Friday Facts #430 - Drowning in Fluids

[valneq]

If we want a tile-able pattern of 256x256 we need to account for the size of the pumps connecting the pipelines.
Therefore, the logical request would be a size limit of 254x254.

But I doubt that Wube will do that. They must have thought about that already, and probably have reasons why they did not go for a higher number – or something compatible with the chunk size.

[FasterJump]

I wasn't convinced by the 'Great Simplification' of the previous FFF.

I think that this FFF's tweaks are good, or at least better than the last system.

Basically now each 250x250 block becomes like a single pipe entity. I'm okay with that... But the 250x250 size seems a bit odd and unintuitive.

To be honest I think that it could work out well in practice, and if 250x250 seems too large, players can always add more pumps to delimit.

I'm still not fully convinced because I liked fluids flowing in pipes in 1.1 and maybe I will miss it, but maybe that's just the classic 'fear of change' talking.

14 sec for trains to transfer fluids? Is it about the same as the time it take to transfer stacks?

Edit: I forgot to mention that I'm glad more tweaks are planned on the fluid system, thanks for keeping is in the loop!

[foxiest_engineer]

The Factory must flow!

[fly]

And here we have another example of an "optional" quality.

I hope there soon will be a mod that sets all/selected items to a pre-selected quality level before the game start, and hides the research and quality related visual nonsense from UI. I would rather play with such mod and without achievements.

[JigSaW]

One step forward, two steps back

Pipelines are constrained to a 250x250 tile area

Cool feature if it wasn't for the fact that the game highlights for you where the issue is so you don't have to think about it. It's a puzzle that literally shows you the solution for itself. Imagine if your science production rates would fall off and instead of figuring out yourself where the shortages are the game would just tell you what and where it is.

1 Water expands to 10 Steam in boilers and heat exchangers; they just consume 10x less water to make the same amount of Steam

Lame. There was a lowkey beauty in how water hungry nuclear energy is (given how dirt cheap uranium is) and you had to put an actual thought into designing your setups to ensure proper water input.

Fluid wagons have been buffed to 50,000 (2x increase).

Not sure why that change was ever needed. You can build trains with how many wagons you want, there was no issue with fluid trains throughput. Just add more if what you have is not enough.

And once again, I'll repeat my comment from "Fluids "2.0" topic - just make new system a setting or a mod to turn on/off. The fact that this simplified version of fluid handling is being forced on all players and not just the ones who'll buy SA is mindboggling to me.

[Gergely]

256*256

Why do you people care so much about chunks? You need to fit your base within 16 radar's range?

[Molay]

I'm surprised the feedback was positive, so I'm probably not really getting how it will actually feel in game without trying it. To me, that artificial 250x250 space limitation sounds, well, artificial and unfun. It may not be constraining, but it sure sounds like it might be annoying when *suddenly* the pipe magically stops working and needs a pump because some weird limit is reached.

I think my biggest issue with it is the binary nature of it. If size exceeds the limit, flow will cease. That sounds so very wrong to me, as pipes never behaved that way. They got ineficient, but that was still good enough for many an application. Perhaps adding a flow modifier for every tile past the 250x250 limit, say -1% flow rate, would feel more natural. You keep the current notification/visual indication of the pipe exceeding the artificial limit, but you don't have it magically stop because one pipe segment too many is placed. If you're 50 tiles over, the network works at half capacity, at 100 tiles it effectively stops. But there is a gradient, and that feels a lot nicer imo.

It's funny that pipes now feel more like a fuse tripping in Satisfactory, where the whole thing stops working if power demand exceeds production, meanwhile in factorio power is on a gradient but the pipe "trips" when it's too long. Weird lol.

Sorry for the negative feedback, I'm thoroughly looking forward to Space Age and all it has to offer, but everything I read about the new fluid system, so in this and that other FFF, just sounds like "placeholder" to me. Just a feeling I get with it. Maybe it'll grow on me as I play, and I'll likely enjoy the performance benefits it brings, but from a feel-standpoint, I'd call it a step back from the previous system -- we used to have fluid flowing through the network and filling it up tile by tile, and we had no arbitrary limit, just an expected and natural feeling decline in flow as length increased, which was less gamey and more easy to intuitively get.

[GregoriusT]

256 x 256 please, as everyone here keeps screaming, I will join in on it. Also 254 or 255 would still be acceptable, since the Pump is 2 Tiles long, unless the pump tiles themselves count towards the Limit.

You did not mention whether Offshore Pumps are limited to 1200 instead of 12000 Water now. I mean it would make sense to nerf them, but I do be tempted to run 100 instead of 20 Boilers from one Offshore Pump if you did not nerf it, lol. (the 6000 total flow limit already nerfs it, not to mention Boilers had flow limits too before)

Fluid Wagons being twice as big and having a higher Flow Rate, hrrm, surely nobody will use Fluid Wagon Tanks instead of regular Fluid Tanks to save space or something stupendous like that. The Tile to Fluid Ratio just so happens to be on the sweet spot to allow those shenanigans.

I do like Water Wagons actually being viable for compact Outposts now, since Water expands by 10.

All in all, great new Fluid System and visualization. I love all the changes to it so far. ^^

...nulcear power is ~10 times more viable in space and...

Pretty sure Steam Engines/Boilers/Turbines are banned on Space Platforms.

[wizcreations]

This is a great improvement over what was shown in the previous Fluid Friday Factorio Fact

[TheKid0z]

For those saying 256x256 forget that you are usually using underground pipes for straight sections. As they are 10 tiles wide you get 25 underground pipes and be chunk aligned. But with pumps, storage tanks and buildings it’s not easy. Plus from a previous FFF logically pipes are merged into one contiguous section except for at junctions. Also I’m not sure if quality increases the underground pipe distance. But overall with 1 pump 1 storage tank and 1 offshore pump(water tile not counted logically) it’s 6 tiles. Hence 250x250 is reasonable.

[KuuLightwing]

Yea, at this point I feel like we are switching one unintuitive mess, with another unintuitive mess with arbitrary restrictions. I don't see how it's an improvement over 1.1 anymore. 1.1 system was not intuitive, sure but it was something you work with - design around its throughput, put pumps when necessary - or not if throughput is sufficient. But this is just... not it IMO. 250x250 footprint is not even tied to pipe length like it is in 1.1 - I can have 5000 tiles long pipe as long as it is within 250x250 footprint.

And yea, wagon unloading is nerfed with caveat of "you can use quality" of course. As for "use more wagons" - maybe I will, when balancing wagon unloading stops being a giant pain in the butt. Fluid wagons are buffed too, while item wagons are not for some reason, even though belt throughput was raised to 5.33x.

[CyberCider]

...nulcear power is ~10 times more viable in space and...

Pretty sure Steam Engines/Boilers/Turbines are banned on Space Platforms.

Out of those, only boilers are banned. We have already seen a nuclear powered platform in the music fff

[spiro9]

Honestly, this is a huge setback. I'd prefer the existing system over any of the changes being presented.
For oil in particular, at this point, if Wube is going to go with this presented system, I'm just going to start setting up barreling to transport oil around. I'd much rather deal with that than have to put up with a completely new, arbitrarily-designed system that I can't make immediate sense of from a surface reading. The existing system has its quirks, yes, but on the surface it makes intuitive sense. A 250x250 block where fluids move around instantaneously is neither realistic nor intuitive and will only confuse new players and frustrate existing players. This is not a good change.

[doktorstick]

• What do you mean 250x250?
• Is this a bounding box?
• Where is it centered?
• How do we know where the boundaries are so we can plan instead of "whoopsie! I need a pump now"?
• Can I have a pipeline that is 62_500 pipe segments without flow falloff?

[FasterJump]

...

I fully agree with most points and suggestions.

I am trying to be open minded with the new fluid system, but I'd say that I share most of Molay's concerns (and they had some interesting suggestions)

I'll wait and see I guess.

[CyberCider]

Steam condensation? acid steam? acid neutralisation? geothermal energy? valuable ice?
Seems like someone had an early access to the game (a LAN party probably)

I’m… flattered?
But no, all that information is from fffs and reddit comments
I’m just active in the discord, where there are channels dedicated to talking and speculating about future content. We love our hypotheticals there (but are of course ready for them to turn out wrong or be undone by a change in development)

[Loewchen]

I generally like that pipe networks will not give infinite throughput with infinite size anymore. But I think the hard cutoff at 250 will make long distance low throughput pipelines (like e.g. for lubricant on the other side of the base) that work fine in 1.1 quite a bit more annoying since you even have to place pumps for those.
If there is a forced fluid segment border at that 250 distance instead, that reduced throughput (like an imaginary slow pump) but did not stop flow completely this would still keep that viable. You couldn't alert for that then though, so I don't know how to handle that.

I like the reduced pump speed for train loading and unloading, that always felt off. Not so sure about the reduced pump speed in general, I hope I don't need to place multiple parallel pumps every time I use them for circuit logic.

Pump output rate being proportional to the fullness ration is a great thing.

[GregoriusT]

Is this a bounding box?
Where is it centered?
How do we know where the boundaries are so we can plan instead of "whoopsie! I need a pump now"?
Can I have a pipeline that is 62_500 pipe segments without flow falloff?

- Yes
- It is not centered, it will just draw a rectangle across all the Pipes, which is absolutely trivial to do in Code, since you only need to take the min and max X and Y coordinates to determine it.
- The Boundaries are indeed not very visible while building (i think), so you might need to measure manually.
- Yes

[NeoMoonstruck]

This change is definitely better than the last one, but I don't know, I feel like something is not right with this fluid system. The 1.1 system had problems that I didn't like at all, like the uneven distribution depending on the order of pipe construction, that doesn't make sense, or the diminishing returns maybe being too harsh. If you made a new fluid system without the uneven distribution and a much looser diminishing returns, that would be great.

PD: Sorry for the translation errors.

[Merssedes]

Will placing 2 pumps one into another will be giving any advantages compared to 1 pump?

P.S. Agree about 256 tile size instead 250. Numbers should be beautiful.