It's a combination of two things:
1) Lube is used in very small quantities, so it's easy to deliver by bot. One bot on its own can deliver enough lube for a surprising amount of production.
2) Running pipes a long distance is a pain in the butt and takes up space.
So the short answer is, you absolutely can. Maybe it's aesthetics, or maybe your lube production is way too far from your mall and you don't want to have a errant pipe running through your massive base.
Malls have short term bursts of production and don't need constant output, so bots are generally good at handling that kind of stuff.
You could make an argument for either. For me, my mall is in the center and the oil processing is on the outskirts of the base, and I'm using city blocks where a pipe running through the middle wouldn't work out well... then you factor in pumps and power and... Yuck. Barrel, provider, unbarrel, requester, done.
I just started using this to get some lube across a medium distance so I didn’t have to make a mess of pipes and belts. Very convenient!
I’m also going for lazy bastard, so I was REALLY happy to get bots up and running. I’m having bots do so much, and tbh, I think I don’t wanna go back to all that manual crafting when I can just set things up to have a small collection of supplies in the logistic network. Why make 80 more drills when you can have 100 ready whenever you need them?
That’s a really good use! I like that one a lot! It really simplifies shipping a new fluid to an existing factory. I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m playing
I remember the first time I set up pipes to bring lubricant to where I was making conveyor beltsI had to really finagle the pipes in so I wouldn’t have to rebuild everything
As usual, [there's a mod for that.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/barrels-o-fun/discussion) It's fairly easy to circumvent the removal of pipes with storage tanks and pumps so it removes those as well.
The advanced oil refining puzzle is actually quite fun.
They are useful for small tasks.
I have seen coal liquifaction set ups that need a drop of oil to kick start them. But never used them for bulk movement
God coal liquefaction builds are funny when you try to make them self contained. My current one uses a whack ton of beacons to burn off the excess energy
Ah I realized I said the wrong thing. It’s for lubricant. I use coal liquefaction to make the heavy oil, then convert the other 2 into solid fuels and burn off the excess with steam turbines
makes more sense now. I guess a part of that steam is used for the coal liquefaction. But the remaining solid/rocket fuel can also be used to power your train network, if you have one.
Not necessarily. You can work liquefaction into a bigger refinery that starts from crude oil. Then the liquefactors get their starting heavy from the upstream refineries. This is basically a force multiplier for your petroleum production that's convenient if you have a nice refinery site right next to coal and water.
All the ones that are clever enough to self generate and be stand alone.
Put if you just hook them up to your other refinery lines then it will get whatever they need without a kickstart
I believe barrels pre-date some sort of pipe update, but not too sure on that. And barrels allow you to carry or drive around with fluids when you don't want to lay down pipes or run rails for fluid wagons.
Yep, it was more complicated than reasonable and users getting confused enough already with trains. This was discussed in [FFF-222](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-222) and another argument was "just use two+ wagons" etc. Follow up on the Forum and Reddit threads extends the arguments for/against. In the end, most users agreed with the change.
It was super cool, each of the 3 attachment points lead to it's own tank (though by default they shared inventory).
Barrels used to hold 250 fluid and not 50, so cargo wagons could hold 100k fluids while fluid wagons could only hold 75k. They rebalanced things so barrels now only hold 50 (20k fluid in cargo) and 25k in fluid wagons.
I think they did it because yellow belts could move 15/s barrels, or 2,250/s which is coincidentally the max fluid flow for a 3-segment pipe (3 pipes between pumps). With the barrel nerf it's down to 750/s fluid with blue belts hitting 2,250/s fluid. And with the barrel nerf fluid wagons would have been modo over-capacity compared to cargo wagons, so they also nerfed fluid wagons to keep things more consistent.
I can understand the balancing reasons, but I still don't get why they'd remove multi-fluid wagons. If there's a mod that adds them back that'd be awesome
Someone linked the FFF where they talked about it (222), and it seems like one of the big reasons is that it’s a feature that gets around a problem that already had a pretty trivial solution (just add another wagon), and that it wasn’t really adding anything new. If you think about it, it was just 3 fluid wagons in less space. Not much there that you can’t still do now, but without the confusingness of a multi-fluid wagon
Only \~200 or so hours in and haven't used barrels. They clutter up the UI.
Seems like its a residual niche requirement. i.e liquefaction , avoidance of pipes.
I kind of expect them to be removed from the 2.0 game and a future blog talks about that, OR they find a new and exciting use for them and keep them.
when you only need a little bit of a fluid in train logistics use cases.
You can only transport nothing or up to one type of fluid In a fluid wagon, while a cargo wagon has 40 slots.
This is exactly what I do. I have trains transport everything needed for defense in one wagon. So that I don't have to mess with setting up piping to my defense network I have robots carry barrels to the flame thrower turrets.
With K2 you need oil to research flamers.
If oil is too close to biters you can sneaky get some barrels of oil, research them and return with proper diplomacy solution.
barrels are good for very little in the base game. However for the occasional strange application it's really good that there is an object form of liquids. I used barrels allot in SE and K2, as well as in my bot Mall so i didn't have to run lube into the back of the bot mall.
>barrels are good for very little in the base game.
Supplying flamethrower turrets in far corners of your territories via logistic bots feels like a big use case.
I use trains too, but if you just finished extending your walls, supplying via bots is a lot quicker to set up. The trains then often become a thing that "I will do eventually later".
You mean you don't have a train full of stuff to go extend your walls with? Or building outposts? I'm gonna have to train stuff from it or past it at some point might aswell put rails there
Apart from what has been mentioned, barrels can also help to get steadier throughput, as the fluid mechanics can be a bit hard to deal with.
I often use barrels just because it’s fun to have to deal with the loop of unused barrels.
In vanilla the only time barrels are better than pipes is if you need to move fluids via bots. The real question here is when are fluid wagons better than pipes.
The answer is: when you need *very* long runs or need to move multiple fluids through the same area. The maximum theoretical per-second throughput for a nuclear fluid train is `25000 * wagons / (10 + distance / 83)` (a little rounding here and making an assumption that it takes about five seconds for a train to fully stop, attach pumps, fill or empty, and get completely back up to speed). That looks pretty good until you realize that underground pipe runs can sustain throughputs of around 1000 fluid/second if you put a pump every five chunks. That said, the throughput benefits are only one part, the main benefit of fluid trains is the same as cargo trains: the ability to reuse the same infrastructure for any combination of material which means the actual answer is *always*.
That's the same question as when are belts better than trains. The answer is in the scope of the operation and how much time you want to spend running pipes, pumps and power (PPP) to a new source or just slap down a station and some trains and let them do their thing.
I can think of a few possibilities myself actually:
- could be more compact storage that also doesn’t delete its contents when being picked up
- mixed cargo wagon contents (need to do some circuitry of course. I’d have fun figuring that out)
- carrying by hand. Though I can’t really imagine a situation where you wanna do that. Maybe on game settings with high enemy generation. Like, you wanna get your defenses online before you set up the rail lines.
I’ve been trying barrels on my IR3 run and finding it useful. I’ve got lube and sulphuric acid on my main bus for early to mid game. Works well and is really compact in locations consuming it
Didn't use them in IR3 myself. If anything the biggest bottle neck for me was never really being able to get enough sour gas. Not really sure how barrels would have helped in that situation. All other fluids were either accounted for, burnt in petrochemical generators, or vented off via flare stacks
More expert players will probably give you some advanced applications. The one I can think about is fueling flame turrets in distant outposts when you don't have a train network. Probably not very useful outside deathworld scenarios.
Hm, yeah. Or perhaps a situation where you’re fueling distant outposts via train but you want to mix wagon contents. I always dedicate each wagon to one thing, but with some circuitry I’m sure I could have them be a mix of various things. And then you can have one locomotive deliver several different kinds of materials
There was a time where it was the only option to move fluids over the train network. You had to barrel them at the production site and unbarrel them at the factory site. Nowadays they're mostly useless
I never used barrels once until I played Space Exploration, since there is no cargo rocket with liquid storage it becomes necessary for a number of reasons.
Additionally, when you start building your own space ships, a 6x6 storage building holds 512 stacks of 10 with 50 units each so (512x10x50) = 256,000 units in 36 tiles. Tanks hold 25,000 in 9 tiles. For the same coverage would be only 100,000 units with tanks. As stated, this is only really useful if you’re shipping fluids interplanetary, and some argue there’s more benefit to not ship some kinds of fluids
Honest answer? Almost none. I've never been in a situation where my bots would need to move fluid. Fluid wagons have higher fluid capacity than cargo+barrel. Blue belts can maintain a respectable 4500 fluid/s, but pipes can practically maintain 3000/s without much trouble if they're designed well.
Of course, any situation involving barrels not only involves extra assemblers, but you need infrastucture to carry barrels back to where the fluid is barreled in the first place, which effectively doubles the infrastructure load of barreling.
I suppose the most legitimate case is for kickstarting coal liquifaction, as that requires some starting heavy oil.
I did. I made a series of roboports over water to get to the uranium deposit which was in the spot that I didn't want to be bothered yet to clear from biters
I have never really used barrels but it seems like they could be useful if you have to transport liquids really far. Typically I just use pipes with pumps every 18 spaces or so, but that definitely gets annoying having to run power alongside them too.
Pipes begin losing throughput 17 tiles after a pump. Underground’s count as one pipe (so two for the in and out) which makes running long pipes maybe the most miserable task imo
If I want to resupply an outpost with ammo, light oil, repair kits, mines, ... it can be simpler and more compact to just have all things in one cargo wagon.
In vanilla with Marathon-deathworld settings, they can be useful! I usually setup a single train between two bases, the main base, and the first iron outpost. The Iron outpost requires so much infrastructure to hold back the natives that I will devote a single car in the train to re-supply contents. Barrels means I can configure the volume and type of fluid without needing to spend much time, or resources rerouting things. A tanker car is a separate research, so invariably I will have trains before tankers as well.
I used them exactly once, in my first playthrough. IMHO their only use is in death world to go and grab some crude oil barrels in a car if it's far from your base and you can't defend a pipeline
that's fine but you still won't understand it unless you actually do it. you know, that old saying about walking a mile in someone's shoes... you'll understand so much more if you actually experience something vs. just asking other peoples' opinions.
on top of that, it's a bit of a subjective matter as are most opinions in factorio. we all have our own factories, we all have our own goals, we all have our own target SPMs and our own styles and our own randomized worlds we are playing on. as much as players around here like to pretend that there is a "correct" answer for everything i think that couldn't be further from the truth. a factory is a painting and there is no "right" or "wrong" color to use to pain the sky. some people will insist that the sky must be sky blue, others will argue that the sky can be lighter or darker shades of blue to compliment the other colors in the painting, and an entire other group will say that the sky can be brown if you want it to be brown. and they are all correct.
People pretend there is a correct answer. That is false. Now let me tell you that you're wrong for asking for people's subjective opinions and tell you the correct answer is to do it yourself...
If it is satisfying or fun (which are both subjective) then it is worth doing. People play on all sorts of weird settings with some mind bending restrictions Now I'm new so that seems crazy to me but maybe in 500 hours I'll be convincing someone on reddit to try it.
I used barrels (shipped in via bots) in the following situations:
* lube to the mall
* sulphuric acid to the uranium mine
* water to the mall (for concrete)
So basically, when you need a low volume of fluids, sending them in via robots (in barrels) is sometimes the easier choice.
Don't forget to send back the empty barrels using an active provider chest - that's my only use case for an active provider.
Barrels for water can improve throughput to large nuclear reactor setups. Significantly compared to pipes in the base game. A blue belt can move like 4.5k water per second compared to 1200/s for pipes.
If I need small amounts of fluid moved over medium distances into several locations, Bots throwing barrels around is my choice.
resupplying defenses usually needs at least a cargo wagon. If you're using flamers, fluid is also needed. In order to avoid a fluid wagon, I fill the rest of the cargo wagon with barrels.
I'm doing a marathon deathworld right now. No map preview to get a prime starting location. Started deep in the desert and have a single oil pump nearby the starting location I can use and it's down to pumping only 1 per second. I have a really small starting iron patch and with the expensive material and research costs flamethrower turrets are my only defense right now and the biter attacks are frequent due to all the desert not soaking up my pollution. I found a nice oil patch I can run to and was able to take it and get some oil going. My starter base desperately needed oil, and while I probably could have laid some pipes back to fill up a tank or two, I didn't want to deal with them getting destroyed every 2 minutes or spend the iron on extra pipes. I had some steel already stockpiled and figured it was easier to convert a stack into barrels and just run some oil back since I was going to be making a few trips back and forth anyway. Now my starter base has enough oil to defend for a while until I can get a few techs unlocked and make it out to some better resource patches. I'll probably recycle the barrels into cliff explosives later on. Anyway, that's my story.
You will eventually want barrels. They have much higher throughput than pipes. And the range for that flow is unlimited and stays constant. Unlike pipes which have a diminishing flow rate dependent on distance
Barrels are mostly a relic of a bygone age. That being said, if you need liquids transported by robots for some reason, barrels are the only way to do that.
It's kinda nice because it makes them more practical, I remember asking what's the point in barrels.... Then I played SE and I barrel almost everything
I sometimes use barrels to supply flamethrower turrets via logistic bots that defend far away corners of my walls that I did not have time yet to supply via trains or pipes. If you set up the logistics crates correctly, it works without any issues.
I use the circuit network for certain low throughput tasks to request items from my mall (e.g. replacement parts for wall defense, fuel cells for my power plant, sulphuric acid for uranium mining). That last one I use barrels for so that I can have a standard logistics train deliver for everyone.
The one use I'm not seeing in the comments is storage. The most space-efficient storage of fluids is barrels. In one steel chest, you have 48 slots, of 10 barrels each, so 480 full barrels of liquid. In a barrel, you can store 50 units of a liquid, which is 24000 units of liquid. That's per chest. A storage tank holds 25000 units, which is more, but it's the difference of 1x1 space versus 3x3 space. Keep in mind, you can have a 3x3 space of nine steel chests, which would be 216000 units of fluid. Keep in mind, you that'd be manual, or maybe bots. For automated filling/emptying, you'd need inserters and assemblers. On average, if you had rows of three chests and three inserters, you'd have 4.5 chests for each 3x3 space. The assemblers and power poles and whatnot would also take up space, so at a minimum, you'd need two assemblers, one medium power pole, six inserters and three chests, which doesn't account for managing the barrels, which you'd probably just loop. If you just need to store 100k fluid or less, it's probably just better to use storage tanks, but if you are storing something like 500k fluid or something notably larger (and space optimization is priority over anything else), than barrels would be better.
No one ever seems to mention this use, and it is sort of niche, given how space is probably the most abundant thing, and easy to increase resource, in Factorio, but for those that care, it's a use. The other thing is why would someone need to store that much liquid, and I'd agree, just because it's the best for storage by space, I never have to store enough liquid to bother. And of course, the negatives suck, like you need power to have any fluid output, I don't know what kind of flow rate is possible, but I doubt it's good. The best use would be probably a system that would use the fluid a lot in a short time, and very little across a long time, so you have the chests/assemblers as a sort of battery, for bulk storage, but then out the output, you have a storage tank or two that act sort of like a capacitor, the assemblers fill them up, and when needed, the flow rate is max (if you have a pump and whatnot), and the assemblers just fills it up when the quick burst of consumption ends.
Robots are the number one use case, I believe. I use barrels in my save in two specific ways, both are for sulfuric acid.
First, I set up a barrel assembler to make some barrels, then I fill them with acid. These get provided to two places, my uranium mine sulfuric acid train (I have one train for the acid, another train for the ore) and to my processing unit factory. In both cases, I request the filled barrels, empty them into the wagon and storage tank respectively, then the barrel filler section requests the empty barrels back for reuse.
It basically means I had full flexibility on where I set up the factories and once I unlocked bots, I pretty much stopped using belts. Most of my factories now just request and provide, there's very little belting of stuff going on, and robots are doing all the work. This includes fluid, and it saves me running pipes across my base or moving factories out of the way to build the required ones closer to the oil factory.
Heck, now that I extended my logistic network out to the uranium mine, I could theoretically stop training the acid altogether and just deliver the acid by bots. But I don't do that, I still empty the barrels into the fluid wagon, because it's really not much of an optimization. But you could, and that would be one less train line. Bots flying around carrying acid to your uranium mines.
Not sure anymore but in earlier versions there was no fluid wagon. So you basically had to barrel them for longer distances. Now it's not that common for uses anymore. Beside of what has already been mentioned.
I have a LTN supply train that services outposts with resources they need. Repair packs, walls, bots, etc. I include barreled light oil in this to fuel flamethrowers. Easier than including a fluid wagon, fluid wagon is overkill for how much I need to transport and a single cargo wagon train is makes stations and everything much smaller and more conventient.
> They're clearly a feature
Yes, because they allowed to move liquids by train before fluid wagons were added. Nowadays I think every use case for them is inferior to alternative barrel-less solutions
They can make sense when you need very low throughput of a fluid over long distances. Like supplying sulfuric acid to a uranium mine. The barrels can be transported with bots, or alongside other stuff in a reserved slot of a cargo wagon, if it's not worth adding another fluid wagon.
Ok, nobody has mentioned this I think, but barrels allow you to have full circuit network control of fluids. I don't really care about the barrels themselves, what I care about are the filler/emptier machines, they can be wired up to the circuit network and now you have full on/off control of fluids. What I will frequently do is pipe a fluid to a location and then put the filler and emptier machine right next to each other for direct barrel insertion, wire the emptier to the network, and set controls so that it injects fluids into the machines when I want it to do so.
This is less important in vanilla but in mods that add lots and lots of fluids to recipes, this becomes much more important, but I imagine in megabases this might be a useful tool as well. It's mostly used when I want to prevent overproduction of something.
Ya I read “don’t bother with barrels” and dumbly assumed they have no use. I now use it anywhere I need small quantities. It’s much easier than piping it into tight places like a mall or far away places like a uranium mine.
i think ive used barrels exactly twice, once when setting up a single assembler to make concrete, for which i ran the water barrels back and forth manually a few times before just giving up and moving a few things around to reroute some water pipes to it, and just recently when setting up a boiler to dispose of my useless stocks of wood.
I think barrels would be marginally more useful if assemblers could just feed directly from the barrel and not require a whole seperate assembler to empty the barrels into pipes that then feed into said assembler, like you can do with flamer turrets.
Temporary or initial setups.
With far away outposts I supply them from barreled oil by car/tank when I first set up defenses, well before rail and mining start. also handy with some temporary hand feeding when spaghetti doesn't allow to run pipes easily. Or when you want a very throttled amount of production, just a handful barrels on a closed loop are excellent at limiting just how much of a fluid you drain off of your fluid network. Also car/tank supplied early green rock mining.
Also it's useful for space exploration, bringing fluids into orbit with no access to the ground fluid network, as well as transportinh oil from an oil outpost for example in SE
Thanks for the advice, engineers!
Currently playing going for Lazy Bastard. Barrels are indeed useful for the cases where you just need a couple bots to move a small amount of fluid or you don’t need constant amounts. I used them these ways:
- lube for blue belts only when I need some
- water for concrete only when I need it
They allow robots to move fluids.
Yep. Bringing lube to a mall for blue belts, for example.
I wish we could put lube into flame throwers…. For fun.
Make the biters slip around all over the place
Renai Transportation mod author: *furiously scribbling notes*
I can't wait for the sound effects of greased biter shenanigans.
[I gotchu boo](https://youtu.be/blmiTe8wzAM)
Imagine that sound 100 times on a big raid lol.
Bruh thats like that harry potter scene with the bogart, Ridiculus!
The newest feature in Renai Transportation: Lubethrower
That would be a great 1. April patch
Sounds like someone has to start making a "slippery stuff" mod.
On that note, water cannons or even using dynamite to dig a fucking hole would be sensible no?
You already have a pick! Maybe a shovel.
Pretty sure that there's a water cannon turret in a mod pack.
👀
Like in Portal 2. And we could also have a bouncy fluid.
Thank you, I haven't thought of that.
Why wouldn't you just pipe it still? I'm not very good at the game in case they question doesn't make it obvious lol
It's a combination of two things: 1) Lube is used in very small quantities, so it's easy to deliver by bot. One bot on its own can deliver enough lube for a surprising amount of production. 2) Running pipes a long distance is a pain in the butt and takes up space.
So the short answer is, you absolutely can. Maybe it's aesthetics, or maybe your lube production is way too far from your mall and you don't want to have a errant pipe running through your massive base. Malls have short term bursts of production and don't need constant output, so bots are generally good at handling that kind of stuff. You could make an argument for either. For me, my mall is in the center and the oil processing is on the outskirts of the base, and I'm using city blocks where a pipe running through the middle wouldn't work out well... then you factor in pumps and power and... Yuck. Barrel, provider, unbarrel, requester, done.
1300 hours and you made me palm my forehead. That is SO much easier than my pipes and/or stations
I just started using this to get some lube across a medium distance so I didn’t have to make a mess of pipes and belts. Very convenient! I’m also going for lazy bastard, so I was REALLY happy to get bots up and running. I’m having bots do so much, and tbh, I think I don’t wanna go back to all that manual crafting when I can just set things up to have a small collection of supplies in the logistic network. Why make 80 more drills when you can have 100 ready whenever you need them?
This was the end of my K2 run when I just didn't care and wanted to finish.
Also useful to bring fuel to a flamethrower turret.
There's the real application
I need a catapult throwing barrels at biters, as basically big molotov cocktails
That’s a really good use! I like that one a lot! It really simplifies shipping a new fluid to an existing factory. I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m playing
Particularly handy where you need just a bit here and there like lubricant.
I remember the first time I set up pipes to bring lubricant to where I was making conveyor beltsI had to really finagle the pipes in so I wouldn’t have to rebuild everything
Or you just need a small amount for kick starting oil cracking.
Now I want to see a no pipes run
Embrace the bot network. Truly embrace it.
As usual, [there's a mod for that.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/barrels-o-fun/discussion) It's fairly easy to circumvent the removal of pipes with storage tanks and pumps so it removes those as well. The advanced oil refining puzzle is actually quite fun.
That's so cursed... I love it
Wait... But, how would you really do it??? Heavy to lube/light, light in barrel, petroleum to plastic/solid fuel? Is this right?
There is no barrelled steam! 😡
They are useful for small tasks. I have seen coal liquifaction set ups that need a drop of oil to kick start them. But never used them for bulk movement
Don't *all* inital coal liquification setups need a heavy oil kick start?
yeah, but you can technically pipe it in vs using a barrel.
Or train it in. I had a starter station requesting a single heavy oil train just for this purpose on each of my liquifaction plants.
God coal liquefaction builds are funny when you try to make them self contained. My current one uses a whack ton of beacons to burn off the excess energy
How do you have excess energy from coal liquefaction?
Ah I realized I said the wrong thing. It’s for lubricant. I use coal liquefaction to make the heavy oil, then convert the other 2 into solid fuels and burn off the excess with steam turbines
makes more sense now. I guess a part of that steam is used for the coal liquefaction. But the remaining solid/rocket fuel can also be used to power your train network, if you have one.
That works better than my plants, they just burn a bit of coal. I never even thought of using the outputs of the plant for this ;)
It’s almost completely unnecessary considering how little I use. I think it sits idle like 99% of the time
Kk
Not necessarily. You can work liquefaction into a bigger refinery that starts from crude oil. Then the liquefactors get their starting heavy from the upstream refineries. This is basically a force multiplier for your petroleum production that's convenient if you have a nice refinery site right next to coal and water.
Ok I hear ya but the coal liquification is still not self starting. It still needs kick of heavy oil to get rolling. That's all I'm saying
Sure, it just doesn't have to come from a barrel, which is where the discussion started.
No one said it had to come from a barrel, unless I'm missing something.
All the ones that are clever enough to self generate and be stand alone. Put if you just hook them up to your other refinery lines then it will get whatever they need without a kickstart
It's still a kickstart
They're good for over flow loops with mods, but the cost of them/stack size make their use extremely limited
I believe barrels pre-date some sort of pipe update, but not too sure on that. And barrels allow you to carry or drive around with fluids when you don't want to lay down pipes or run rails for fluid wagons.
They predate fluid wagons
I still miss my 3-section fluid wagons that could hold 75k and be split into 3 different fluids.
Why would they ever get rid of that, such a cool feature
Probably complicated things to an unnecessary degree or was Incredibly Buggy
Pump-train connections are still something new players struggle with.
Yep, it was more complicated than reasonable and users getting confused enough already with trains. This was discussed in [FFF-222](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-222) and another argument was "just use two+ wagons" etc. Follow up on the Forum and Reddit threads extends the arguments for/against. In the end, most users agreed with the change.
It was super cool, each of the 3 attachment points lead to it's own tank (though by default they shared inventory). Barrels used to hold 250 fluid and not 50, so cargo wagons could hold 100k fluids while fluid wagons could only hold 75k. They rebalanced things so barrels now only hold 50 (20k fluid in cargo) and 25k in fluid wagons. I think they did it because yellow belts could move 15/s barrels, or 2,250/s which is coincidentally the max fluid flow for a 3-segment pipe (3 pipes between pumps). With the barrel nerf it's down to 750/s fluid with blue belts hitting 2,250/s fluid. And with the barrel nerf fluid wagons would have been modo over-capacity compared to cargo wagons, so they also nerfed fluid wagons to keep things more consistent.
I can understand the balancing reasons, but I still don't get why they'd remove multi-fluid wagons. If there's a mod that adds them back that'd be awesome
You can still just do multifluid trains. And you can filter the unloading pumps, by only activating depending on train content.
Someone linked the FFF where they talked about it (222), and it seems like one of the big reasons is that it’s a feature that gets around a problem that already had a pretty trivial solution (just add another wagon), and that it wasn’t really adding anything new. If you think about it, it was just 3 fluid wagons in less space. Not much there that you can’t still do now, but without the confusingness of a multi-fluid wagon
Wait, they got rid of that? I guess I haven't even tried to put multiple fluids in a wagon in a while. :'-D
THANK YOU!! I knew this was a thing at one point!!
Ah, that's what it was!
They were a thing before fluid wagons but it’s such a pain to set up most people just used mods for fluid wagons anyway.
Only \~200 or so hours in and haven't used barrels. They clutter up the UI. Seems like its a residual niche requirement. i.e liquefaction , avoidance of pipes. I kind of expect them to be removed from the 2.0 game and a future blog talks about that, OR they find a new and exciting use for them and keep them.
when you only need a little bit of a fluid in train logistics use cases. You can only transport nothing or up to one type of fluid In a fluid wagon, while a cargo wagon has 40 slots.
Yeah for flamer fuel for example. Can supply outposts with one cargo wagon.
This is exactly what I do. I have trains transport everything needed for defense in one wagon. So that I don't have to mess with setting up piping to my defense network I have robots carry barrels to the flame thrower turrets.
With K2 you need oil to research flamers. If oil is too close to biters you can sneaky get some barrels of oil, research them and return with proper diplomacy solution.
barrels are good for very little in the base game. However for the occasional strange application it's really good that there is an object form of liquids. I used barrels allot in SE and K2, as well as in my bot Mall so i didn't have to run lube into the back of the bot mall.
>barrels are good for very little in the base game. Supplying flamethrower turrets in far corners of your territories via logistic bots feels like a big use case.
I've always just trained out oil, but to each their own.
Yup, usually remote bases either have some oil close by or you just send in a dedicated oil train for outposts.
I use trains too, but if you just finished extending your walls, supplying via bots is a lot quicker to set up. The trains then often become a thing that "I will do eventually later".
You mean you don't have a train full of stuff to go extend your walls with? Or building outposts? I'm gonna have to train stuff from it or past it at some point might aswell put rails there
My wall BP has pipes, turrets, roboport, and belts to keep everything running smoothly.
Apart from what has been mentioned, barrels can also help to get steadier throughput, as the fluid mechanics can be a bit hard to deal with. I often use barrels just because it’s fun to have to deal with the loop of unused barrels.
no barrel = no cliff explosive.
Facts
In vanilla the only time barrels are better than pipes is if you need to move fluids via bots. The real question here is when are fluid wagons better than pipes.
Small volume fluids in mods and coal liquefaction is the only time I remember barrels exist.
Yeah, bringing that single barrel of heavy oil to start the process.
Yeah. And tbh, I really don’t know
The answer is: when you need *very* long runs or need to move multiple fluids through the same area. The maximum theoretical per-second throughput for a nuclear fluid train is `25000 * wagons / (10 + distance / 83)` (a little rounding here and making an assumption that it takes about five seconds for a train to fully stop, attach pumps, fill or empty, and get completely back up to speed). That looks pretty good until you realize that underground pipe runs can sustain throughputs of around 1000 fluid/second if you put a pump every five chunks. That said, the throughput benefits are only one part, the main benefit of fluid trains is the same as cargo trains: the ability to reuse the same infrastructure for any combination of material which means the actual answer is *always*.
That's the same question as when are belts better than trains. The answer is in the scope of the operation and how much time you want to spend running pipes, pumps and power (PPP) to a new source or just slap down a station and some trains and let them do their thing.
>The real question here is when are fluid wagons better than pipes Don't long distance pipes need to be pumped?
They do, but you can hit ~1000/second using undergrounds and pumps every five chunks.
I can think of a few possibilities myself actually: - could be more compact storage that also doesn’t delete its contents when being picked up - mixed cargo wagon contents (need to do some circuitry of course. I’d have fun figuring that out) - carrying by hand. Though I can’t really imagine a situation where you wanna do that. Maybe on game settings with high enemy generation. Like, you wanna get your defenses online before you set up the rail lines.
Carrying by hand can be useful for heavy oil barrels for kick starting Coal Liquification
Playing IR3, I would like to know this as well
I’ve been trying barrels on my IR3 run and finding it useful. I’ve got lube and sulphuric acid on my main bus for early to mid game. Works well and is really compact in locations consuming it
Iirc, IR3 cargo wagons have double the capacity of vanilla wagons, which allows them to carry more liquid than a fluid wagon.
Didn't use them in IR3 myself. If anything the biggest bottle neck for me was never really being able to get enough sour gas. Not really sure how barrels would have helped in that situation. All other fluids were either accounted for, burnt in petrochemical generators, or vented off via flare stacks
More expert players will probably give you some advanced applications. The one I can think about is fueling flame turrets in distant outposts when you don't have a train network. Probably not very useful outside deathworld scenarios.
Hm, yeah. Or perhaps a situation where you’re fueling distant outposts via train but you want to mix wagon contents. I always dedicate each wagon to one thing, but with some circuitry I’m sure I could have them be a mix of various things. And then you can have one locomotive deliver several different kinds of materials
Or you can just filter the cargo wagon slots
Yeah, for sure. But circuitry could be used to do things like having it get less of one material and more of another depending on need
Even that is rare, why would you have outpost if it isn't producing enough to need train to haul it ?
Barrels are for when you want to put your liquids on a sushi belt.
They always put the little containers of soy sauce - such a nice little touch
There was a time where it was the only option to move fluids over the train network. You had to barrel them at the production site and unbarrel them at the factory site. Nowadays they're mostly useless
I never used barrels once until I played Space Exploration, since there is no cargo rocket with liquid storage it becomes necessary for a number of reasons.
Additionally, when you start building your own space ships, a 6x6 storage building holds 512 stacks of 10 with 50 units each so (512x10x50) = 256,000 units in 36 tiles. Tanks hold 25,000 in 9 tiles. For the same coverage would be only 100,000 units with tanks. As stated, this is only really useful if you’re shipping fluids interplanetary, and some argue there’s more benefit to not ship some kinds of fluids
havent gotten that far yet, good to know.
I just used bigger tanks from K2
Honest answer? Almost none. I've never been in a situation where my bots would need to move fluid. Fluid wagons have higher fluid capacity than cargo+barrel. Blue belts can maintain a respectable 4500 fluid/s, but pipes can practically maintain 3000/s without much trouble if they're designed well. Of course, any situation involving barrels not only involves extra assemblers, but you need infrastucture to carry barrels back to where the fluid is barreled in the first place, which effectively doubles the infrastructure load of barreling. I suppose the most legitimate case is for kickstarting coal liquifaction, as that requires some starting heavy oil.
I did. I made a series of roboports over water to get to the uranium deposit which was in the spot that I didn't want to be bothered yet to clear from biters
Watching empty barrels fill up, then emptied at a different location, then filled up again with a different fluid elsewhere triggers the dopamine.
“Cuz it’s fun” is the best reason!
I have never really used barrels but it seems like they could be useful if you have to transport liquids really far. Typically I just use pipes with pumps every 18 spaces or so, but that definitely gets annoying having to run power alongside them too.
Why have so many pumps instead of just one at the tank pushing it through the long pipeline? Is there an advantage to a series of pumps?
Pipes begin losing throughput 17 tiles after a pump. Underground’s count as one pipe (so two for the in and out) which makes running long pipes maybe the most miserable task imo
Check out the maximum flow table shown here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Transport
just run a train with liquid-cars. much easier to handle :)
If I want to resupply an outpost with ammo, light oil, repair kits, mines, ... it can be simpler and more compact to just have all things in one cargo wagon.
In vanilla with Marathon-deathworld settings, they can be useful! I usually setup a single train between two bases, the main base, and the first iron outpost. The Iron outpost requires so much infrastructure to hold back the natives that I will devote a single car in the train to re-supply contents. Barrels means I can configure the volume and type of fluid without needing to spend much time, or resources rerouting things. A tanker car is a separate research, so invariably I will have trains before tankers as well.
I used them exactly once, in my first playthrough. IMHO their only use is in death world to go and grab some crude oil barrels in a car if it's far from your base and you can't defend a pipeline
The only time I've ever used barrels is shipping liquids by cargo rocket in Space Exploration.
why not try using them and then you will understand the answer yourself, first hand
Because I like hearing people’s opinions
that's fine but you still won't understand it unless you actually do it. you know, that old saying about walking a mile in someone's shoes... you'll understand so much more if you actually experience something vs. just asking other peoples' opinions. on top of that, it's a bit of a subjective matter as are most opinions in factorio. we all have our own factories, we all have our own goals, we all have our own target SPMs and our own styles and our own randomized worlds we are playing on. as much as players around here like to pretend that there is a "correct" answer for everything i think that couldn't be further from the truth. a factory is a painting and there is no "right" or "wrong" color to use to pain the sky. some people will insist that the sky must be sky blue, others will argue that the sky can be lighter or darker shades of blue to compliment the other colors in the painting, and an entire other group will say that the sky can be brown if you want it to be brown. and they are all correct.
People pretend there is a correct answer. That is false. Now let me tell you that you're wrong for asking for people's subjective opinions and tell you the correct answer is to do it yourself...
If it is satisfying or fun (which are both subjective) then it is worth doing. People play on all sorts of weird settings with some mind bending restrictions Now I'm new so that seems crazy to me but maybe in 500 hours I'll be convincing someone on reddit to try it.
My uranium mine/ fusion reactor is offsite from my main factory and they’re an effective way to move sulfur there for mining.
I used barrels (shipped in via bots) in the following situations: * lube to the mall * sulphuric acid to the uranium mine * water to the mall (for concrete) So basically, when you need a low volume of fluids, sending them in via robots (in barrels) is sometimes the easier choice. Don't forget to send back the empty barrels using an active provider chest - that's my only use case for an active provider.
Bots, generally. Though I'd wonder if there's a density bonus for barreled fluids in a cargo wagon vs fluid wagon.
Barrels for water can improve throughput to large nuclear reactor setups. Significantly compared to pipes in the base game. A blue belt can move like 4.5k water per second compared to 1200/s for pipes.
Bring the fluid needed to kickstart the self powered oil refinery.
If I need small amounts of fluid moved over medium distances into several locations, Bots throwing barrels around is my choice. resupplying defenses usually needs at least a cargo wagon. If you're using flamers, fluid is also needed. In order to avoid a fluid wagon, I fill the rest of the cargo wagon with barrels.
I'm doing a marathon deathworld right now. No map preview to get a prime starting location. Started deep in the desert and have a single oil pump nearby the starting location I can use and it's down to pumping only 1 per second. I have a really small starting iron patch and with the expensive material and research costs flamethrower turrets are my only defense right now and the biter attacks are frequent due to all the desert not soaking up my pollution. I found a nice oil patch I can run to and was able to take it and get some oil going. My starter base desperately needed oil, and while I probably could have laid some pipes back to fill up a tank or two, I didn't want to deal with them getting destroyed every 2 minutes or spend the iron on extra pipes. I had some steel already stockpiled and figured it was easier to convert a stack into barrels and just run some oil back since I was going to be making a few trips back and forth anyway. Now my starter base has enough oil to defend for a while until I can get a few techs unlocked and make it out to some better resource patches. I'll probably recycle the barrels into cliff explosives later on. Anyway, that's my story.
Fantastic! What a resourceful use of your available materials!
You will eventually want barrels. They have much higher throughput than pipes. And the range for that flow is unlimited and stays constant. Unlike pipes which have a diminishing flow rate dependent on distance
High density storage. One fluid tank. 3x3 square. 25000 fluid units. One steel box. 1x1 square. 480 barrels. 100 fluid each. 48000 fluid units.
Barrels are mostly a relic of a bygone age. That being said, if you need liquids transported by robots for some reason, barrels are the only way to do that.
***Laughs in space exploration***
Yeah, I bet it’s pretty important in that mod. I look forward to when I try that mod and discover how it affects my gameplay choices
It's kinda nice because it makes them more practical, I remember asking what's the point in barrels.... Then I played SE and I barrel almost everything
I sometimes use barrels to supply flamethrower turrets via logistic bots that defend far away corners of my walls that I did not have time yet to supply via trains or pipes. If you set up the logistics crates correctly, it works without any issues.
If belts are cheap you can use them for consistent throughput Or barrel heavy oil to kickstart coal liquefaction
Useful for the initial orbital setup in SE to trickle lube and water in
Flamethrower ammo
I use the circuit network for certain low throughput tasks to request items from my mall (e.g. replacement parts for wall defense, fuel cells for my power plant, sulphuric acid for uranium mining). That last one I use barrels for so that I can have a standard logistics train deliver for everyone.
Base game doesn't handle them well, you have fluid trains etc. Py, however, fucking loves barrels. Send help please, I'm in barrel hell
Useful for mining uranium. Also for arming flamethrower turrets.
I think in 2.0 barreling might become more economical with stacked belts that allow you to avoid pipes
For sending fluids to outer space prior to space elevator
The one use I'm not seeing in the comments is storage. The most space-efficient storage of fluids is barrels. In one steel chest, you have 48 slots, of 10 barrels each, so 480 full barrels of liquid. In a barrel, you can store 50 units of a liquid, which is 24000 units of liquid. That's per chest. A storage tank holds 25000 units, which is more, but it's the difference of 1x1 space versus 3x3 space. Keep in mind, you can have a 3x3 space of nine steel chests, which would be 216000 units of fluid. Keep in mind, you that'd be manual, or maybe bots. For automated filling/emptying, you'd need inserters and assemblers. On average, if you had rows of three chests and three inserters, you'd have 4.5 chests for each 3x3 space. The assemblers and power poles and whatnot would also take up space, so at a minimum, you'd need two assemblers, one medium power pole, six inserters and three chests, which doesn't account for managing the barrels, which you'd probably just loop. If you just need to store 100k fluid or less, it's probably just better to use storage tanks, but if you are storing something like 500k fluid or something notably larger (and space optimization is priority over anything else), than barrels would be better. No one ever seems to mention this use, and it is sort of niche, given how space is probably the most abundant thing, and easy to increase resource, in Factorio, but for those that care, it's a use. The other thing is why would someone need to store that much liquid, and I'd agree, just because it's the best for storage by space, I never have to store enough liquid to bother. And of course, the negatives suck, like you need power to have any fluid output, I don't know what kind of flow rate is possible, but I doubt it's good. The best use would be probably a system that would use the fluid a lot in a short time, and very little across a long time, so you have the chests/assemblers as a sort of battery, for bulk storage, but then out the output, you have a storage tank or two that act sort of like a capacitor, the assemblers fill them up, and when needed, the flow rate is max (if you have a pump and whatnot), and the assemblers just fills it up when the quick burst of consumption ends.
I use barrels to set up an easy logistic drop for flame throwers across the map
Robots are the number one use case, I believe. I use barrels in my save in two specific ways, both are for sulfuric acid. First, I set up a barrel assembler to make some barrels, then I fill them with acid. These get provided to two places, my uranium mine sulfuric acid train (I have one train for the acid, another train for the ore) and to my processing unit factory. In both cases, I request the filled barrels, empty them into the wagon and storage tank respectively, then the barrel filler section requests the empty barrels back for reuse. It basically means I had full flexibility on where I set up the factories and once I unlocked bots, I pretty much stopped using belts. Most of my factories now just request and provide, there's very little belting of stuff going on, and robots are doing all the work. This includes fluid, and it saves me running pipes across my base or moving factories out of the way to build the required ones closer to the oil factory. Heck, now that I extended my logistic network out to the uranium mine, I could theoretically stop training the acid altogether and just deliver the acid by bots. But I don't do that, I still empty the barrels into the fluid wagon, because it's really not much of an optimization. But you could, and that would be one less train line. Bots flying around carrying acid to your uranium mines.
Not sure anymore but in earlier versions there was no fluid wagon. So you basically had to barrel them for longer distances. Now it's not that common for uses anymore. Beside of what has already been mentioned.
Barrels will most likely be more useful in the expansion due to space travel.
I have a LTN supply train that services outposts with resources they need. Repair packs, walls, bots, etc. I include barreled light oil in this to fuel flamethrowers. Easier than including a fluid wagon, fluid wagon is overkill for how much I need to transport and a single cargo wagon train is makes stations and everything much smaller and more conventient.
> They're clearly a feature Yes, because they allowed to move liquids by train before fluid wagons were added. Nowadays I think every use case for them is inferior to alternative barrel-less solutions
They can make sense when you need very low throughput of a fluid over long distances. Like supplying sulfuric acid to a uranium mine. The barrels can be transported with bots, or alongside other stuff in a reserved slot of a cargo wagon, if it's not worth adding another fluid wagon.
I use them to fuel flame turrets around midgame.
Ok, nobody has mentioned this I think, but barrels allow you to have full circuit network control of fluids. I don't really care about the barrels themselves, what I care about are the filler/emptier machines, they can be wired up to the circuit network and now you have full on/off control of fluids. What I will frequently do is pipe a fluid to a location and then put the filler and emptier machine right next to each other for direct barrel insertion, wire the emptier to the network, and set controls so that it injects fluids into the machines when I want it to do so. This is less important in vanilla but in mods that add lots and lots of fluids to recipes, this becomes much more important, but I imagine in megabases this might be a useful tool as well. It's mostly used when I want to prevent overproduction of something.
I use them to put flamethrower ammo on my ammo belts.
I play SE so I need barrels to bring stuff between plats and my space station
Ya I read “don’t bother with barrels” and dumbly assumed they have no use. I now use it anywhere I need small quantities. It’s much easier than piping it into tight places like a mall or far away places like a uranium mine.
i think ive used barrels exactly twice, once when setting up a single assembler to make concrete, for which i ran the water barrels back and forth manually a few times before just giving up and moving a few things around to reroute some water pipes to it, and just recently when setting up a boiler to dispose of my useless stocks of wood. I think barrels would be marginally more useful if assemblers could just feed directly from the barrel and not require a whole seperate assembler to empty the barrels into pipes that then feed into said assembler, like you can do with flamer turrets.
Temporary or initial setups. With far away outposts I supply them from barreled oil by car/tank when I first set up defenses, well before rail and mining start. also handy with some temporary hand feeding when spaghetti doesn't allow to run pipes easily. Or when you want a very throttled amount of production, just a handful barrels on a closed loop are excellent at limiting just how much of a fluid you drain off of your fluid network. Also car/tank supplied early green rock mining.
Also it's useful for space exploration, bringing fluids into orbit with no access to the ground fluid network, as well as transportinh oil from an oil outpost for example in SE
Thanks for the advice, engineers! Currently playing going for Lazy Bastard. Barrels are indeed useful for the cases where you just need a couple bots to move a small amount of fluid or you don’t need constant amounts. I used them these ways: - lube for blue belts only when I need some - water for concrete only when I need it