0.15 and Flare Stack Problem

[evildogbot100]

The Original Problem :
At some point of the game we might be needing lots of heavy oil but none of the other oil. The other oils will pile up no matter how much storage you dedicate and the best we can do is convert it to other product and store them. But then, we need to keep making storage for the products and so on, and storage placing can not be automated. Or we could manually mine a full liquid tank to destroy the liquid inside. One of the scenario we might be facing is when we need to make tons of tier 3 belt and nothing else. Or making those electric engine for construction robots. While it is an unlikely scenario, I find it unfitting for an automation game to hit a dead end where there is no automation solution for a certain scenario. And we aren't talking about things that the devs intend to be manually done like biter management. It is some normal production problem.


The Solution (0.14) :
In 0.14 we can easily circumvent the problem by putting steam engine to eat up liquids that goes inside them. It is wasting oil, true, but it is not a problem of automation. The factory still works as long as you want to sacrifice efficiency for automation.

The new problem (0.15)
After the change to steam engine, they now only use steam instead of all liquid, so there is no easy way to destroy excess oil byproduct.

The new solution (0.15)
But there is still way to destroy liquid. Right now there is only 2 automated way to destroy item in Factorio that doesn't create more product. The first one is burn them, have a train running around in circle and feed them with fuels. It is extremely slow and only works on fuel items. Or you could run a boiler with fuel but after you heat the liquid (can not use water), barrel them then re-feed it to boiler so that the boiler keep running nonstop, again only works on fuels. The burner loop is probably the fastest liquid destroyer right now. The second one is launching rocket without satellite, so that we won't get space science back, but seriously, who wants to launch rocket just to get rid of light oil.

So what's your point :
It has been too long that factorio don't implement a proper flare stack (oil burner that doesn't do anything other than burn oils), we just keep on exploiting game mechanic to get it work like a flare stack. First the steam engine, then the burner loop, we just keep using exploit after exploit. So the feature is already there, but hidden from the eye of public. Why do we need to hide this feature? So I am proposing the devs to do one of these 3 things:

1. Implement a flare stack building
Self explanatory, a "proper" way to do liquid destruction.

2. Make a process that convert petrol gas to heavy oil with very unattractive ratio
This is one way to circumvent the original problem without having item destruction. So the loop heavy->Light->gas->heavy in a sense works like a flare stack.

3. Do nothing
Congrats to the player who figure out burner loop. A cumbersome solution for an unlikely problem. We shouldn't make their knowledge obsolete by adding simpler way of liquid destruction.

So, which one of them that you think is best?

[Lav]

My suggestion is:

1. Allow boiler to accept liquid fuel as well.
2. Allow boilers to vent the steam into atmosphere or introduce a steam vent with the same purpose.

Essentially, if you're burning something you should be able to get benefit from it. And there's already a building which burns something and can get a benefit from it - the only problem is this building doesn't have a way to burn something uselessly.

For bonus points:

3. Make vented steam deal damage.

[OBXandos]

We have this in .15 now, it's called infinite research. You need a constant supply of plastic bars and sulfur. If you crack everything into petroleum gas it will always be used.

Before getting to that point I do see that there could be an issue, so something could be done there.

[Gnark]

But there is a solution,

Make solid fuel of Gaz and light petroleum => burn it, launch space rocket with it, whatever you want ...

[Mehve]

Despite the increased need for heavy oil now, I can't ever see it outpacing the need for light oil and petroleum. At worst, you'll run some refineries on the basic model instead of advanced, and do less cracking. But between solid fuel, plastic, and sulphur, there's no reason to run into a situation where you need more heavy oil than the others.

Also, don't forget about the new coal liquification - which lets you turn 25 heavy oil into 35. If you ever run into a situation where you needs tons of heavy oil, there are lots of good options.

[Finndibaenn]

I don't get what the problem is .

My factory is running on solid fuel, both furnaces and steam engine.
I've set up circuits so that when my storage tanks are fuel this enables processing the relevant oil to solid fuel, this way i don't have any problem, neither full tanks, nor any shortage.

I have coal as a backup but it's almost never necessary

[iceman_1212]

i can think of a third way to "flare" off unwanted byproduct for production of lubricant.

p.s. surely it is better to launch a rocket or make modules than it is to spin a train, fluid or fuel in circles?

[evildogbot100]

Seems like half the reply don't understand the problem, It's not when you want to use light oil/gas that is the problem. It is when you don't want to use them. And I stated earlier that it is unlikely scenario but doesn't mean it is not a problem.

[vanatteveldt]

Another option is to make a "flare stack": convert the unwanted oil into rocket fuel, add a powerplant, and add dummy-load to the powerplant (radars or pairs of barrel/unbarrel assemblers with full speed modules). In a sense, radars are a way to void power, and solid fuel turns oil (+water) into power...

I would probably buffer the rocket fuel and feed it to my trains (180% accel!) and normal power plant, and only unload into the "flare" powerplant if the buffer is full. A steel chest can hold 480 rocket fuel <- 4800 solid fuel <- 96k PG or about 4 normal tanks. So, if you have a buffer of something like 6 steel chests, it can hold the equivalent of 24 tanks of PG...

[In .15.6 you could wall of a biter nest and build flamethrower turrets just out of range, that would function as a flare with nice visuals to boot , but I think the update to remove the 'anticipatory firing' makes this impossible]

[iceman_1212]

yes i face temporary sitautions where natural buffering due to trains results in periods of not making lubricant, but as long as i keep my factory running, the issue sorts itself out. but you are correct that if you want lubricant at a moment's notice, it may not be possible (depending on how your factory is structured) without jumping through hoops - or in my case, burner inserters - to get rid of unwanted byproduct.

[AcolyteOfRocket]

I agree with the OP, the game directs you to convert heavy to light oil, with no reverse gear. The fact that conventionally you might not need a reverse gear misses the point, this is a sandbox game and it is both counterintuitive and unrealistic to not have a way of converting light oil/petroleum into heavier products as it is very easy in real life.

It would be nice to convert light oil into heavy, it should be possible at only small cost - just make sure that going from heavy to light and back again is a loss, otherwise you have an exploit on your hands.

The game should also have a disposal point, that produces pollution and nothing else, from anything. It can be a flare stack, burn-pit (a flare stack for liquids) or a just a pump that dumps into a water course (formerly the industry standard).

And watch that pollution map turn red

[Daid]

Seems like half the reply don't understand the problem, It's not when you want to use light oil/gas that is the problem. It is when you don't want to use them. And I stated earlier that it is unlikely scenario but doesn't mean it is not a problem.

The problem is, that you have this hypothetical scenario, and didn't sketch an actual one.

Actual one, you have a pretty big factory. You want to produce the blue belts and friends somewhere. There is oil nearby. All of a sudden you have these byproducts that you cannot use where you are doing this. And transporting them to where you actually use them it far away and the amounts you are producing are not worth saving compared to the size of your factory.

(Angle mods have a flare stack, but you have so many byproducts that that not using it makes it really really complex)

[vanatteveldt]

yes i face temporary sitautions where natural buffering due to trains results in periods of not making lubricant, but as long as i keep my factory running, the issue sorts itself out. but you are correct that if you want lubricant at a moment's notice, it may not be possible (depending on how your factory is structured) without jumping through hoops - or in my case, burner inserters - to get rid of unwanted byproduct.

I generally have a fluid tank right behind the lube plant, this buffers enough lube for around 1k blue belts. As a poster above said, you can have a secondary refinery row with normal (non-advanced) refining activated if heavy is too low.

(I used heavy for my flamethrowers for a while, but that was a big mistake, it's just too difficult to make in sufficient quantities and my base gets overrun quite quickly if I run out of flamethrower turret fuel... now I just use light, and so far have never had a shortage - and it does more damage too)

[iceman_1212]

@OP

I know this doesn't directly address the concern of not having on-demand lubricant that is desynced from all other production - but thought it might help.
Tying your lubricant production to a coal liquefaction setup should ensure plenty of supply. I just switched my lubricant production over in my main save from being tied into petroleum production to my coal liquefaction setup which I use for creating rocket fuel.

[NotABiter]

Just surround your whole base with a solid fuel "storage" system. Feed it with one big long belt like a gun turret ammo setup, but instead of filling turrets with bullets you're filling a solid wall-like set of boxes with solid fuel. Then as long as your base is making pollution and pulling biter attacks, the biters will destroy some of the boxes (along with the fuel inside of them) and then your construction robots replace the destroyed boxes with new empty ones. To make it more reliably automated, have a large bank of chem plants making the solid fuel with full T3 productivity modules (and no efficiency or speed beacons) so any time you're cranking out this "waste" solid fuel you're also cranking out tons of pollution to draw in the biters. (Or you could use a large bank of do-net-nothing barrel -> unbarrel -> barrel -> ... set of assembly machines directly connected to each other with stack inserters and pipes and loaded to the gills with speed modules to make infinite pollution.) And, of course, whatever your selected pollution generator, power it with solid fuel powered steam for even more pollution.

an unlikely problem ... So I am proposing the devs to do one of these 3 things: ... 3. Do nothing

The answer is obviously #3. Why would anyone want the Factorio devs wasting their time "solving" a non-problem when there are plenty of actual problems they could work on instead?

I stated earlier that it is unlikely scenario but doesn't mean it is not a problem.

Except that's EXACTLY what it means.

There's some chance that I will have a hallucination that causes me to walk out onto the balcony and climb over the rail and go *SPLAT*. But that's not a problem - that's not something I'm going to spend any effort "solving" - the cost/benefit ratio for any such "solution" is awful.
(In fact, the only hallucinations I've ever experienced were due to sleep deprivation, and one of the most likely causes of sleep deprivation at this point is Factorio, so this unlikely scenario of mine is actually a problem with Factorio! Do you think the devs should try to fix it? I don't.)

this is a sandbox game and it is both counterintuitive and unrealistic to not have a way of converting light oil/petroleum into heavier products

What do you mean "no way to convert"? It's EASY to convert light oil to heavy oil:

light oil -> solid fuel -> boilers -> steam engine -> electricity -> pumpjack -> oil -> refinery -> heavy oil

[Distelzombie]

light oil -> solid fuel -> boilers -> steam engine -> electricity -> pumpjack -> oil -> refinery -> heavy oil

You would just end up with billions of chests full of solid fuel. Yea... actually, you can include requester chests in your solar power builds. There is probably enough space for about 5-10.

[Oleksij]

I am having exactly the same problem. I was reading through the thread in a hope that community has some elegant solution. Instead, I found only lack of understanding of the problem and "you shouldn't want it". But I DO want to find an automated way to solve the problem. Simply because it's Factorio, where everything should be automated.

Problem is following:

I am building a 2k SPM (science per minute) mega base. All my production is distributed, I am not using centralized "do all smelting", "do all greens", "do all reds"... production, because at that scale rail system becomes a bottleneck. I split everything into smaller production blocks, and merge them locally with smaller rail networks. For example, I have on-site bot smelter, producing 10k plates a minute, and I am using only ore patches that can last for 100+ hours. I have on-site steel smelters, producing 2k steel a minute. I have red circuit outposts, producing 7k red a minute. To achieve that, I am wiring 2x copper plates, 1x iron plates, 1x coal outposts and ~100 oil pumps worth to a fairly small beaconed outpost that turn it all into red circuits. All of these production areas are self sufficient, and are capable of producing intermediates at certain amounts. And all I do, I just set up outposts and wire them together to create higher level products (science, and rocket components).

Until it gets to purple science. Purple science requires lubricant for engines. And lubricant production is not self sufficient. It has excess oil products, which I cannot trash in .15. I do not care about trashing some extra oil at this scale. For me it means trashing production of some 25 oil pumps, that's nothing, I have 500+ of them. But what I do care, is that I'm forced to have some un-needed dependency of my main base on that single lubricant outpost. Because the only solution right now seems to be converting these oil products into rocket fuel and bringing it to my central base, hoping that it will consume them eventually.

If you never achieved at least 1RPM, don't bother replying, you just don't understand the problem yet. You still have all the fun ahead, trying to build a bigger base.

[Lav]

Actually, I'm pretty sure disposal of extra oil can be automated with a decent performance.

The solution includes flamethrower turrets, chests and a biter spawner.

Keep a single spawner and build a bunch of laser turrets which will make mincemeat out of any spawned biter, but lack the range to shoot at the spawner itself.

Build a bunch of chests between laser turrets and the spawner. Solid fuel is to be delivered and stored in them.

Build a bunch of flamethrower turrets farther back, making sure they cover the chests.

Build another bunch of laser turrets to quickly kill any biter that manages to pass through the chests.

Slap a roboport for good measure.

When chests get filled with solid fuel, disable power to the first line of laser turrets and to the roboport. Happy biter will charge forward and draw fire from flamethrower turrets - both on itself and on the chests. As soon as the biter passes the chests though, it dies of laser poisoning from the second bunch of turrets.

When chests are destroyed by fire, restore power to the first line of laser turrets. Give flames some time to burn away.

Enable power to the roboport. Bots will fly out and rebuild the chests and solid fuel delivery system.

[evildogbot100]

Using flamethrower to burn off liquid is horrible. 1 entity burns off 3 liquid/s, also doesn't destroy petrol gas. Compared to the old steam engine who destroyed 30 liquid/s it has no chance.

[Lav]

Using flamethrower to burn off liquid is horrible. 1 entity burns off 3 liquid/s, also doesn't destroy petrol gas. Compared to the old steam engine who destroyed 30 liquid/s it has no chance.

I'm talking about using flamethrower to burn chests full of solid fuel.