective, but there are various ways. Generally speaking either extraction effort or consumption rates can be used, pumpjacks don't use the same extraction logic as mining drills - a 100% pumpjack extracts 10 oil/s but it does diminish, an electric mining drill extracts 0.57/s but it's cheaper than a pumpjack. Both use 90kW and make 9 pollution and a 57% pumpjack will extract 10 oil at exactly the same energy cost and pollution as an electric mining drill extracts 1 ore. Using this metric 1 ore is worth roughly 10 oil, though an argument could be made for as little as 5 oil or as high as 25 oil and scarcity also enters this as a consideration, though in 0.15 iron ore and oil seems to be quite similar in abundance (i.e. if you extract all resources from a certain area without extreme use of speed or productivity, you might be limited by iron or you might be limited by oil, you certainly wont always be limited by one or the other, as it were in earlier versions where oil was always the limiting resource).
Alternatively, the plastic bar can be considered equivalent to an iron plate - it's like the oil plate and is the simplest oil product transportable by belt. A plastic bar costs 0.5 coal + 10 oil (depends how exactly your refining is setup, advanced oil turns 10 oil into 9 petroleum but any productivity at all improves it to 1:1 or better). To make 100 plastic bars would require 50 coal and 4 petroleum barrels - it probably feels that the coal is the lesser component of plastic bars and yet if raw material delivery is by bot the coal requires 12.5x the bot work.

A final metric is train delivery and stack size: Barrels stack to 10 whereas ore stacks to 50 and plates stack to 100. So if you transport full wagons of raw or slightly processed resources by train then offload them with bots, the barrels require 1/5th or 1/10th the bot work as the ore/plates.

Anyway, sensible metrics seem to work out that 10 oil = 1 ore and I'm pretty sure this is exactly the ratio the devs used when balancing costs (or originally 1:1, which became 1:10 when fluids were multiplied by 10).

[Cobaltur]

still missing a pump with a single filter for offloading

[McDuff]

+1 on this, or some other way to reliably filter different fluid types.

[Cobaltur]

filtering inside a base is insufficient.
After playing more than 1000 hours I found recently the "logistic train network" mod.
I love it.
Altough I love trains, managing multiple outpots and balancing refinements (to plates or to green circuits) is a mess.

But using a train for multiple purposes is dangerous. If the train cannot be unloaded and get to the next pump the internal buffer is filled with unwanted liquids. Now its useless and you have to interact manually (replace it)

Having a filter like in "filter inserters" would be great
or like the new splitter filter (even if can be set only manualley)... that was my favourite change .

[JePeSWE]

Hi

This could a bit of topic. The problem i have is, i want to setup the pumps to pump into the train only the requested amount from my request station. Any ideas.?

/JePeSWE

[mrvn]

Hi

This could a bit of topic. The problem i have is, i want to setup the pumps to pump into the train only the requested amount from my request station. Any ideas.?

/JePeSWE

1) use an arithmetic combinator connected to the yellow constant combinator of the LTN train stop and the train stop (set to read train contents). But you won't get the amount perfect.

2) Don't bother for liquids. Just work in multiples of 25k. It simply isn't worth the hassle.