Factorio Forums

I see all these suggestions for food but never have I once seen something for water while it is even more important for human life than food so i was thinking of a water meter and also adding water as a resource meaning that eventually the water you pump and drink will make the water in your pond lake or ocean deplenish over time making you go farther out for more water.

Then, you could also add weather. With rain it is also possible to have water. Water cleaning enables a good management of your water stock also...

I like that also the water that you deplet from lakes and what not should be replenished from the rain just a little but it would be a nice touch

For that, you should use huge amount of water. The amount used for intensive irrigation for instance. Right now, for a couple of steam engine, it is not worth.

On the other hand, if you have salty water and fresh water, then you will some management to do to get what you need (most of the time, fresh water). There is also the possibility to implement underground water source...

Well if they were to implement salt water they should add salt water treatment plants to evaporate the water and have it condense on a upside down v shaped roof and then fall on tanks to the side to get fresh watter

Necroing.
epic: water as limited ressource
There are so many suggestions about it.

there is a mod for this, but the ideas for the water system are really good too and i hope they find a way to implement them too

finite water https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 94&t=14506

At the moment water can't work very well as a limited resource for the simple reason because STEAM ENGINES. Steam engines consume absurd quantities of water to generate modest amounts of electricity. Heck, they'll devour cold water all day if you pipe it directly in. Every other water consumer in Factorio put together is thrown aside by the water drain of one line of steam engines. So if you want to treat water as a limited resource, the only relevant question is if there's enough to run steam power. Either there is enough water for steam and every other use is insignificant on the reserves, or there isn't and the player has to jump over to solar power before completely drying out factory production and killing themselves.

For water to be viable as a limited resource, steam engines have to be completely rethought. Ideally they would not destroy water, instead creating a cold water output to be recycled back into the network. This way they take some water to set up, and only a small amount of water to keep running. The final exhaustion rate would need to be around 5-10% of what currently happens, and even that may be too demanding on a limited water supply.

Hmm.. but if lakes were to dry up, then they would dissappear and people can use that to drain small ponds that get in the way. Changing the terrain like that might be difficult. Also, the steam engine problem is important. Solution? Water is limited to a certain amount of water per second, based on the size of the pond/lake/ocean. Any pumps taking from there would then be limited to the maximum output distributed between them. So to properly supply large steam power plants or chemical plants needing lots of water per second, you would have to source the water from larger bodies.
The justification is that the water "used up" in these processes should eventually make its way back into the lakes and seas through the water cycle.

Why shouldn't it not be possible to dry out lakes?
What limits the amount of water you take out from a lake?

ssilk wrote:Why shouldn't it not be possible to dry out lakes?
What limits the amount of water you take out from a lake?

IRL? the rivers and natural springs that feed the lake

As a mechanic this would mean that if you exceed X number of pumps on a body of water it'll start to shrink. If you stop pumping the water will refill.

I'm just struggling to think of how a drained lake could be achieved in the game. The finite water mod replaces water with terrain as lakes are drained, but I don't really like that idea. The water should still be an obstacle in my opinion. Perhaps the water is replaced with dry lake bed that you still can't build on? Once the lake begins to shrink your offshore pumps are not sitting in the water and stop pumping. Or, water tiles are represented like oil wells, with a yeild that affects the max water per second that can be pumped. The difference is that neighbouring water tiles share the yeild.

Why shouldn't it be possible to build on a "dry lake"?

Turn the story around: Assume you are in a very wet area. Then it rains one whole day. You forgot to care about building in "dry lakes". Or better: There was no other place left, than the dry lakes. Now - while raining - water will come ... if you don't have installed enough pumps to bring the water away.

What a game.

ssilk wrote:Why shouldn't it be possible to build on a "dry lake"?

Gameplay reason? Because water shouldn't be removed as an obstacle
Practical reason? Because the lake bed is soft silt and mud unsuitable for building

All what want to say is this: The behavior of dry lakes depends on, what type of game you want to play. Maybe it makes sense, that both types exists on the same map?

And in a wider sense I want to say, that the forum members should not to think only into their domain or their wanted gameplay, because we don't know, how Factorio could be played in a good way (even if I know, that it's now 3 years old)

The problem with water as a limited resource, is that water consumption is completely unreasonable to make this work.

Steam power does not annihilate hundreds of gallons of water every second. It recycles water through hot and cold cycles before using it over and over again.

In factorio you can use thousands of water, total, to process concrete. You can also use thousands of water PER SECOND for steam power. Water can't work as an industrially limited resource because you'll run out of energy water in minutes, and it can't be a power limiting resource without providing unlimited industrial use.

That's why we need more industrial uses for water. There should be some mid- to end-game things that require large amounts of water and could potentially drain large lakes. On the other hand, there could be terrain settings that allow you the possibility of finding yourself with limited water, and you must be careful to conserve what little you have.

Hi all, just to mention that someone made a cool mod (pycoal) which happens to make good uses of Steam generation and recycling back using Cooling Towers: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/pyanodon ... processing

i think the notion of having water as a limited resource deserves a good friendly debate, to the pros and cons, (and a list of possible gameplay areas that could be affected or would need to be considered) but i guess a possible way to start, could be to simply add an option to Toggle water limits On or Off, but for each defined Water area on the map. This way, just like an Ore Patch will have a finite total amount of minable ore (usually), each Water Patch could also have one.

Then, a quick Rightlick (or button) could be toggled On or Off, to enable or disable the enforcement (and calculation) of IF the water patch has enough Water remaining. The water patches could also be controlled via the starting settings (like how many patches of water to have, and how large etc)

but for the sake of balancing, the toggle would allow people to continue their games if they actually found that they had a good game in progress, yet were struggling with water supply, and then they could later enable the feature, when ready to try new tactics?

The only main thing i think would be important overall though, would be to ask if any "visible" weather animations could have some options for them, so that the CPU does not suffer with high usage (unlike some other games where the weather system and animating rain & animating trees causes lag)

I wish water be (optionally) limited in some scenarios.

There should 3 water sources in game: lake (finite), sea (infinite, as is now) and groundwater.

Sea is infinite, everything works just as now.
It's any body of water greater than eg. 400 tiles, or with at least one deep water tile.
You can divide sea to smaller bodies and convert it into lakes.
However, landfill should not work on deep water tiles and one-two tile from it, so You can not just drain entire sea or build over it. Just shallow part of it...

Lake is any body of water smaller than eg. 400 tiles, and with no "deep/dark" tiles (just "light" ones).

Any one dark tile => sea.
Bigger than 400 = sea.

There are no water physic needed, used water is just subtracted from every tile in that lake evenly. No flow, no level differences. Just one variable, with equal value on all lake tiles.

Initially, each lake tile after generation contain eg. 128k of water, so having 100 tiles of lake gives You 13M of water.
Offshore Pump performance is equal to amount of water in the tile (or 1,2k, whatever is lower), so there are no negative effects until water level drops from 120k to 1,2k (99% of water is drained). After this, pump efficiency drops with water level to 0.

When water level reach zero, *puff* - lake shoreline is converted into cliffs, with desert (or new terrain "biome") at the bottom.
You must blow the cliffs to get access to drained lake bottom. You can not refill 100% drained lake. It's permanently converted into useful grounds. It may reveal new resources, eg. oil fields, or any resource currently replaced by water during map generation. Resources should be hidden until You drain entire water.

You can drain water from lake to nearby sea (water "disappears"), or other lake using new object - water outlet. Outlet just add any spare water from your system (optionally limited with Login Network) to the lake, up to the maximum lake level of 256k/tile. Outlet performance is limited in the same way as the pump. Closer to maximum water level on the tile, the slower it works. So, you can't overfill the lake. You can't pump other liquids to the lake using water outlet.

Groundwater
Is just resource very similar to oil. Blue puddles, gathered in fields, require water tower to get access, infinite, but shrinking output. Exactly just like oil.
Alternative for regions without access to lakes or sea. No new code is required, just recolore the oil fields

And ice, if the planet is enough cold. Smelt it, use it and now the water can be used as before.

UPD:
Ice ore mod