[2.0.45] Fuels or nutrients can sometimes lose 1% of its energy value

[asere]

Hello,
During my first time on Gleba, I have tried to understand how to link recipes to nutrients.
For instance:
- a nutrient is 2 MJ yummy value,
- the bioflux to nutrient recipe takes 2 secs (1 sec on biochamber with x2 speed),
- the biochamber's yummy consumption is 0.5MW.

So using Biochamber using batchs of 4 times the bioflux to nutrients recipe should consume exactly 1 nutrient in theory.
Well... in practice, there can be 1% loss from nowhere depending on how fast the inputs are coming to the biochamber.

Here is a gif as a demo (video format as attachment):

Biochamber.gif (67.88 MiB) Viewed 420 times

And the problem also exists on furnaces recipes !

So the problem is easy to reproduce:
- place two biochambers / furnaces
- place exactly 1 nutrient / fuel on each machine
- for biochambers, select a recipe (for instance bioflux to nutrients here)
- on one of the machine, place lots of inputs (for instance bioflux / iron ores)
- on the other machine, place enough inputs to process 1 recipe at a time

And I did not expect this 1% loss at all. So far I tried to find a mention of this somewhere in the Factorio wiki and this forum, nothing... Did I miss something ?
The issue occurs on Windows and Linux for the tests, on version 2.0.43 and 2.0.45, with or without the Space Age DLC (with furnaces).

I really hope this problem be considered as a bug and be fixed. The current workaround is to ensure that the machine will never have a downtime until the fuel / nutrient is completly consumed.

Thank you !
Asere

[asere]

The problem might be related to this one: 49936
Although the topic is old (2017) and not referred as a bug, the goals have evolved since then (with the spoilage system for example).

[Rseding91]

What I suspect is happening:

During each machine update it will attempt to consume it's maximum energy consumption for that tick (based off the value defined in the prototype). It then applies that % consumed to the % progress of the recipe. If the recipe progress is > 100%, it's finished and produces the result. If it has more progress left it attempts to consume more ingredients and apply the progress to that craft. If there are no ingredients then the extra progress left over from finishing the last craft is simply lost as part of the last craft cycle.

We have no plans to change this behavior and the "work around" for it is to simply make more nutrients for the machine to consume. They're infinite and cheap.

[asere]

Thank you for the answer ! I understand the ideas and I accept the choices.

But relying on abundance supply of nutrients means relying on garbage collector (or spoilage collector), a completely different design not everyone would consider directly.
I am not here to debate between different designs. I just want to point the fact that a batch design is possible, the game gives literally everything to let you think it's possible (like inserters taking spoiled first items, read fuel from circuits, etc...).
And the fact that there is only this hidden fuel consumption behavior (non intuitive from player point of view) as an obstacle can have a side effect of frustration for many players (I assume I am and will be not the only one who would imagine a batch design for Gleba).
This, plus the lack of documentations of such an obstacle which ends up letting people believe the total opposite (by finding for example this wiki page).

Thank you !
Asere