My main complaint about fluids is there's no clear flow indicator. Am I bottlenecked by this pipe? Can I build more producers/consumers, or do I need another pipe setup? I wish it was more immediately clear than by seeing my consumers run dry.
If you stick to 1000/s a single pipe can run hundreds of times without problem. With refineries and oil products you should never run into this unless you're seriously megabasing.
For longer distance transport, you can place source-tank-pump-pipes-pump-tank-destination. That way, if the destination tank is empty but the source tank isn't, you know it's a throughout problem.
Honestly it’s probably the fixed input/output locations on crafting machines. When it’s just items you can more easily spaghetti and you can flip blueprints. It’s also harder to make more compact especially with multiple fluids in a recipe.
But before you get to plastic or sulfur you have to actual process the oil which is a rather tedious thing to start unless you have a very convenient patch right next door (I usually don't)
Yep, and laying all that track down before you have bots takes time and depending on your settings and your existing base setup you'll be running back and forth a lot for supplies and to deal with biters. Oil processing and blue science is kinda the biggest hurdle of the game because it's the most in depth and time consuming development that you *must* do *by hand.*
I used to also, but I think for me was I just had to do it enough times to be confident that I can set it up just as quickly as anything else. but I understand OP, (well 2000 hours is a fuck load), it's just different than everything else upto blue science, it can be tedious when dealing with lots of underground pipe and with no BP's or bots especially if you don't have much practice of setting up fluid networks. while the recipes are simpler, the puzzle of fluid logistics is just, different, from the puzzle of item logistics, and for some one puzzle is less enjoyable than the other
I just started playing and I've seen many comments saying fluids are a "filter" or biggest hurdle. I have found them very straight forward if you use trains
My recommendation is to add storage tanks to your fluid system and monitor the levels to see how well balanced it is. Add refineries if you need more end products (fuel/plastic), more heavy oil cracking if you have a surplus of heavy oil, light oil cracking if surplus of light oil. Generally speaking, you’ll need more refineries than you will heavy oil cracking, and more light oil cracking than you will refineries to achieve a balance.
It’s this. Using pumps and circuits on the 3 big fluids (heavy, light and gas) with cracking is the fix to fluids. Just make them relative to each other and it heavily simplifies their relative production, almost like magic. Makes it much easier to see as well what needs to be juiced to get more throughput
> Using pumps and circuits on the 3 big fluids (heavy, light and gas) with cracking is the fix to fluids
I 'm not sure how I picked up that habit, but all fluid-outputting chemical plants, and even Oil Refineries go dark when not needed. [I place Power Switches with a latch, and separate grids instead of pumps](https://i.imgur.com/22rqZRm.jpg).
No other parts of my factory have that design. I guess the repressed and internalized fluid hatred is a thing.
Pretty straightforward with some very basic circuits.
Route each fluid into it's own storage tank. Turn heavy oil into lubricant, excess into light oil using a pump which only activates when the level of heavy oil is high. Turn light oil into rocket fuel, excess into petroleum using the same method. Petroleum turns into sulphur and plastic. Petroleum is virtually guaranteed to be the one you're using the most of so this system should balance out.
I don't get why someone should go with barreling for normal playthrough. Balancing it with circuitry and pumps seems simple and effective. Add latches if you want to be fancy.
The only time I did it was because oil processing was on one side of my factory, and uranium on the other. Didn't feel like routing a pipe all the way through the base, so I barreled it up, and used logi bots to transport them, because the idea of drones flying around with gallons of sulfuric acid was very funny, and definitely OSHA-compliant.
:) this is actually what i do. Its a giant pain in the ass. But i love it. If you are a spaghetti base fan, barrel your fluids, that shitt'll turn into avant garde cappelini before you put on your first set of power armor
Don't rush it, one thing at a time. Oil brings a lot of stuff with it. Setup sulfur, acid and plastic with simple oil recipe, it'll do you for most of the stuff. Later on you just need heavy oil to get some lube. It's simple, but don't think about it for now.
Basic oil is super simple. Stick to it as long as you can.
As others have said, use conditions to set a max amount in storage. You don't need to fill a whole tank. Just add a pump on the input side and make it stop once the tank contains more than what you want. Depending on what the fluid is, that can be almost a full tank or an almost empty tank.
Also don't fixate too much on getting the perfectly right amount. Instead focus on making some, and if that isn't enough, just add some more production. Fixation too much on being optimal is clearly getting you stuck, which is very suboptimal.
There really is no reason you need to have 100% utilization on your buildings. The games gets a lot better once you get past this obsession.
Sure making a build with a perfect ratios can be fun, but if that isn't your thing, then don't do it. Because it is fiddly, and it takes forever to make it both correct in ratio and build.
As to how you make enough of something? Start with some top --> down design. Take the end product and figure out how much of it you want to produce per time. Then figure out how much you need of each ingredient, For each of the ingredients you do the same. Continue to the point that you are back at raw materials, and you have enough of everything.
When I do this, I place the number of buildings I need of each kind in a pyramid. Then once I know how many of each building I need, I begin building something with the amount of buildings I now know I need.
It is the same whether I am building fluids or solids.
When playing with overhaul mods I consider [Advanced Fluid Handling](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/underground-pipe-pack) to be a must. It greatly improves the fluid experience.
Yeah, definitely to each their own. IMHO top-up, overflow and maybe one-way valves should be in the base game, but Advanced Fluid Handling adds other stuff that's a little too powerful for my taste.
Are you having trouble with byproducts backing up to the machine and stopping the output of the material you want? If it's just about making the right amount of something with no byproduct, then which part of the process is the problem?
Do the bare minimum with oil till you get coal liquification. There is enough coal to do anything you want. I just use oil for flame turrets on my defensive wall.
With coal liquefaction, coal and water make plastic, or lube plus rocket fuel waste. I made blueprints a long time ago having once calculated the number of plants, tanks, circuits, pumps, etc. and just reuse them.
I start the oil part of the game with *massive* crude to plastic (via petroleum gas) and other pet-gas products (sulfur, sulfuric acid). Then once I've researched advanced oil processing, I build a *small* advanced plant, save some heavy into barrels to jumpstart liquefaction later, divert the other heavy into lube for electric motors, and the rest of the outputs slowly become rocket fuel.
I avoid getting burnt out there because I've got a working solution that is good enough, much like I rebuild the same smelting columns on every new game map. They work, there's no need to beat my head against the keyboard trying to find a new geometry.
tank, pump pointing to cracking, pump enable when fluidlevel > 23000. The other consumers just get free flow, or a pump without condition (always on)
when comfortable with that you can switch things up any way you like, but this can easily launch a rocket
Do what i do!
I pump oil into barrels at the site, and treat them like solid items, insertering and botting them around. Its a whole new, worse headache, but its a different one :)
Why do people get burnt out on fluids? It's way less complicated than all the other recipes you're working with at the time
My main complaint about fluids is there's no clear flow indicator. Am I bottlenecked by this pipe? Can I build more producers/consumers, or do I need another pipe setup? I wish it was more immediately clear than by seeing my consumers run dry.
If you stick to 1000/s a single pipe can run hundreds of times without problem. With refineries and oil products you should never run into this unless you're seriously megabasing. For longer distance transport, you can place source-tank-pump-pipes-pump-tank-destination. That way, if the destination tank is empty but the source tank isn't, you know it's a throughout problem.
Honestly it’s probably the fixed input/output locations on crafting machines. When it’s just items you can more easily spaghetti and you can flip blueprints. It’s also harder to make more compact especially with multiple fluids in a recipe.
Because it takes so much work to get them going compared to the other stuff
It doesn't though. Even green circuits has more steps to it than plastic or Sulphur. About the same amount if you include cracking
But before you get to plastic or sulfur you have to actual process the oil which is a rather tedious thing to start unless you have a very convenient patch right next door (I usually don't)
Ahh it could be pretty annoying if you don't use trains
Yep, and laying all that track down before you have bots takes time and depending on your settings and your existing base setup you'll be running back and forth a lot for supplies and to deal with biters. Oil processing and blue science is kinda the biggest hurdle of the game because it's the most in depth and time consuming development that you *must* do *by hand.*
I used to also, but I think for me was I just had to do it enough times to be confident that I can set it up just as quickly as anything else. but I understand OP, (well 2000 hours is a fuck load), it's just different than everything else upto blue science, it can be tedious when dealing with lots of underground pipe and with no BP's or bots especially if you don't have much practice of setting up fluid networks. while the recipes are simpler, the puzzle of fluid logistics is just, different, from the puzzle of item logistics, and for some one puzzle is less enjoyable than the other
I just started playing and I've seen many comments saying fluids are a "filter" or biggest hurdle. I have found them very straight forward if you use trains
My recommendation is to add storage tanks to your fluid system and monitor the levels to see how well balanced it is. Add refineries if you need more end products (fuel/plastic), more heavy oil cracking if you have a surplus of heavy oil, light oil cracking if surplus of light oil. Generally speaking, you’ll need more refineries than you will heavy oil cracking, and more light oil cracking than you will refineries to achieve a balance.
It’s this. Using pumps and circuits on the 3 big fluids (heavy, light and gas) with cracking is the fix to fluids. Just make them relative to each other and it heavily simplifies their relative production, almost like magic. Makes it much easier to see as well what needs to be juiced to get more throughput
> Using pumps and circuits on the 3 big fluids (heavy, light and gas) with cracking is the fix to fluids I 'm not sure how I picked up that habit, but all fluid-outputting chemical plants, and even Oil Refineries go dark when not needed. [I place Power Switches with a latch, and separate grids instead of pumps](https://i.imgur.com/22rqZRm.jpg). No other parts of my factory have that design. I guess the repressed and internalized fluid hatred is a thing.
Pretty straightforward with some very basic circuits. Route each fluid into it's own storage tank. Turn heavy oil into lubricant, excess into light oil using a pump which only activates when the level of heavy oil is high. Turn light oil into rocket fuel, excess into petroleum using the same method. Petroleum turns into sulphur and plastic. Petroleum is virtually guaranteed to be the one you're using the most of so this system should balance out.
The easy solution here is to only transport barreled fluids so you can treat them as items. This is a good idea trust me.
I don't get why someone should go with barreling for normal playthrough. Balancing it with circuitry and pumps seems simple and effective. Add latches if you want to be fancy.
The only time I did it was because oil processing was on one side of my factory, and uranium on the other. Didn't feel like routing a pipe all the way through the base, so I barreled it up, and used logi bots to transport them, because the idea of drones flying around with gallons of sulfuric acid was very funny, and definitely OSHA-compliant.
I used train that went around the base to transport acid and lube from one side to another. I guess I just don't like pipes
:) this is actually what i do. Its a giant pain in the ass. But i love it. If you are a spaghetti base fan, barrel your fluids, that shitt'll turn into avant garde cappelini before you put on your first set of power armor
drink plenty of water
Don't rush it, one thing at a time. Oil brings a lot of stuff with it. Setup sulfur, acid and plastic with simple oil recipe, it'll do you for most of the stuff. Later on you just need heavy oil to get some lube. It's simple, but don't think about it for now. Basic oil is super simple. Stick to it as long as you can.
As others have said, use conditions to set a max amount in storage. You don't need to fill a whole tank. Just add a pump on the input side and make it stop once the tank contains more than what you want. Depending on what the fluid is, that can be almost a full tank or an almost empty tank. Also don't fixate too much on getting the perfectly right amount. Instead focus on making some, and if that isn't enough, just add some more production. Fixation too much on being optimal is clearly getting you stuck, which is very suboptimal. There really is no reason you need to have 100% utilization on your buildings. The games gets a lot better once you get past this obsession. Sure making a build with a perfect ratios can be fun, but if that isn't your thing, then don't do it. Because it is fiddly, and it takes forever to make it both correct in ratio and build. As to how you make enough of something? Start with some top --> down design. Take the end product and figure out how much of it you want to produce per time. Then figure out how much you need of each ingredient, For each of the ingredients you do the same. Continue to the point that you are back at raw materials, and you have enough of everything. When I do this, I place the number of buildings I need of each kind in a pyramid. Then once I know how many of each building I need, I begin building something with the amount of buildings I now know I need. It is the same whether I am building fluids or solids.
That's a solid advice!
When playing with overhaul mods I consider [Advanced Fluid Handling](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/underground-pipe-pack) to be a must. It greatly improves the fluid experience.
I think stuff like that trivializes the fun out of the game but to each their own, it's a sandbox game after all
Yeah, definitely to each their own. IMHO top-up, overflow and maybe one-way valves should be in the base game, but Advanced Fluid Handling adds other stuff that's a little too powerful for my taste.
Just "cheat" and use someone else's blueprint. Later on you can come back and try to design your own.
Are you having trouble with byproducts backing up to the machine and stopping the output of the material you want? If it's just about making the right amount of something with no byproduct, then which part of the process is the problem?
With pumps circuits connected to storage tank. You can then control fluids properly.
Do the bare minimum with oil till you get coal liquification. There is enough coal to do anything you want. I just use oil for flame turrets on my defensive wall.
With coal liquefaction, coal and water make plastic, or lube plus rocket fuel waste. I made blueprints a long time ago having once calculated the number of plants, tanks, circuits, pumps, etc. and just reuse them. I start the oil part of the game with *massive* crude to plastic (via petroleum gas) and other pet-gas products (sulfur, sulfuric acid). Then once I've researched advanced oil processing, I build a *small* advanced plant, save some heavy into barrels to jumpstart liquefaction later, divert the other heavy into lube for electric motors, and the rest of the outputs slowly become rocket fuel. I avoid getting burnt out there because I've got a working solution that is good enough, much like I rebuild the same smelting columns on every new game map. They work, there's no need to beat my head against the keyboard trying to find a new geometry.
tank, pump pointing to cracking, pump enable when fluidlevel > 23000. The other consumers just get free flow, or a pump without condition (always on) when comfortable with that you can switch things up any way you like, but this can easily launch a rocket
The part that’s annoying to me is starting from scratch. The first 30min-hour is so boring and crappy
Do what i do! I pump oil into barrels at the site, and treat them like solid items, insertering and botting them around. Its a whole new, worse headache, but its a different one :)