Factorio Forums

At first I thought it was a problem caused by the fluid handling fix, but this morning I noticed something that revealed the true problem to be in the chemical plants and only revealed by the fluid handling fix:

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=69207&p=421136#p421136

Essentially, the inputs for the chem plants are different between making solid fuel from light oil and cracking light oil to petroleum. The former is set up for dual light oil inputs and the latter for one water and one light oil. This was not a problem for switching the recipe so that either could be used with the setup linked in the other thread, before the fluid "fix", because the chem plants would just ignore the water input when running the solid fuel recipe and didn't care about only having one light oil supply pipe.

So I pumped out the water and deleted the connection. Now, the chem plant itself is mixing the two inputs and allowing light oil to back flow into the vacated water pipes, which is what clued me in. If the chem plants treated both inputs independently and didn't allow the back-flow, the water pipes could be left in situ and there wouldn't be a problem, allowing me to use my old setup without any problems.

Nothing you describe is a bug, the machine input pipe simply sets the fluid system connected to it to the filter that it is using - light oil.

A) It breaks something that worked fine before.

B) If you mixed inputs in a real chemical plant, I would want to be far, far away.

To me, that's a bug, or at the very least a design flaw.

Even the premise is ridiculous on the face of it...setting pipe contents based on what the machine expects as an input, rather than what is being pushed into it from the source? That's, as they say, putting the cart before the horse. Players don't need to be policed to protect them from their mistakes (or deliberate actions in this sort of case), that isn't even what Factorio is about. The whole fluid system has turned into a textbook case study of far left political decisions.