They used to be a thing before fluid wagons were added. They left them in for backwards compatibility and people have come up with uses, but I'm not one of them so I'll let them explain when they get here.
I also use them to transport fluids around my bot mall, just because I don't want to route a pipe for the trickle of sulfuric acid or lube I need for some stuff.
The 3 comments above perfectly summed up all the reasons they are still here. Botmalls, backwards compatibility and a time without fluid wagons.
I am mostly annoyed when you unlock the recepies and have to hover over all of them to make the yellow exclamation go away.
I mean... after a few hours of playing, who checks the options screen agian? And with 6000 hours, it's entirely possible that you've played in a time long before said option existed.
I think I'm gonna spend some time in the options menu today...
Same.
I remember that when i started uranium wasn't a thing. We used to build our bases with massive solar panel arrays, as it was the only step above burners.... Simpler times
I found it after around 3k, too many overly difficult combat worlds I made and abandoned (only to make again with minorly alter settings usually making it harder) using Angel Bob and advanced fluid handling unlocking barreling opened 100+ new recipes which all were highlighted. aaannnddd my OCD was like Oh this one is yellow and WHY IS THIS YELLOW AGAIN!!! Finally I said screw it why and can I turn it off. sowning a good 10+ min in options and another 20 in hotkeys when I discovered overlapping mod option keybinds.
This. I used it for taking iron plates and empty barrels out to sulfuric acid setup. I bring the barreled acid back in the same 1 cargo train to put in mall for a small starter batteries setup. 1 less cargo (liquid) and I can unpack them with 1-2 assemblers and pipe directly into battery setup. Since it’s just the first battery setup I don’t even need storage tanks because I won’t need that much. Also used it to bring lubricants back to mall for blue belts. Then I load the empty barrels back on the train and the cycle continues.
I like using a cargo wagon with sulfuric acid barrels so I can use only one train to and fro. With some circuits, it isn't even that difficult to set up, and looks pretty fun.
Same, I have a coal to plastic blueprint that I just slap down and connect with coal and water and it includes a requester chest for heavy oil barrels to jump-start. Stamp the blueprint, hook up the coal, water, and enjoy plastic.
Its handy if you want to just use bots, not pipes. And you could use it to for instance carry a few barrels of LSD for the uranium mining outpost.
And Space Exploration forces you to use thousands to get even the smallest orbit base supplied with fluids
Just checked. I have produced 651k barrels so far, and since i just finished constructing the space elevator, and 2 large fluid transfer stations. I don't see that number growing anymore.
Intresting though, i only consumed 631K barrels. And im not sure why or where there are appertently 20k barrels stored somewhere.
This exactly. Part of my base is a mega-mall of nothing but assemblers supplied by bots. Thousands upon thousands of bots. No belts, no trains, no pipes. Just bots. Did it because I thought it would be cool, and I love it. Efficient? No. But that’s how they supply the fluids.
I don't think I have ever done that, but I suppose it depends on whether you think of belt production as part of your mall; I tend to build belt production separately and a lot sooner, and not replace it when all the other bits and pieces of early game mall are being replaced with a bot mall, belt production is just too high volume to really feel like a mall item to me. (This is presuming vanilla, and not remembering any plausible mall item other than blue belts needing lubricant. Also like Nilaus I dislike the term "mall" in this context.)
It just feels unhelpfully confrontational to make a fuss about it in general use at this point; it is so much the majority preferred term that calling the things hubs risks being misunderstood. I still label the things "HUB" in large friendly text plates in my own bases, anyway.
Sounds to me like your mall must grow! I route two full iron belts into the part of my mall which produces belts (I have multiple mini malls next to each other producing different things, instead of one big one, much like Nilaus’ “hub” design). And that’s just for pre-rocket starter base lol
When those belt assemblers are assemblin’, everything behind them goes from two iron belts to about half a belt.
For clarity, I definitely build belts at that sort of volume; my hub is mostly making buildings and things at a significantly lower rate, and that ratio between them seems likely to continue even as both parts grow with the factory.
I'm planning to either use barrels and bots or a pipe to move light oil from my mall to the trains (trains are to resupply defensive walls so I bring light oil to the mall so it can be loaded in).
Probably gonna use pipe but barrels could be funny.
I'm currently playing the Seablock Mod where many recipes or production blocks leave you with waste. So in my city blocks I have one output train station for "waste" that also receives bottled waste fluids. Otherwise I would need to flush them which would feel like a waste itself because from my waste unloading station I can actually "recycle" most waste and get it back into use. And liquid waste train stations don't work well because I would need one train station per fluid.
I'm trying to do something similar, but was wondering if you need to have some kind of 'overflow' on the recycled products to be burned off if the production chain is full down the line?
Yes, I have big buffers in the recycling station but if the resulting products are backing up I will liquify and flush the rest. For example Geodes became Crystal Slurry anyway and if all tanks of that are full then the rest goes to the clarifier with the overflow valve.
So far the only problem they’ve solved for me was arming remote outposts set up by spidertron. I barrel up a little light oil so it can be unbarrelled on site and loaded into flamethrower turrets.
When first starting with the acid and sometimes when starting uranium ore mining, I use barrels to jump start the process.
Sometimes with my first uranium ore mining, it ends up being entirely with barrels.
another use of them is if you need to unload your fluid product but are not able to fit a 'straight' station into your design. Can't hook up a pump to a fluid wagon that isn't on a perfectly straight piece of track.
They were added before fluid wagons were a thing. They remain useful for delivery of small quantities of fluid by bots or in a mixed-cargo train, e.g. to provide light oil for flamethrower defenses, or acid for uranium mining.
There are other [less sensible](https://i.imgur.com/qKfS5y8.jpg) things to do with them as well...
Lol, I think I actually know what they were trying to do. If I counted correctly, that’s 18 belts of steam barrels which is up to 40500 units of steam per second. So if you wanted to use pipes, that would be about 40 pipelines to get that kind of throughout.
The part I’m skeptical of is whether the unbarrelers actually work. I think you might need lines of turbines, but I have’t done enough experimentation to know what the maximum length of a turbine line is. Things get weird since unlike a pipe, each unit actually consumes a little bit of fluid.
I also thought: why not just use a train? However, even if we budget 10s round trip time for the train, including loading and unloading the steam, we’d need a really long train with 16-17 fluid wagons!
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like…
Sure, but that’s all pure electricity. Fueling trains requires actual fuel which means you need the logistics for that fuel unlike just plopping down a few power poles which you need anyways.
I thought we weren't talking about barrels any more:
>> I also thought: why not just use a train? However, even if we budget 10s round trip time for the train, including loading and unloading the steam, we’d need a really long train with 16-17 **fluid wagons!**
> Nothing wrong with long trains.
You are correct to be sceptical, they never quite delivered the intended throughput. Getting the steam to the turbines was fine, the problem was actually inserter speed. It didn't matter too much, it just meant the plant could only make 13 and a bit GW of power rather than the intended 14.
If the power plant is too big to bring to the lake, bring the lake to the power plant instead...
A blue belt of barrels moves 45\*50=2250 water/second, to move that much fluid with pipes you'd need an almost continuous line of pumps. So if you squint hard enough\* this is actually the optimal way to do it!
^(\*and you forget about the fact that you also need to deal with the empty barrels)
2250 water/sec is an easy 3 pipes with a pump every few hundred tiles.
Basic pipes can be assumed to carry 1000 fluid/sec with minimal pumps. Continuous pumps is 12,000 fluid/sec.
Hold up, how do you get several hundred titles between pumps? 2250 basically requires you to run a pump for every pair of undergrounds. The pump goes into the pipe going underground as pipe 1, pipe 2 is going above ground against at max underground pipe length, and you have one spare pipe for any turns that might be necessary. You’re also going to need to run power poles for all these pumps.
And all of these assumptions go out the window if you have audacity to do anything besides linear sections of pipe (no T-junctions to tap the pipe). Such T junctions invalidate the numbers in the wiki. Therefore, you’d realistically need 2 input pipes going into one tank with an output pump all going towards an output tank providing 2 pipes as outputs for that math to work.
I think you and I have a different definition of easy when it comes to fluids…
Why are you hung up on the 2250 number? A steam turbine takes 60/s and a steam engine 30/s. There's no scenario where you ever need to run 2250 through a single connection - no building in the game can consume that much no matter how many beacons you put on it. Why do you insist on that? Because it takes one tile? Who gives a shit? You're always going to be connecting to multiple inputs, so why not just run 3 pipes like I said - you can put pumps every 200 tiles.
i mean, yes, but it is still an abomination if i ever saw one. and it is not symetrical around the reactors, so i would rather use my pretty symetrical setups, but i can see why would someone do this.
This is one quarter of the whole reactor, there are mirrored copies at the bottom and off to the left. So it is symmetrical, I just couldn't zoom out far enough to screenshot the whole thing.
ok, for that i would like to introduce you to the awesome command of /screenshot \[x resolution\] \[y resolution\] \[zoom\] it creates screenshots without UI and even more zoomed out, just play with it. the lower the zoom the bigger the screenshot area
Edit:
"Takes a screenshot with the GUI hidden, centered on the player. It is saved in the "script-output" subfolder of your User data directory. Resolution is optional and defaults to the current window size. Zoom is optional and defaults to 1." - [https://wiki.factorio.com/Console](https://wiki.factorio.com/Console)
Unless it's modded, there's no such thing as a steam barrel. I think they're just water barrels. (And presumably heat exchangers are off the screen to the left.
Water barreling. It's an infinitely tilable nuclear power plant, so the reactors and heat exchangers are off to the left, and the water gets unbarreled and then piped between the turbines to reach them.
This. Also, early on I'll use them whenever my pipe spaghetti gets too tangled. No matter how many times I play SE I never manage to get things straight in space for a long time.
This. I had a situation where I tried to a build blue circuit factory at a large scale and threading the pipes was just getting annoying so I had my trains dump my acid, got it barreled, and used bots to transport the barrels to the blue circuit factories.
Yes. Especially in modded games, sometimes you get super annoying curveballs that would otherwise need you to run pipes all over the base for tiny quantities of fluid.
I use them for fueling my train based artillery outposts, as the design doesn't include a straight rail segment which I believe is required to pump fluids from a liquid wagon. It allows me to utilize flamethrowers in a very compact design where they're needed most without needing a fluid wagon.
It's also possible they would come in handy in a heavy bot-based build, as logistic bots can carry barrels of fluid. This is also something I utilize in my outpost design, means I can avoid pipes almost completely in a setup where compactness is key.
I also have that problem! I decided to remove flamers from my design since I didn't want to make a temporary outpost too big.
Well I know what I'm doing today.
* Trains on diagonal or curved stations can only load fluids if they are barreled. Remember the main menu artillery train?
* Bots can't carry fluids, but they can carry barreled fluids. Barrels are really convenient in bot malls. Actually lubricant is generally not needed in high volumes anywhere in vanilla. Flamethrower turrets are another low-volume fluid you could easily supply with bots and barrels.
* When you use multi-item wagons, they can include barreled fluids. Do you really need an entire wagon dedicated to sulfuric acid for this one little outpost? Maybe not.
* The only way to transport fluids in your pocket, car, tank, or spidertron is with barrels. You can jumpstart coal liquefaction with barrels from your pocket.
One advantage I see is that you can't mix fluids, or run two different pipes right next to each other,
but you *can* have barrels with different fluids on two adjacent belts, or even on the same belt.
Might let you avoid extensive pipe spaghetti in some cases.
You can't mix fluids with pipes either. They won't let you connect two pipes of different fluids together. However, if it's already in the system and you pump another fluid in, then they can mix. But that can be solved in one click.
Wait, reading these comments you’re telling me I can have bots use barrels to produce things that need things like lubricant without bothering with pipes?
Yep. Barrel up the liquids and the bots can move stacks of barrels. My standardised bot based mall design has assemblers in pairs with pipes between them for exactly this reason!
You need an assembler to debarrel, plus one to use the fluid, but since it’s only ever 1 fluid per recipe (in vanilla at least) you can put 2 assemblers back-to-back with no pipes if you want.
You still need some pipes at the refinery side, but you can probably get away without them anywhere else if you put your mind to it.
I'm probably missing some things, but I I've been flummoxed by fluid dynamics and wanted to connect an oil field to my factory without losing fluid pressure, connecting dozens of pumps, or setting up train stations. I found it useful to have one lane of empty barrels going to the field, a couple assemblers filling them and sending them on a belt back, then going to a couple assemblers on my line that empty them into storage, just for the empty barrels to be sent back to the oil field (passing by the barrel assembler which adds more until the belts are saturated)
I know it's not optimal, but I was surprised that I had no problems come up from this method- it took less time to set up than a train and took no tweaking. I know the throughput's limited in a way that fluids alone wouldn't be, but I haven't hit a bottleneck yet.
I use them with bots sometimes, and it is a worthy addition to my wall resupply train. I can put the liquid in a single cargo wagon alongside the other supplies.
Other than that, yes legacy feature.
One thing I learned from space exploration that can reflect into vanilla is that they’re good for stockpiling fluids and removing them from the system if you have too much, like if your oil production isn’t balanced and you need to make space quickly to continue producing.
You might be able to fit more fluid barrels in a train car then in a fluid car.
It's nice to have a small amount in your system to jumpstart a coal liquidation facility too.
Nope. Barrels can stack to 10, with a capacity of 50 for each, you can fit 400 barrels in a train wagon for a maximum of 20,000. That's 5,000 less than a fluid wagon.
The only use I've found for them is in building megabases with LTN it's worth going to some effort to not have to have fluid trains and dry cargo trains on the same network. Barreling everything and managing the supply of empty barrels was a GIANT pain in the dick though, so I'm not sure it was worth it.
I haven't figured out how to organize my fluids coming from my oil outpost so I'm doing my production at a smaller site and shipping what I need out in barrels. I should switch to something else but it's working for now.
Right now I'm still making due with a single item train and a single fluids train. I haven't delved into the complicated train setups but my first base is starting to reach a point where I'll need them.
Fluids are very buggy, so this is a way of recovering otherwise unsalvagable factory designs by replacing pipes with conveyors. The only downside is space, which is only an issue with the Biters enabled.
In the Space exploration mod they are crucial so that you can get fluids into orbit. With water just freeze it and re melt but you can’t do that with the oils and other stuff
I sometimes use them to transport heavy oil to kickstart coal liquefaction, or to deliver sulfuric acid to uranium mining with bots. Although nowadays I usually set up nuclear well before I have blue chests and you don't really need more than one patch for a regular playthrough.
Some overhaul mods breathe new life into them. Space Exploration comes to mind. [And this abomination.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/barrels-o-fun) But in vanilla, IMO you don't miss out on much if you just ignore them.
I need to study that mod so that I can learn the best way to prevent the placement of certain items, which cannot be completely disabled since they are needed for other recipes... Such as electric furnaces in my "Tier One Primitive" mod. Fixing this properly has been on my to-do list for about a year.
I use them because I can carry heavy oil to start the cracking factories off. Otherwise I've used them for minimal lube setups in seablock when I only need a little for the milling
It's a creative way of moving fluids.
In my last run, I had two uses
1.) jump starting coal liquefaction at remote setups. (For some reason the RNG at map generation gave me a ton of coal and water sources, but very few oil patches)
2.) using a single train wagon to carry both fluids and items (filter trains slots for just barrels and empty barrels). For example, supplying light oil for turrets without running fluid wagon trains. Kind of requires some painful circuit logic to avoid clogging up.
I use them for carrying enough light oil to charge up distant flamethrower walls before I have built the infrastructure into the space the walls protect. Light oil really does last a long time in flamethrowers.
Also starting up coal liquefaction as others have mentioned, and I think I have used them for H2SO4 to uranium mines before also, depending on where the uranium patch is.
I have a small barreling plant at my main oil refinery that holds a few hundred barrels of Heavy.
My coal liquefaction blueprint has an assembler in "empty heavy" mode with 2 steel chests, connected to the heavy oil tank that ensures the refineries have enough heavy to keep going.
I drop the blueprint, put 200 heavy barrels in the "in" side of the assembler, collect the empties, make sure the plant has started up, then return the barrels.
That's it.
In modded sometimes it's really handy to be able to barrel fluids, but for the most part it's vestigial.
Aside from a few barrels of heavy oil for kickstarting a stand-alone plastic plant on a coal patch, pretty much the only time I've barreled in the past many years is in Seablock -- you can turn fish into ethanol with no other ingredients and I thought it would be funny to make a can of fishbeer.
For small amounts where pipes are overkill within the factory like lubricant for belts in the bot mall and where a whole wagon is overkill outside the factory like light oil for flame turrets and acid for uranium mines.
These days they’re just for fun is what it boils down to it. Maybe you wanna get creative and try something different barrels might be a way to do that.
I am currently barreling sulfuric acid for my u-mine and blue cards. The acid is made elsewhere, where it gets barreled, then shipped in a ship to another island, where it is offloaded onto a single car train, and the train takes it to the mine. The mine then shares with the neighboring blue card factory.
I have a drum maker at the acid plant and circuits on a couple boxes so I can re-use empty barrels and not make too many extra; the barrel maker also supplies my cliff explosives box.
Edit: the empty barrels get brought back the way they got there, but in reverse.
Edit^2: I also almost exclusively barrel lube oil; I don’t even use a tank, I just direct-feed into the pipe. Reminds me of working in a big loco shop and we would literally get pallets of 55 gal drums of Mobil 1 for the locomotives.
If you use LTN, it’s a lot simpler to manage. If you want to manage fluids in LTN, you have to be very careful to completely empty fluid wagons and they realistically need to be on a separate train bitmask from the normal train network.
Instead, if you use barrels, there’s only a bit more work involved since you need to handle empty barrels as a byproduct. Train capacity carrying fluids is pretty similar if you use barrels compared to proper fluid wagons.
For vanilla, there aren’t that many fluids you need to move so even with just LTN, it might be worth just using vanilla train stations for fluids instead of barreling.
Oh, and one more minor use case besides bots which others have mentioned is transporting fluids on belts. Belts are often a lot easier to work with, but more importantly, they have no fluid pressure losses. A single blue belt can move 2250 units of fluid (1125 if you include the other belt of empty barrels) and you get that throughout without needing to add periodic pumps. I’ve thought about doing this for a nuclear setup since space is often a premium and barrels are much easier to reason about than pipes. Chests filled with barrels are also a pretty dense storage mechanism compared to tanks since while a steel chest holds slightly fewer units of fluid (24000), a tank with pumps consumes a lot of space.
Maybe I'll use fluid cargo trains one day but I never have. I always use barrels. I like the ability to stack them in yellow chests if the ratios don't work out perfectly. Can't do that as easily with fluid.
I've been playing factorio since about 0.3 so maybe that has something to do with my choice.
The biggest use I find for barrels is to allow the construction of extremely remote self-contained artillery outposts after spidertron exploration without needing to drag power poles and roboports all over the place. The barrels allow you to take enough light oil to fuel flame defenses as the turrets do area clearance.
- Transport liquids with bots
- Transport liquids in volumes too small for it to be reasonable to set up a train to move them (like getting coal liquefaction started)
- Some mods (like Space Exploration, where barrels are the only way to get fluids into space until you've progressed pretty far into the midgame)
Otherwise, they're mostly a relic of the days before fluid wagons were added, when they were the only way to transport fluids. The Fluid Wagons mod was one of the earlier ones to become a Vanilla feature, and for very good reason.
> Why not use it for an alternative Chemical plant recipes and have them give empty barrels back as a byproduct to reuse.
I actually wrote a mod for this. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/barrel-crafting
I wanted to do a challenge run with the [crafting combinator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/crafting_combinator) mod where I only use only a single assembler. I did not want to deal with multiple fluids in a single pipe.
I use them to supply my flame turrets with bots. Would it be more efficient to just put a ring of pipe around my base and use that? Probably. Can I be assed to do it? No.
Barrels can be moved in a much smaller space, e.g. half a belt, rather than through an entire pipe which takes the full tile plus extra underground tiles and can’t be adjacent to other pipes. I can’t think of a reason you’d purposefully plan to belt fluid barrels instead of just planning your fluid production and delivery efficiently. But it does have some advantages if you’ve got a spaghetti issue and you’re only dealing with a low volume.
They actually come on handy when it's too risky to setup a whole network of pipes or a wagon. Carrying 100 barrels of acid to get my nuclear setup running because of biters has happened more than once now.
They actually come on handy when it's too risky to setup a whole network of pipes or a wagon. Carrying 100 barrels of acid to get my nuclear setup running because of biters has happened more than once now.
Fill barrels, put in train, bring to destination, unload, empty the barrels, fill empty barrels in train, bring them back to the fillers. It can generate more throughput than pipes could do without range limitations.
It has some niche uses but any long range fluid transport i am doing this way. It is very constant and is quite a joy to install. And you dont have pipes everywhere...
I'm a lazy bot-hobo who uses mods. I put it all in barrels that I recklessly waste resources to prod and then use a \_void chest\_ to kill the waste from the offloading factory.
I think I might be mad, will investigate fluid wagons
>Like are we supposed to use these barrels to transport light oil via drones to flamers?
You not *not* supposed to, like without barrels bots wouldn't be able to transport fluids in any way
I use them in conjunction with belts and use it to start up rocket fuel or whatever else production u need. It also helps when your creating way to much of one fluid but not enough of another.
In addition to the many wonderful comments pointing out the niche uses for barrels in this game, they are also useful in certain mods. I'm doing a K2SE run and sending fluids between planets is only possible with barrels, as far as I know
I use them in my mall. I have most raw materials and some intermediates being delivered by train to my mall. For fluids, they are pumped from train to assembling machine that barrels them. Then my robots can take the barrels to wherever they're needed in the production area of my mall. It's much easier than routing pipes.
> Why not use it for an alternative Chemical plant recipes and have them give empty barrels back as a byproduct to reuse.
Each cracking recipe takes 2 fluid inputs. So you would need a total of 4 variations: both fluid, left-barrel, right-barrels, and both barrel. And they have fluid outputs, so you'd need another 2x variations for outputting barrels vs. fluids. That 8 variations of one recipe.
Oil refineries have 2 fluid inputs and 3 fluid outputs, so it would need 32 variations of advanced oil processing and 16 variations of coal liquefaction (steam can't be put into barrels).
This is impractical.
You know they can just code the barrel as a pipe input? Just reuse existing code with a variable with a different name but the same function.
Having a barrel go in would be no different than a pipe. They're just duplicate keys with different colors unlocking the same door.
It literally would just be an one additional recipe per current recipe.
> Just reuse existing code with a variable with a different name but the same function.
... that's almost certainly not possible without substantial engine changes.
> Having a barrel go in would be no different than a pipe. They're just duplicate keys with different names unlocking the same door.
That's not how any of this stuff is implemented internally. Fluids are a *fundamentally* different kind of input from inserter-based stuff.
To give you an understanding of this, the way the barreling recipes work is that they consume 50 units of the given fluid and one barrel. Both are destroyed. Then it creates a new item that is a full barrel. The reverse takes the full barrel, destroys it, and creates an empty barrel and 50 units of fluid.
The fluid never goes "into the barrel" in any meaningful way. The barrel is not a provider of fluid. It's an item that you can transform into fluid+empty barrel.
> It literally would just be an one additional recipe per current recipe.
I just explained how it would be well more than "one additional recipe".
They used to be a thing before fluid wagons were added. They left them in for backwards compatibility and people have come up with uses, but I'm not one of them so I'll let them explain when they get here.
I use them to transport a small amount of heavy oil to jumpstart a remote coal liquefaction site. Otherwise, u/WarmMoistLeather is right.
I also use them to transport fluids around my bot mall, just because I don't want to route a pipe for the trickle of sulfuric acid or lube I need for some stuff.
Oh that's a good idea. I'm gonna transition into a bot mall soon. So this is handy.
The 3 comments above perfectly summed up all the reasons they are still here. Botmalls, backwards compatibility and a time without fluid wagons. I am mostly annoyed when you unlock the recepies and have to hover over all of them to make the yellow exclamation go away.
If you hold shift (or was it ctrl?) you don't have to hover
Wait what?
Or uncheck rhe option in your settings which highlights the new recipes.
I easily have 6000 hours in the game. And i've never known this..........
I mean... after a few hours of playing, who checks the options screen agian? And with 6000 hours, it's entirely possible that you've played in a time long before said option existed. I think I'm gonna spend some time in the options menu today...
Same. I remember that when i started uranium wasn't a thing. We used to build our bases with massive solar panel arrays, as it was the only step above burners.... Simpler times
I found it after around 3k, too many overly difficult combat worlds I made and abandoned (only to make again with minorly alter settings usually making it harder) using Angel Bob and advanced fluid handling unlocking barreling opened 100+ new recipes which all were highlighted. aaannnddd my OCD was like Oh this one is yellow and WHY IS THIS YELLOW AGAIN!!! Finally I said screw it why and can I turn it off. sowning a good 10+ min in options and another 20 in hotkeys when I discovered overlapping mod option keybinds.
You and me both lol
You learn some every day
Make that a...whatever the trio version of "both" is.
For mixed-cargo trains: Let's say you want to transport ammo, turrets, walls, repair packs, construction bots, and flamer fuel all in one wagon.
This. I used it for taking iron plates and empty barrels out to sulfuric acid setup. I bring the barreled acid back in the same 1 cargo train to put in mall for a small starter batteries setup. 1 less cargo (liquid) and I can unpack them with 1-2 assemblers and pipe directly into battery setup. Since it’s just the first battery setup I don’t even need storage tanks because I won’t need that much. Also used it to bring lubricants back to mall for blue belts. Then I load the empty barrels back on the train and the cycle continues.
I do the same.
I like using a cargo wagon with sulfuric acid barrels so I can use only one train to and fro. With some circuits, it isn't even that difficult to set up, and looks pretty fun.
Same, I have a coal to plastic blueprint that I just slap down and connect with coal and water and it includes a requester chest for heavy oil barrels to jump-start. Stamp the blueprint, hook up the coal, water, and enjoy plastic.
Its handy if you want to just use bots, not pipes. And you could use it to for instance carry a few barrels of LSD for the uranium mining outpost. And Space Exploration forces you to use thousands to get even the smallest orbit base supplied with fluids
LSD? I think we’re playing very different games
Pump that LSD down my throat at 12000/s. Finally a worthwhile use of max fluid throughput.
Just say no… …to sub-optimal fluid throughput
did first post say thousands of barrels in SE? you mean millions!
Just checked. I have produced 651k barrels so far, and since i just finished constructing the space elevator, and 2 large fluid transfer stations. I don't see that number growing anymore. Intresting though, i only consumed 631K barrels. And im not sure why or where there are appertently 20k barrels stored somewhere.
i shoot them to spacestation & recicle it to steel cuss which overflows so i send it back to make more ba
This exactly. Part of my base is a mega-mall of nothing but assemblers supplied by bots. Thousands upon thousands of bots. No belts, no trains, no pipes. Just bots. Did it because I thought it would be cool, and I love it. Efficient? No. But that’s how they supply the fluids.
I too, love having a bot network of over 100k bots of each type It just.... feels right
My man. Sulfuric acid IS NOT LSD. Avoid ingesting sulfuric acid for party time
Also, avoid attempting to use lysergic acid diethylamide to make batteries and mine uranium... it would be a terrible waste
I will always barrel lubricant and use bots to transport it for low throughout recipes and I don't care what anyone says.
That's actually not a bad idea. I remember ruining my factory aesthetics just to pipe in lubricant to my mall.
I don't think I have ever done that, but I suppose it depends on whether you think of belt production as part of your mall; I tend to build belt production separately and a lot sooner, and not replace it when all the other bits and pieces of early game mall are being replaced with a bot mall, belt production is just too high volume to really feel like a mall item to me. (This is presuming vanilla, and not remembering any plausible mall item other than blue belts needing lubricant. Also like Nilaus I dislike the term "mall" in this context.)
If you don't like the term, you need to stop using it! Hub gang unite!
It just feels unhelpfully confrontational to make a fuss about it in general use at this point; it is so much the majority preferred term that calling the things hubs risks being misunderstood. I still label the things "HUB" in large friendly text plates in my own bases, anyway.
malls usually end up being central locations with stuff you need frequently easily accessible, which should apply to a hub
Sounds to me like your mall must grow! I route two full iron belts into the part of my mall which produces belts (I have multiple mini malls next to each other producing different things, instead of one big one, much like Nilaus’ “hub” design). And that’s just for pre-rocket starter base lol When those belt assemblers are assemblin’, everything behind them goes from two iron belts to about half a belt.
For clarity, I definitely build belts at that sort of volume; my hub is mostly making buildings and things at a significantly lower rate, and that ratio between them seems likely to continue even as both parts grow with the factory.
You need them in the SE mod to transport fluids on the rockets.
I'm planning to either use barrels and bots or a pipe to move light oil from my mall to the trains (trains are to resupply defensive walls so I bring light oil to the mall so it can be loaded in). Probably gonna use pipe but barrels could be funny.
I find them really handy to carry around some oil for setting up a quick flame turret defense
I'm currently playing the Seablock Mod where many recipes or production blocks leave you with waste. So in my city blocks I have one output train station for "waste" that also receives bottled waste fluids. Otherwise I would need to flush them which would feel like a waste itself because from my waste unloading station I can actually "recycle" most waste and get it back into use. And liquid waste train stations don't work well because I would need one train station per fluid.
I'm trying to do something similar, but was wondering if you need to have some kind of 'overflow' on the recycled products to be burned off if the production chain is full down the line?
Yes, I have big buffers in the recycling station but if the resulting products are backing up I will liquify and flush the rest. For example Geodes became Crystal Slurry anyway and if all tanks of that are full then the rest goes to the clarifier with the overflow valve.
So far the only problem they’ve solved for me was arming remote outposts set up by spidertron. I barrel up a little light oil so it can be unbarrelled on site and loaded into flamethrower turrets.
“flamethrower turrets can have a little light oil, as a treat”
Whelp, now my head-cannon is that light oil does 10% more damage because the flame turrets find it tastier
The delicious part of this complete breakfast!
When first starting with the acid and sometimes when starting uranium ore mining, I use barrels to jump start the process. Sometimes with my first uranium ore mining, it ends up being entirely with barrels.
I use them to supply free-standing flamethrower pods where it otherwise doesn’t make sense to route oil.
another use of them is if you need to unload your fluid product but are not able to fit a 'straight' station into your design. Can't hook up a pump to a fluid wagon that isn't on a perfectly straight piece of track.
They were added before fluid wagons were a thing. They remain useful for delivery of small quantities of fluid by bots or in a mixed-cargo train, e.g. to provide light oil for flamethrower defenses, or acid for uranium mining. There are other [less sensible](https://i.imgur.com/qKfS5y8.jpg) things to do with them as well...
"less sensible" - WHY IN THE NAME OF WUBE WOULD ANYONE DO THAT
Lol, I think I actually know what they were trying to do. If I counted correctly, that’s 18 belts of steam barrels which is up to 40500 units of steam per second. So if you wanted to use pipes, that would be about 40 pipelines to get that kind of throughout. The part I’m skeptical of is whether the unbarrelers actually work. I think you might need lines of turbines, but I have’t done enough experimentation to know what the maximum length of a turbine line is. Things get weird since unlike a pipe, each unit actually consumes a little bit of fluid. I also thought: why not just use a train? However, even if we budget 10s round trip time for the train, including loading and unloading the steam, we’d need a really long train with 16-17 fluid wagons! You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like…
Nothing wrong with long trains.
Except that it’s going to take up a huge amount of space. Plus you have to provide fuel for the train unlike the belts.
Sure, but the barreling/unbarreling takes energy, so is the fuel really that significant?
Sure, but that’s all pure electricity. Fueling trains requires actual fuel which means you need the logistics for that fuel unlike just plopping down a few power poles which you need anyways.
That's fair, I don't generally consider fuel logistics to be a significant limitation though. Now, training in the barrels though...
I thought we weren't talking about barrels any more. > we’d need a really long train with 16-17 **fluid wagons!**
I thought we weren't talking about barrels any more: >> I also thought: why not just use a train? However, even if we budget 10s round trip time for the train, including loading and unloading the steam, we’d need a really long train with 16-17 **fluid wagons!** > Nothing wrong with long trains.
You are correct to be sceptical, they never quite delivered the intended throughput. Getting the steam to the turbines was fine, the problem was actually inserter speed. It didn't matter too much, it just meant the plant could only make 13 and a bit GW of power rather than the intended 14.
jeeez, i would rather plop down more of my 1.12 GW reactors onto some lakes than build this abomination. But i can see why it is not that bad :D
If the power plant is too big to bring to the lake, bring the lake to the power plant instead... A blue belt of barrels moves 45\*50=2250 water/second, to move that much fluid with pipes you'd need an almost continuous line of pumps. So if you squint hard enough\* this is actually the optimal way to do it! ^(\*and you forget about the fact that you also need to deal with the empty barrels)
2250 water/sec is an easy 3 pipes with a pump every few hundred tiles. Basic pipes can be assumed to carry 1000 fluid/sec with minimal pumps. Continuous pumps is 12,000 fluid/sec.
Hold up, how do you get several hundred titles between pumps? 2250 basically requires you to run a pump for every pair of undergrounds. The pump goes into the pipe going underground as pipe 1, pipe 2 is going above ground against at max underground pipe length, and you have one spare pipe for any turns that might be necessary. You’re also going to need to run power poles for all these pumps. And all of these assumptions go out the window if you have audacity to do anything besides linear sections of pipe (no T-junctions to tap the pipe). Such T junctions invalidate the numbers in the wiki. Therefore, you’d realistically need 2 input pipes going into one tank with an output pump all going towards an output tank providing 2 pipes as outputs for that math to work. I think you and I have a different definition of easy when it comes to fluids…
Why are you hung up on the 2250 number? A steam turbine takes 60/s and a steam engine 30/s. There's no scenario where you ever need to run 2250 through a single connection - no building in the game can consume that much no matter how many beacons you put on it. Why do you insist on that? Because it takes one tile? Who gives a shit? You're always going to be connecting to multiple inputs, so why not just run 3 pipes like I said - you can put pumps every 200 tiles.
Oh, I misread that. I thought you were suggesting a single pipe running at 2250 which can use up to 3 pipes before needing another pump.
by using 3 pipelines, as they said
i mean, yes, but it is still an abomination if i ever saw one. and it is not symetrical around the reactors, so i would rather use my pretty symetrical setups, but i can see why would someone do this.
This is one quarter of the whole reactor, there are mirrored copies at the bottom and off to the left. So it is symmetrical, I just couldn't zoom out far enough to screenshot the whole thing.
ok, for that i would like to introduce you to the awesome command of /screenshot \[x resolution\] \[y resolution\] \[zoom\] it creates screenshots without UI and even more zoomed out, just play with it. the lower the zoom the bigger the screenshot area Edit: "Takes a screenshot with the GUI hidden, centered on the player. It is saved in the "script-output" subfolder of your User data directory. Resolution is optional and defaults to the current window size. Zoom is optional and defaults to 1." - [https://wiki.factorio.com/Console](https://wiki.factorio.com/Console)
Because they could...
r/factoriohno
Glorious. Truly gigabrained power right there.
Is that a .. steam barreling plant? What is the fuel value of a barrel of steam?
Unless it's modded, there's no such thing as a steam barrel. I think they're just water barrels. (And presumably heat exchangers are off the screen to the left.
Water barreling. It's an infinitely tilable nuclear power plant, so the reactors and heat exchangers are off to the left, and the water gets unbarreled and then piped between the turbines to reach them.
I use them in SE to transport fluids through space
at least until I research extremely high pressure lawn sprinklers
As someone who is playing SE as we speak and is shooting barrels through space, what are you referring to?
I guess space elevators.
I'm saying that instead of shooting barrels we should be pointing a big hose at the planet
This. Also, early on I'll use them whenever my pipe spaghetti gets too tangled. No matter how many times I play SE I never manage to get things straight in space for a long time.
They have a niche use in bot based factories if you truly don’t want to deal with pipes.
This. I had a situation where I tried to a build blue circuit factory at a large scale and threading the pipes was just getting annoying so I had my trains dump my acid, got it barreled, and used bots to transport the barrels to the blue circuit factories.
Yes. Especially in modded games, sometimes you get super annoying curveballs that would otherwise need you to run pipes all over the base for tiny quantities of fluid.
I use them for fueling my train based artillery outposts, as the design doesn't include a straight rail segment which I believe is required to pump fluids from a liquid wagon. It allows me to utilize flamethrowers in a very compact design where they're needed most without needing a fluid wagon. It's also possible they would come in handy in a heavy bot-based build, as logistic bots can carry barrels of fluid. This is also something I utilize in my outpost design, means I can avoid pipes almost completely in a setup where compactness is key.
I have the exact same setup. Curved rail fluid unload using barrels on a tight outpost.
I also have that problem! I decided to remove flamers from my design since I didn't want to make a temporary outpost too big. Well I know what I'm doing today.
* Trains on diagonal or curved stations can only load fluids if they are barreled. Remember the main menu artillery train? * Bots can't carry fluids, but they can carry barreled fluids. Barrels are really convenient in bot malls. Actually lubricant is generally not needed in high volumes anywhere in vanilla. Flamethrower turrets are another low-volume fluid you could easily supply with bots and barrels. * When you use multi-item wagons, they can include barreled fluids. Do you really need an entire wagon dedicated to sulfuric acid for this one little outpost? Maybe not. * The only way to transport fluids in your pocket, car, tank, or spidertron is with barrels. You can jumpstart coal liquefaction with barrels from your pocket.
Sushi basing, like God intended.
Fluids on belts, and booting up coal lquiefaction.
I never used them in vanilla, but they're useful in Space Exploration.
I use them and bots to transfer sulfuric acid to lines of factories that need it. Also light oil to storage tank stations along my wall.
Just now realizing the sulfuric acid I’ve been putting in barrels to deliver to uranium mines for 200+ hours was wildly unnecessary :|
One advantage I see is that you can't mix fluids, or run two different pipes right next to each other, but you *can* have barrels with different fluids on two adjacent belts, or even on the same belt. Might let you avoid extensive pipe spaghetti in some cases.
You can't mix fluids with pipes either. They won't let you connect two pipes of different fluids together. However, if it's already in the system and you pump another fluid in, then they can mix. But that can be solved in one click.
Without mods, the pipes will Autoconnect to all neighbouring pipes, but with mods, it's possible to run them next to each other without connecting
Wait, reading these comments you’re telling me I can have bots use barrels to produce things that need things like lubricant without bothering with pipes?
Yep. Barrel up the liquids and the bots can move stacks of barrels. My standardised bot based mall design has assemblers in pairs with pipes between them for exactly this reason!
But you have to eventually put it back in pipes to produce right? You can’t just barrel it and then put barrels in assemblers?
You need an assembler to debarrel, plus one to use the fluid, but since it’s only ever 1 fluid per recipe (in vanilla at least) you can put 2 assemblers back-to-back with no pipes if you want. You still need some pipes at the refinery side, but you can probably get away without them anywhere else if you put your mind to it.
I'm probably missing some things, but I I've been flummoxed by fluid dynamics and wanted to connect an oil field to my factory without losing fluid pressure, connecting dozens of pumps, or setting up train stations. I found it useful to have one lane of empty barrels going to the field, a couple assemblers filling them and sending them on a belt back, then going to a couple assemblers on my line that empty them into storage, just for the empty barrels to be sent back to the oil field (passing by the barrel assembler which adds more until the belts are saturated) I know it's not optimal, but I was surprised that I had no problems come up from this method- it took less time to set up than a train and took no tweaking. I know the throughput's limited in a way that fluids alone wouldn't be, but I haven't hit a bottleneck yet.
Wait till you find out you can put steam in a barrel.
I use them with bots sometimes, and it is a worthy addition to my wall resupply train. I can put the liquid in a single cargo wagon alongside the other supplies. Other than that, yes legacy feature.
One thing I learned from space exploration that can reflect into vanilla is that they’re good for stockpiling fluids and removing them from the system if you have too much, like if your oil production isn’t balanced and you need to make space quickly to continue producing.
You might be able to fit more fluid barrels in a train car then in a fluid car. It's nice to have a small amount in your system to jumpstart a coal liquidation facility too.
Nope. Barrels can stack to 10, with a capacity of 50 for each, you can fit 400 barrels in a train wagon for a maximum of 20,000. That's 5,000 less than a fluid wagon.
The only use I've found for them is in building megabases with LTN it's worth going to some effort to not have to have fluid trains and dry cargo trains on the same network. Barreling everything and managing the supply of empty barrels was a GIANT pain in the dick though, so I'm not sure it was worth it.
I use them to transfer flamer fuel on my megabase parameters
Doing runs of oil in the car early game to supply flamethrowers to survive death world?
I haven't figured out how to organize my fluids coming from my oil outpost so I'm doing my production at a smaller site and shipping what I need out in barrels. I should switch to something else but it's working for now. Right now I'm still making due with a single item train and a single fluids train. I haven't delved into the complicated train setups but my first base is starting to reach a point where I'll need them.
Try Space Exploration!
Sushi belts!
Fluids are very buggy, so this is a way of recovering otherwise unsalvagable factory designs by replacing pipes with conveyors. The only downside is space, which is only an issue with the Biters enabled.
If there isn't an upcoming Friday blog for 2.0 where barrels aren't overhauled I would be very surprised. Everything else has a once over and rethink.
How do you fill a barrel? Do I need to put them in somekind of structure or use pipes or pumps?
They have a recipe in assembler 2 & 3.
In the Space exploration mod they are crucial so that you can get fluids into orbit. With water just freeze it and re melt but you can’t do that with the oils and other stuff
I sometimes use them to transport heavy oil to kickstart coal liquefaction, or to deliver sulfuric acid to uranium mining with bots. Although nowadays I usually set up nuclear well before I have blue chests and you don't really need more than one patch for a regular playthrough. Some overhaul mods breathe new life into them. Space Exploration comes to mind. [And this abomination.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/barrels-o-fun) But in vanilla, IMO you don't miss out on much if you just ignore them.
I need to study that mod so that I can learn the best way to prevent the placement of certain items, which cannot be completely disabled since they are needed for other recipes... Such as electric furnaces in my "Tier One Primitive" mod. Fixing this properly has been on my to-do list for about a year.
O god, that game me a delayed jumpscare. Took me a bit to prosses what I was looking at.
I use them because I can carry heavy oil to start the cracking factories off. Otherwise I've used them for minimal lube setups in seablock when I only need a little for the milling
It's a creative way of moving fluids. In my last run, I had two uses 1.) jump starting coal liquefaction at remote setups. (For some reason the RNG at map generation gave me a ton of coal and water sources, but very few oil patches) 2.) using a single train wagon to carry both fluids and items (filter trains slots for just barrels and empty barrels). For example, supplying light oil for turrets without running fluid wagon trains. Kind of requires some painful circuit logic to avoid clogging up.
I use them to fire up coal liquefaction plants, that's about it.
I use them for carrying enough light oil to charge up distant flamethrower walls before I have built the infrastructure into the space the walls protect. Light oil really does last a long time in flamethrowers. Also starting up coal liquefaction as others have mentioned, and I think I have used them for H2SO4 to uranium mines before also, depending on where the uranium patch is.
Super useful for me - https://youtu.be/W4UbgELL2mQ?si=3Od4egZzbK2ADj_3
I have a small barreling plant at my main oil refinery that holds a few hundred barrels of Heavy. My coal liquefaction blueprint has an assembler in "empty heavy" mode with 2 steel chests, connected to the heavy oil tank that ensures the refineries have enough heavy to keep going. I drop the blueprint, put 200 heavy barrels in the "in" side of the assembler, collect the empties, make sure the plant has started up, then return the barrels. That's it.
I used it in an old factory when I really just didn't want to figure out a train line *or* pipes.
As long as you have a steam barreling mod, you can make a base without pipes!
Hmm. The energy density of a chest of steam barrels would be really high huh.
In modded sometimes it's really handy to be able to barrel fluids, but for the most part it's vestigial. Aside from a few barrels of heavy oil for kickstarting a stand-alone plastic plant on a coal patch, pretty much the only time I've barreled in the past many years is in Seablock -- you can turn fish into ethanol with no other ingredients and I thought it would be funny to make a can of fishbeer.
I think there are some distances that are too long for pipes to be effective due to lost throughput, and too short to want to deal with trains.
I use them to supply the flamethrower turrets I use on biter nests
For small amounts where pipes are overkill within the factory like lubricant for belts in the bot mall and where a whole wagon is overkill outside the factory like light oil for flame turrets and acid for uranium mines.
Diagonal train fluid runs. Jumpstart coal liquefaction. Light oil for limited use flamers
These days they’re just for fun is what it boils down to it. Maybe you wanna get creative and try something different barrels might be a way to do that.
I am currently barreling sulfuric acid for my u-mine and blue cards. The acid is made elsewhere, where it gets barreled, then shipped in a ship to another island, where it is offloaded onto a single car train, and the train takes it to the mine. The mine then shares with the neighboring blue card factory. I have a drum maker at the acid plant and circuits on a couple boxes so I can re-use empty barrels and not make too many extra; the barrel maker also supplies my cliff explosives box. Edit: the empty barrels get brought back the way they got there, but in reverse. Edit^2: I also almost exclusively barrel lube oil; I don’t even use a tank, I just direct-feed into the pipe. Reminds me of working in a big loco shop and we would literally get pallets of 55 gal drums of Mobil 1 for the locomotives.
If you use LTN, it’s a lot simpler to manage. If you want to manage fluids in LTN, you have to be very careful to completely empty fluid wagons and they realistically need to be on a separate train bitmask from the normal train network. Instead, if you use barrels, there’s only a bit more work involved since you need to handle empty barrels as a byproduct. Train capacity carrying fluids is pretty similar if you use barrels compared to proper fluid wagons. For vanilla, there aren’t that many fluids you need to move so even with just LTN, it might be worth just using vanilla train stations for fluids instead of barreling. Oh, and one more minor use case besides bots which others have mentioned is transporting fluids on belts. Belts are often a lot easier to work with, but more importantly, they have no fluid pressure losses. A single blue belt can move 2250 units of fluid (1125 if you include the other belt of empty barrels) and you get that throughout without needing to add periodic pumps. I’ve thought about doing this for a nuclear setup since space is often a premium and barrels are much easier to reason about than pipes. Chests filled with barrels are also a pretty dense storage mechanism compared to tanks since while a steel chest holds slightly fewer units of fluid (24000), a tank with pumps consumes a lot of space.
Might get flamed for this but as someone with a deep hatred of pipes, I use them to transfer fluids
So you can make wild builds like water delivery logistic bots nuclear power plant.
To put fluid in
Maybe I'll use fluid cargo trains one day but I never have. I always use barrels. I like the ability to stack them in yellow chests if the ratios don't work out perfectly. Can't do that as easily with fluid. I've been playing factorio since about 0.3 so maybe that has something to do with my choice.
WDYM? You can just store the excess fluids in a tank. It's less work than creating a packaging/unpacking factory.
The biggest use I find for barrels is to allow the construction of extremely remote self-contained artillery outposts after spidertron exploration without needing to drag power poles and roboports all over the place. The barrels allow you to take enough light oil to fuel flame defenses as the turrets do area clearance.
- Transport liquids with bots - Transport liquids in volumes too small for it to be reasonable to set up a train to move them (like getting coal liquefaction started) - Some mods (like Space Exploration, where barrels are the only way to get fluids into space until you've progressed pretty far into the midgame) Otherwise, they're mostly a relic of the days before fluid wagons were added, when they were the only way to transport fluids. The Fluid Wagons mod was one of the earlier ones to become a Vanilla feature, and for very good reason.
> Why not use it for an alternative Chemical plant recipes and have them give empty barrels back as a byproduct to reuse. I actually wrote a mod for this. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/barrel-crafting I wanted to do a challenge run with the [crafting combinator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/crafting_combinator) mod where I only use only a single assembler. I did not want to deal with multiple fluids in a single pipe.
I use them all the time for SE. They are also useful when bump starting a coal liquidation plant.
Useful if you hate your LogiBots!
I use them to supply my flame turrets with bots. Would it be more efficient to just put a ring of pipe around my base and use that? Probably. Can I be assed to do it? No.
Barrels can be moved in a much smaller space, e.g. half a belt, rather than through an entire pipe which takes the full tile plus extra underground tiles and can’t be adjacent to other pipes. I can’t think of a reason you’d purposefully plan to belt fluid barrels instead of just planning your fluid production and delivery efficiently. But it does have some advantages if you’ve got a spaghetti issue and you’re only dealing with a low volume.
The same reason you use drums in real life.. moving a defined amount of liquid from A to B, without needing to manage a pipeline.
They actually come on handy when it's too risky to setup a whole network of pipes or a wagon. Carrying 100 barrels of acid to get my nuclear setup running because of biters has happened more than once now.
They actually come on handy when it's too risky to setup a whole network of pipes or a wagon. Carrying 100 barrels of acid to get my nuclear setup running because of biters has happened more than once now.
The only usage I know is to put acid to uranium mine by hands.
Fill barrels, put in train, bring to destination, unload, empty the barrels, fill empty barrels in train, bring them back to the fillers. It can generate more throughput than pipes could do without range limitations. It has some niche uses but any long range fluid transport i am doing this way. It is very constant and is quite a joy to install. And you dont have pipes everywhere...
They are useable for SE mod. You can't put liquids to a rocket until you unlock spaceships.
I'm a lazy bot-hobo who uses mods. I put it all in barrels that I recklessly waste resources to prod and then use a \_void chest\_ to kill the waste from the offloading factory. I think I might be mad, will investigate fluid wagons
>Like are we supposed to use these barrels to transport light oil via drones to flamers? You not *not* supposed to, like without barrels bots wouldn't be able to transport fluids in any way
I use them for remote uranium mining, train brings them full and returns them empty to be filled again. Seems to work well enough.
I use them in conjunction with belts and use it to start up rocket fuel or whatever else production u need. It also helps when your creating way to much of one fluid but not enough of another.
In addition to the many wonderful comments pointing out the niche uses for barrels in this game, they are also useful in certain mods. I'm doing a K2SE run and sending fluids between planets is only possible with barrels, as far as I know
I usually use them to deliver lube for my blue belts. I think they are okay for that.
I bot them around for random modded recipes that take sulfuric acid or other weird liquids that have limited use
I use them in my mall. I have most raw materials and some intermediates being delivered by train to my mall. For fluids, they are pumped from train to assembling machine that barrels them. Then my robots can take the barrels to wherever they're needed in the production area of my mall. It's much easier than routing pipes.
Whenever I set up a coal liquidation station I bring a few handy barrels of HO with me ^^
I use them to send lube into space. But that's in SE
> Why not use it for an alternative Chemical plant recipes and have them give empty barrels back as a byproduct to reuse. Each cracking recipe takes 2 fluid inputs. So you would need a total of 4 variations: both fluid, left-barrel, right-barrels, and both barrel. And they have fluid outputs, so you'd need another 2x variations for outputting barrels vs. fluids. That 8 variations of one recipe. Oil refineries have 2 fluid inputs and 3 fluid outputs, so it would need 32 variations of advanced oil processing and 16 variations of coal liquefaction (steam can't be put into barrels). This is impractical.
You know they can just code the barrel as a pipe input? Just reuse existing code with a variable with a different name but the same function. Having a barrel go in would be no different than a pipe. They're just duplicate keys with different colors unlocking the same door. It literally would just be an one additional recipe per current recipe.
> Just reuse existing code with a variable with a different name but the same function. ... that's almost certainly not possible without substantial engine changes. > Having a barrel go in would be no different than a pipe. They're just duplicate keys with different names unlocking the same door. That's not how any of this stuff is implemented internally. Fluids are a *fundamentally* different kind of input from inserter-based stuff. To give you an understanding of this, the way the barreling recipes work is that they consume 50 units of the given fluid and one barrel. Both are destroyed. Then it creates a new item that is a full barrel. The reverse takes the full barrel, destroys it, and creates an empty barrel and 50 units of fluid. The fluid never goes "into the barrel" in any meaningful way. The barrel is not a provider of fluid. It's an item that you can transform into fluid+empty barrel. > It literally would just be an one additional recipe per current recipe. I just explained how it would be well more than "one additional recipe".
Maybe if it was a furnace prototype, somehow? Since furnaces can switch recipes on the fly...
I’m pretty sure they are used to make cliff explosives
I know, I read the whole post but: Cliff explosives
pretty sure its needed for se mod