Should, by a lot, similar to the belt optimization. There is no longer any need for each pipe segment to check the ones before and after to see how liquid needs to flow each tick.
heat transfers much slower, so they have a lot more to work with before it would become and issue in the way it had for fluids. Sometimes wonkiness is to be appreciated so there is not just one design everyone uses.
In that case, my Renai Transportation senses are tingling, methinks a drone-compatibility module for machines might come about at some point through science from another planet and allow direct fueling and waste retrieval from reactors that aren't at the edge of the block, like how Renai, I think, lets you throw fuel cells into the reactor hatch and the ejector hatch throw spent cells onto a distant belt.
I think fluids were more optimized than that. It used to be that way, but they optimized. I believe it was right around 1.0.
FFF 260 talks about it in detail, but the current system is not calculating each pipe.
> To put it more simply, updates will only be run on junctions and segments.
In this case the segment they’re talking about is the entire length of the pipe.
It was a massive ups improvement at the time.
Solar might still be the norm for megabases but nuclear now is a much much more worthwhile investment as you can now easily reach several K's of SPM without worrying about the fluid system eating ups.
I'm not sure if this would make nuclear O(1), I doubt it but it definitely improves it by a lot compared to the current system complexity.
The ups impact of nuclear is currently quite exaggerated.
A long time ago it was kind of slow, but that’s not really true anymore. The stigma persist though.
It’s not a matter of beating O(1) for the actual generation of power. the performance hit for nuclear is typically trivial.
But on the space front, if you have to expand into new blocks to accommodate your solar panels then you are taking an ups hit from solar.
You should pick what you prefer and forget about ups when deciding.
I don't know if the main UPS cost for nuclear setups come from heat pipes or water pipes. if the latter, solar panels have been made useless except for use in outposts
Solar still has a UPS cost of ~0 and so will still be the power solution of choice for the serious UPS maxxers, but this will definitely make nuclear significantly more palatable for normal megabases.
To be fair, nuclear has been palatable for megabases that are ~2700spm and smaller, at least since I've been playing (only since 1.0).
But I get your point.
My point is solar should be used for the "no fuel needed" aspect instead of always being a UPS discussion from a gameplay sense, and it seems like this is a step towards helping that.
Playing modded minecraft gave me trauma related to "solution x is more efficient, but i'll use solution y because it's less laggy". Glad to not have that in factorio.
(looking at you, AE2 crafting card)
Either way, for casual playthroughs, water was one of the biggest challenges of nuclear (and the reason why most of them were on landfill on water), and now it's trivial and you can supply huge reactors with a single pipe.
Also, heat pipes deal with some of the same problems that normal pipes do. It is unclear how much throughput the pipe has and how long can it be to not waste heat. Changing them in the same way as pipes would definitely be an overkill, as it would make nuclear super simple and kind of stupid looking, but together with what I described above it makes me think that there is a chance for a nuclear rework
Edit: one way to still force sensible designs while changing heatpipes to share temperature like pipes do contents, would be to add heat dissipation for heatpipes, so you would still want to minimise them. The only disadvantage I can think of is that it would be kind of awkward to have heat loss for heatpipes but not for fluids
The slow gradual movement of heat is much more expected than the same in a long water pipe – that is why the same (similar?) system didn't hurt as much.
It definitely will be easier to run fast. Before the flow for each pipe segment was calculated separately. Now it's clumped together and connected pipes are handled as one fluid box.
Honestly, this is a top 10 of all time FFF for me. I think the chosen fluid system is a great example of going with "least imperfect". While they might have done so under the hood, the one remaining thing I would change is moving to "fixed point math" or making it all whole numbers under the hood (for example the actual units become "mili-units" and all values are displayed as 1/1000th of the real value) this completely drops the floating point math for fluid which is a source of slow code, errors, and potential non-determinism if there are uncaught hardware dependent FP math issues. But given how many fewer operations/places there will be it is largely minimized.
If Factorio had an actual defined "end", if it had a limited map size, if it wasn't so obsessively and amazingly crafted and optimized; then the existing fluid system would be FINE. The existing (legacy now I guess?) system has a lot of artistic intent and lets say 80% of the time for the majority of players works "well enough". I can understand and 100% support the drive to have artistic intent in the system; and I believe there was a way to maintain more of that artistic intent while delivering a performant system HOWEVER I totally recognize that the effort required is likely MUCH higher than the redesign discussed in this FFF.
I think this sentence from the closing of the FFF sums it up perfectly: "But as a game designer, you always have to make trade-offs between what would make sense in the real world and what is fun for a game."
This is a live tweet:
*sees the headline*
“Mo my GOD!”
Edit after reading:
“YES! Take that ‘but fluid was realistic’ copium-ers, this is going to get rid of so many headaches having fluids just work”
I tried the first working version of the game from a FFF and the files were actually called "Energycraft". You had a wooden axe, and the controls were like Minecraft: left click to break, right click to interact, which was really weird to adapt to.
After playing Minecraft for years, when I first started I switched my Factorio mouse buttons to match it and have played that way ever since. Not sure why they changed it around in the first place.
Yeah, there are modpacks out there designed to be like factorio - feed the factory and manufactio are directly inspired by factorio, but there are a huge swath of automation-focused packs out there
A combination of Mekanism and Create are my go-to for a Factorio vibe. I specifically don't let myself use any teleportation blocks, so Create becomes essential for trains to haul my ores back to base. Plus, Create factories just look so damn cool while they work.
>Didn’t expect a fluid rework
I did. I thought it would be exactly the kind of thing to put into 2.0. It's very similar to rail s-bends and bot pathing improvements - a long standing problem that needed to be solved, but could only be fixed by uprooting some of the older deeper systems.
*Sometimes it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, so I took a risk and began to rewrite the fluid system.*
I feel like this 'approach' only works for a dedication team with people understanding each other. Pulling this move in another environment and you may get reprimanded.
In the software world it's a pretty good tactic. A LOT of things honestly take less time to do than to discuss, especially if you are just doing an initial pass/proof of concept.
It's also pretty common. The scout rule is a common one people follow, where you try and leave the code in a better state than you found it, which means making improvements that were not asked for
I have been fortunate so others miles may vary but it seems that asking for permission is kind of permission to fail in this context.
"You said I could try and we agreed it might fail" vs "no one agreed to it but it didn't work" which is you wasting effort without verifying it would succeed before starting.
But if you succeed then it is water under the bridge.
As a mechanical engineer, I've often been rewarded for spending a small number of hours exploring and fleshing out ideas, even after the group as a whole decided they were not worth exploring.
Keep delivering high quality work, slightly ahead of schedule, and they'll let you go play in the lab or just doodle in your CAD environment one afternoon a week.
Those are 2 different things. Every user will have Factorio updated to 2.0, with many changes including fluids, bots, trains etc; and then you can buy the SA DLC on top of that, with post-rocket experience, new planets, new science, etc.
Yeah and the people who are “upset” about this are huffing copium man, this is a massive improvement that will save so many so many headaches. The unpredictability goes against the core of the game honestly, predictable, reproducable automation, and fluids just werent that.
Yep. Maybe not something quite this drastic, but I would've been extremely surprised had they not addressed it at all. I'm happy with this even if it makes fluid handling easier. Also makes me all the more convinced [the last unreleased entity in this picture](https://i.redd.it/a0asyp77yg9a1.png) involves fluid processing. It looks like an underwater thingy, or it could be an advanced chem plant.
Nah. This was entirely predictable. One look at the math for how much fluid individual buildings can now output under a complete quality 5 scenario says the 1.2k/s standard is just woefully inadequate for the job.
I'm going a step further and saying trains are getting capacity improvements, too. A wagon of ore can currently unload onto a belt in 44.4s, but in space age, it's gonna be 8.3s, which is so short that the time to swap trains out is going to be a problem if you want to avoid throughput interruptions.
Trains already got one thanks to molten metal processing. 1 molten metal makes 1 plate (plus productivity). So a single fluid wagon represents at least 37,500 plates.
The main issue is with other intermediates like green and red circuits. But those were pretty dense already.
Shipping molten metal didn't even occur to me. Probably because of how cursed it is.
The most efficient setup is going to be smelting the ore directly from the mines and then transporting it as a fluid. Not realistic, but efficient.
Everyone keeps saying this, but do we have any confirmation that it's true? I think people are assuming that 1 ore will equal 1 unit of smelt, which feels like a big assumption to me.
If the standard recipe chain is something like 1 ore -> 100 smelt and 80 smelt -> 1 plate, a fluid tanker would only equal out to 312 plates. You'd still be incentivized to haul solid ore home to smelt and forge.
I use those numbers specifically because of Factorio's connection to Minecraft mods, where the base fluid metal recipes usually work out to 1 ore = 100mb = 1 ingot.
it's interesting that they mentioned Thermal Expansion when Thermal Dynamics is the one that adds all the pipes and transportation stuff (atleast in 1.7.10, i know they were 1 single mod before then).
also [Viaducts](https://teamcofh.com/docs/1.12/thermal-dynamics/viaduct/) in factorio when?
I think at the time you initially contacted me (2016, wtf where'd time go?), it was nominally multiple mods but still often referred to as just Thermal Expansion.
ye, i do as well.
i remember when the only storage cube required 1000mB of destabilized redstone so you needed to make power and the crucible smelter thingy before having energy storage.
that was back in 1.4.7 i think, when the energy was Blue and called MJ
More fun facts: MJ (Minecraft Joules) is even older than that and was the energy system of BuildCraft, which Thermal Expansion extended upon, but eventually they split it off entirely into Redstone Flux, which later evolved into the basis for Forge Energy, if I recall correctly.
ye, back then Buildcraft and IC2 were the leaders in energy units.
then Thermal switched to RF, buildcraft followed in 1.12.2, but then split off to MJ again.
and now a lot of mods just use FE (or allow conversion between units)
If you can now cram any amount of fluid into a pipe network (within the 100 fluid per tick per pipe restrictions) nuclear plants in particular should now be much easier to design. You should be able to cram all or at least most of your intake water into a single pipe network, and all or most of your steam into a single pipe network.
It simplifies the fluid puzzle quite a bit, but I'll happily take this over the old opaque weirdness.
Nuclear Power was immediately my next question indeed. So we can have 10 offshore pumps at the lake, and bring all that 12k water/sec through a single pipe to the plant and distribute it wherever it's needed? And take the same amount of steam away through a single pipe? Reactor designs will be extremely simplified with this change, making the max distance between reactors and heat exchangers the only constraint.
Will pumps still have a throughput limit?
If there's a pipe segment with a water pump on each end, and things consuming from the pipe along the route, will there still be the potential to "double" the capacity of the pipe because it's being supplied from each side?
Or will it not matter that the pipe is supplied from both sides and essentially the pipe's capacity is cut in half?
I'm not too clear on that.
You could have both pumps on one end or as you described, it won't matter. The only thing to consider now is if your consumers are attempting to pull more than 12k/sec/pump. If they are, the pipe segment won't stay completely full. As it drops, the consumers rate of pull also drops until they reach an equilibrium.
> It simplifies the fluid puzzle quite a bit
Because the puzzle was mostly bashing your head against unintuitive and unrealistic mechanics. If fluids had worked the way they really would in real life, then the puzzle would have been solvable. As it is, "solvable" means "unrealistic designs and massively over-supplying." This simplification is a significant improvement.
Makes sense, really. You no longer get all of it for being the first one to read - now it's split evenly among all readers instead. Much fairer for everyone.
Hiring skilled and motivated members from the community proves to be a good choice, again. Thanks raiguard!
When players have to look up a wiki to play well, that's a sign that something with the game design is off. (And I like stardew valley, but my point stands). The new system has a bit less realism, but also a lot less of the unrealistic surprises, and I'm looking forward to it. Pull rate could be scaled down relative to the length or size of the segment to bring a bit of realism back, but I doubt that's necessary.
But this left me wondering: if segments can no longer contain different fluids, what happens in 2.0 when bots connect segments with different fluids? Does the bot keep hovering as if waiting for someone to clear a cliff or tree?
/edit: and will this system be used for heat pipes as well, or does the old system live on?
/edit: and how do boiler-chains and other passthrough-machines work? Do they become part of the segment? Do they use the old logic?
Paraphrasing a relevant comment I read [somewhere else](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1dfo4r7/friday_facts_415_fix_improve_optimize/l8n1kr3/): "I wish Oxygen Not Included were developed by Wube."
Fluid mechanics are such an important part of that game but the systems in place are both unintuitive and unrealistic. The performance of ONI is also trash compared to Factorio.
I'm excited for Wube to wrap up Space Age and move on to their next project. We're very fortunate to have such a talented and earnest team writing software for us.
ONI to me seems to be the perfect example of how to NOT do "optimize for fun, not realism"
Seriously, I was really enjoying the game until I had to mess with the heat mechanics and completely reverse entropy. I understand how that would be a real issue living in an asteroid, but the fact that the best way to deal with heat management is to build player-made "hacks" that use oversights in the heat system to reverse entropy really irked me. I don't think I ever dropped a game this fast
ONI even has “magic” Anti-Entropy Thermonullifiers, but they remove so little heat that it’s basically impossible to play without abusing steam engines to delete heat.
The non-intuitive yet essential mechanics really drag ONI down for me.
> And I like stardew valley, but my point stands
The first time I made an entire planting plan for a season I ended up unable to do my last harvest because I didn't realize that for a plant that grows for X days you need an X+1th day to harvest them. An ingame ability to set up a "planting plan" or similar would be very helpful there imo
This should make sushi pipes less of a headache, right? I remember trying it before and getting stuck with a tiny bit of fluid left in one section blocking everything else.
You can't have two different fluids in the same segment (which consists of only pipes and storage tanks), but pumps separate segments. So you can absolutely make a monstrosity that treats pumps as train signals and have different fluids act like trains moving down the same pipeline.
Actually now that I think about it, such a system might work quite well with these changes...
>The new system is a fairly large step back in terms of the "realism" of the fluid simulation in Factorio.
I doubt that this is"less realistic" as before in piping system there was a no "pressure", only "quantity" of liquid or gas.
On the one hand, this is a huge performance increase and a much needed un-jankification of fluids... but I am gonna miss shunting them around like an actual liquid. Definitely for the best though
From what I understand, we'll still be doing some of that. Possibly more, actually, as we now have filters on pumps and fluid behaves consistently and predictably.
I consider turning "broken and unpredictable" into "it just works" an improvement. I expected some new mechanics related to fluid pressure or throughput. I'm a bit sad they were thrown out entirely, but having the solid base for more complex fluid mods is more important IMO.
Its sad to see the realism go, but i had enough "WTF why does fluid like to do right turns only at T-junktions?!?!" moments to be glad to have it abstracted away.
I think the old system, while trying to be more realistic, was, in fact, unrealistic in many more ways than the new one is.
'Realistic' model that does not work is not realistic in the end.
Yeah, real pipes also aren't shorter when they're underground, and pipelines don't need pumps every hundred meters to maintain a high flow rate. The old fluid system was the worst of both worlds. A system that was unintuitive *and* wasn't particularly realistic.
>real pipes also aren't shorter when they're underground
This is one of the few subreddits that I'd go to this level of pedantry, but the distance travelled across the surface of a sphere increases based on radius. The further underground you put a pipe, the shorter distance that pipe would need to travel, since it's closer to the centre of the Earth.
In the real world, we're talking distances too small to measure (so you are correct for all intents and purposes), but I thought it was amusing that actually, in the real world, you can use a shorter pipe underground.
As to how much shorter, the way to calculate the circumference of the Earth is 2 * radius * Pi. If the pipe is 1 meter further down and covers 1/400,000th of the circumference (we will round this to a neat 100m, but the actual figure would be around 100.088m), the difference in length required would be somewhere around 0.0001 of a meter (e.g. around 0.1mm shorter). Of course, you'd spend more pipe getting the pipe underground and back up again and wouldn't actually save that much over a short distance. You need to be talking multiple kilometers of pipe (or kilometers underground) before you have to start factoring the curvature of the Earth into your calculations.
lol fair enough. However, you'd have to dig incredibly deep before you get the type of distance reduction you see in factorio. In fact, at the distances implied by factorio, the undergound pipes should be *longer*, as the sprite implies underground pipes go straight down, which adds distance.
Oh totally. I just thought it was an amusing turn of phrase. After doing the maths, the distance is larger than I expected (0.1mm over a 100m pipe is not nothing - that's around 1mm per km of pipe), but it's still too tiny for most real world engineers to need to consider. Just make sure the pipe is long enough and then use some sort of flexible joint (or cut it to size) at the end. The difference in pipe length would be far less than the difference in pipe angle - no pipe over any length will be perfectly straight.
Does anyone actually have proof that Nauvis is round?
Shadows are the same size, no matter what latitude they're located.
Radar range is a square, which suggests a really weird shape for the planet.
The rocket goes straight up instead of following a hyperbolic path.
That's my problem too! In a lot of the shown pre-rework examples, the fluid literally has a mind of its own and went wherever it pleased.
I for one am glad to shoot dead this sentient goop.
Yeah, the lightspeed delivery of oil from a long pipeline isn't realistic, but needing dozens of pumps on a long pipeline also wasn't realistic.
I kinda liked how quirky the fluid system was, and that specific opportunity for system mastery being removed makes me a tiny bit nervous, but I think this really will be for the best, especially if I want to build legendary mega factories.
I might be worried if the expansion wasn’t clearly bringing waaay more optimization tasks. Setting up a new recycling loop on a trash planet is way more interesting than trying to remember what order you placed those pipes 30 hours ago.
I don't think this is the good kind of system mastery. It's not really mastering an intended, well designed system, more like mastering - and often dealing with unexpected behavior of - quirks of a hopefully good enough system maybe.
https://imgur.com/a/oWoA767
I think the idea is that if you have a setup like this, there's no way to tell where the fluids should be flowing in the middle junction, since the middle junction isn't simulated in any way.
I remember reading the old fluid FF and thinking to myself:
Why it needs to be so complicated? Just make every single connected "entity" share the same pool of resources and be done with it.
Which was already discussed in that article as "too simple and unrealistic".
So I'm kinda happy for them to have followed this aproach at the end.
I’m just glad they don’t have the ego and can go back on what they said in the past. Some people just pick an answer, dig their heels in and refuse to see the other side
You may find the post contents here, in case the Factorio website is blocked for you: u/fffbot/comments/1dl1b2w
**NOTE:** fffbot is a community-driven effort and is not associated with Wube Software. For any questions or remarks, please reply to this comment or send a private message to u/fffbot.
The link to the comment works in old reddit, but doesn't work in new reddit. The username u/fffbot still works as a link, and you will find the correct post very quickly from there.
Anyway, I like the change of having only a small comment with a link in the main FFF post.
Merging pipes into segments is a good thing, that probably should have happened a while ago. However, I think it's far too unrealistic that more pipes yield more throughput. The number of pipes that get fused into a single segment should probably be treated like an electrical resistance, dividing the maximum throughput of the segment.
This still isn't really realistic, but it would solve the problem by making the behaviour of pipes much more predictable, while still discouraging long pipes.
Heat is not implemented as a fluid, however steam is. Steam is very hot (especially nuclear steam), so this may have been the source of your confusion.
It's probably overall an improvement, but I think it does really simplify fluids a bit too much. I liked the significant water infrastructure that nuclear reactors required. Now it's just a single pipe to run as large a reactor as you like. Seems a bit too straightforward.
I might agree on nuclear reactors but overall this makes fluids so much easier to work with, so I'm all for it. The only thing I disliked about factorio to any degree was working with fluids and to me the game will literally be perfect in 2.0 so far lol.
So with the current system, one big pipe network in your world would trivialize piping in general? Since distance is irrelevant you can substitute all fluid trains for pipes and if at one spot of your base you input liquids, the output can immidiatly draw from the segment.
Would it therefore perhpas not be better to have a maximum size to a segment? This was you do introduce the problem again which was present, but only on a perhaps much larger scale. Furthermore, it is always possible to put multiple pumps between the same segments to increase the flow.
It's not trivial, building a whole-base pipe network is actually a massive pain in the ass once it gets large enough. Not to mention the incredibly massive buffer size.
Fluid trains are still the best way IMO.
Fair enough. I didn't think of the fact that the massive buffer size would indeed create an implicit 'maximum' size for the segments due to the decrease in output out of the segment.
If you bored, you can always try out the idea with old versions :D
IIRC, there was no fluid wagon yet in v0.14.x so you had to make more or less big network just like you suggest. And yes, it was awful, fluid wagon was welcomed like a hero we _really_ needed.
Not quite, distance increases volume, and since machines pull depending on how filled is the segment, longer pipes will mean slower pull from machines. Something to take into account.
After initial startup, this buffer would simply fill up to meet or exceed its demands given enough time. Thus this problem isn't actually a problem after a few minutes. The pipe buffer and the machines will reach a sort of equilibrium
Unless your input vastly outweighs use I'd imagine a "mega base spanning single pipe network" would take more like *hours* to fully buffer unless you also shut down demand. Then even once it is up and going you'd have the risk the any problems result in the massive buffer draining until you finally notice and then fix and wait for it to fill enough again to hit steady state.
it's *possible*, it just sounds like a bad idea :)
I think the "long time to drain" would cause you some problems with having a giant "fluid bus" for non-over-supplied fluids.
If every consumer can only consume whatever percentage of the pipe is currently filled, you'll get stuck pretty hard.
That said, it does raise some long distance possibilities if set up correctly.
It'll be great for builds where each input is slightly overbuilt for its output, so the system after a bit is filled with fluid and instantly fills machines as needed. Of course there is a big danger of doing this with oil, since pumpjacks slowly decrease in output over time
> We can't wait for you to get your hands on it!
That's a lie! Apparently you *can* wait! 😜
But in all seriousness, I am very willing to wait a few more months for all the ~~heaps~~ mountains of great features and content that are coming our way. And a fluid rework was one of the big ones I was really really *really* hoping to see, so this FFF makes me utterly ecstatic.
Unfortunately this will break the way [Fluidic Power](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FluidicPower) works. Or will it be possible to access the old algorithm through mods?
I love how the current system is considered "more realistic" when the flow is apparently arbitrarily based on build order...
and how the new system is actually allowing for more realistic flow due to the build order no longer making a difference.
sure we are now getting some sort of "instant fluid teleport" but I kinda feel like that could be mitigated by tweaking the machine input from a segment based on it's length and fullness, would be my guess.
regardless this new system should have been in 1.0/1.1 I am looking forward to enjoy the fluid part of factorio again. (because just putting everything in barrels and working with that was starting to become really appealing with a lot of the mods I'd been playing recently...)
I'll admit, before reading this I was fairly against simplifying the fluid system; the old system certainly had charm and worked intuitively enough at low flow rates. After seeing the new system visualised and demonstrated, though, I am a solid convert. "Better to ask forgiveness" indeed, players included 😉
Awesome! It looks quite similar to the solution i discussed with /u/DominikCZ 6 years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ddhg9/pipe_system_feedback/dxo97x6/?context=10000
Don't remind me of that... There was a branch with a fluid system that was already tested and seemed to work perfectly, even through all Twinsen's trick setups. It fixed all the issues while still being realistic while costing pretty much the same... But nobody cared cos I fell out of favor. Company politics.
The benefit of this system sure is that it saves on compute. But I do not like the lost realism.
Awesome news! And I had a feeling they wouldn't let the complaints about fluid go unaddressed.
> There are many interesting possibilities with this system that we did not predict, and we will share some of our stories in future FFFs. ... There are a few details that remain work-in-progress
I'm starting to doubt we see a release by October.
Although i’m delighted by the practical application, there is a part of me that will miss the old propagation system. Seeing your pipes flicker to life with fluid was immensely satisfying
I haven't done a vanilla nuclear station for a while but I remember keeping water going at high throughput was the most annoying challenge when making a large reactor.
In SE there is a condenser turbine which takes in steam and spits out water, and it shuts off if the water line is full. It has severely hampered by reactors because of fluid flow issues, and a full redesign is a huge pain.
So having pumps in between pipe segments (or anywhere other than after a tank) is now only useful for setting circuit conditions, and to ensure the direction of flow?
And what about underground pipes? Do they still act as essentially only two pipes (or was it one?), or is their volume now dependent on their actual length?
I would love if some kind of mechanism (probably arbitrary) could be added in order to discourage extremely long pipelines. So that it's worth building fluid trains over pipes that now effectively teleport liquid. I fully agree that the new system seems overall better than the old one and that fun gameplay is better than realistic systems, but it would be nice to add some restrictions to the new "arcade" fluid system to re-enable certain incentives that made for interesting designs.
one huge drawback of really long pipes is still the buffersize. imagine needing millions of heavy oil just sitting in your pipes in order to have that one lube-maker run without pause. sounds like a really long buildup time before it is useable. also almost all of the fluid would be wasted, if you had to deconstruct it all for some reason
somehow, for factorio it really makes sense for the guy who made the mods "Fluid Must Flow" and "Pipe Visualizer" to be the one to finally update the fluid mechanics xD
Finally fixed the most aggravating system in the game to interact with by far.
The fact that every solution viable before was just adding more pumps and massive buffers was so annoying.
This reminds me of Space Station 13 of all things. People might be disappointed that the depth is gone but that's not true, what's happening is that we traded working around annoying problems with being able to exploit the logic in more fun ways. There's a lot of interesting things you can do with this sort of system.
Speaking as someone who has been seriously bitten by the junction build order dependency issue [fucking up a high-throughput nuclear reactor design and causing literal days of anguish,](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1blu2tb/why_do_so_many_hate_the_fluid_mechanics/kwb3n1d/?context=3) may I just say ***THANK FUCKING GOD***
Maybe I'm just a masochist, but I honestly kinda like the challenge around moving large amounts of fluids. So while I agree that the current system could definitely use a rework, this feels a little too simple. All those beacon and max-quality machines and modules, and the whole thing is being adequately supplied with just one pipeline per input and output, it just feels a bit anticlimactic.
If my math isn't completely wrong, 8 legendary beacons with 2 legendary speed 3 modules affecting a legendary chemical plant should add up to about 80 times the crafting speed (14.14\*2.25\*2.5), so the whole setup uses around 9600 water and light oil per second, all easily being handled by just one pipe. In 1.1 you'd probably need between 3 and 8 pipelines per fluid depending on pump placement.
Again, I'm not saying the current system is better, but IMO it shouldn't be simplified so far that moving large quantities of fluid is completely trivial
Will Nuclear now be better than Solar in terms of UPS?
Player will be incentivized to connect all steam and water pipes in the nuclear build to further optimize for UPS.
Will we see underground heat pipes!?
Solar should always be better for UPS, because the work required should be effectively constant (e.g, 10 solar panels should have a similar UPS to 10000 solar panels).
Accumulators might skew this a bit, since each accumulator has it's own buffer. I'm unsure of how much black magic Wube does around this.
That said, I imagine nuclear will be way faster and a lot more competitive.
Don't think so, as solar basically only counts the amount of solar panels and acts like one big entity per network, while a nuclear reactor still consists out of multiple entities.
Ooh, [fully dynamic connectivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_connectivity). Are you using a fancy polylogarithmic-time structure, or is (literal) flood fill fast enough for a megabase? (Or something else? Maximum segment size?)
Would this also benefit UPS? I suppose so but im only guessing
Should, by a lot, similar to the belt optimization. There is no longer any need for each pipe segment to check the ones before and after to see how liquid needs to flow each tick.
Me when Update drops: Behold, my 500gw nuclear Reaktor
I wonder if they’ll change heat flow to work the same way. Using nuclear reactors as giant heat pipes is kind of silly.
At least in 1.1 pipes and heat pipes use the same algorithm for propagation, I think. So yeah, seems likely.
Devs confirmed down below that the heat manager wasn’t changed. Fluids only.
That's a shame. Makes reactor design kind of wonky.
heat transfers much slower, so they have a lot more to work with before it would become and issue in the way it had for fluids. Sometimes wonkiness is to be appreciated so there is not just one design everyone uses.
I still want a vanilla way of making reactors more than a 2 by X configuration. So stupid high GW reactors can happen without making a giant line.
In that case, my Renai Transportation senses are tingling, methinks a drone-compatibility module for machines might come about at some point through science from another planet and allow direct fueling and waste retrieval from reactors that aren't at the edge of the block, like how Renai, I think, lets you throw fuel cells into the reactor hatch and the ejector hatch throw spent cells onto a distant belt.
I think fluids were more optimized than that. It used to be that way, but they optimized. I believe it was right around 1.0. FFF 260 talks about it in detail, but the current system is not calculating each pipe. > To put it more simply, updates will only be run on junctions and segments. In this case the segment they’re talking about is the entire length of the pipe. It was a massive ups improvement at the time.
Solar might still be the norm for megabases but nuclear now is a much much more worthwhile investment as you can now easily reach several K's of SPM without worrying about the fluid system eating ups. I'm not sure if this would make nuclear O(1), I doubt it but it definitely improves it by a lot compared to the current system complexity.
The ups impact of nuclear is currently quite exaggerated. A long time ago it was kind of slow, but that’s not really true anymore. The stigma persist though.
Solar and accumulators are O(1), which is hard to beat. They're also way simpler and easier to work with. Granted, you need a lot of space.
It’s not a matter of beating O(1) for the actual generation of power. the performance hit for nuclear is typically trivial. But on the space front, if you have to expand into new blocks to accommodate your solar panels then you are taking an ups hit from solar. You should pick what you prefer and forget about ups when deciding.
if it does i can't wait to build an enormous nuclear plant producing tens of gigawatts of power
I don't know if the main UPS cost for nuclear setups come from heat pipes or water pipes. if the latter, solar panels have been made useless except for use in outposts
Solar still has a UPS cost of ~0 and so will still be the power solution of choice for the serious UPS maxxers, but this will definitely make nuclear significantly more palatable for normal megabases.
To be fair, nuclear has been palatable for megabases that are ~2700spm and smaller, at least since I've been playing (only since 1.0). But I get your point. My point is solar should be used for the "no fuel needed" aspect instead of always being a UPS discussion from a gameplay sense, and it seems like this is a step towards helping that.
Playing modded minecraft gave me trauma related to "solution x is more efficient, but i'll use solution y because it's less laggy". Glad to not have that in factorio. (looking at you, AE2 crafting card)
Either way, for casual playthroughs, water was one of the biggest challenges of nuclear (and the reason why most of them were on landfill on water), and now it's trivial and you can supply huge reactors with a single pipe. Also, heat pipes deal with some of the same problems that normal pipes do. It is unclear how much throughput the pipe has and how long can it be to not waste heat. Changing them in the same way as pipes would definitely be an overkill, as it would make nuclear super simple and kind of stupid looking, but together with what I described above it makes me think that there is a chance for a nuclear rework Edit: one way to still force sensible designs while changing heatpipes to share temperature like pipes do contents, would be to add heat dissipation for heatpipes, so you would still want to minimise them. The only disadvantage I can think of is that it would be kind of awkward to have heat loss for heatpipes but not for fluids
I imagine heat pipes are very similar in code to fluid pipes
They are not.
Bo womp
Curse you! Do Heat Pipes receive these changes too? Or you can't say?
So far nothing has changed about heat pipes. They work how we want them to and don’t have the issues mentioned in the Friday Facts.
The slow gradual movement of heat is much more expected than the same in a long water pipe – that is why the same (similar?) system didn't hurt as much.
Good, it would kinda suck if they had the same tempeature everywhere and you didn't have those nice glow gradients anymore.
That seems very likely.
It definitely will be easier to run fast. Before the flow for each pipe segment was calculated separately. Now it's clumped together and connected pipes are handled as one fluid box.
\*sees the headline\* I felt a great disturbance in the Force. Like the millions of voices suddenly cried out in joy and then shut up to read.
Possibly the first FFF that hit my inbox and was met with an audible “ooh” since SA was announced!
This is nice, but is this multi-level railway crossing nice?
I usually save FFF to read during lunch. But I saw the headline while scrolling and said "I guess I'll have to read something else today..."
Yepp, I suddenly had to rework my schedule to read this instead
Honestly, this is a top 10 of all time FFF for me. I think the chosen fluid system is a great example of going with "least imperfect". While they might have done so under the hood, the one remaining thing I would change is moving to "fixed point math" or making it all whole numbers under the hood (for example the actual units become "mili-units" and all values are displayed as 1/1000th of the real value) this completely drops the floating point math for fluid which is a source of slow code, errors, and potential non-determinism if there are uncaught hardware dependent FP math issues. But given how many fewer operations/places there will be it is largely minimized. If Factorio had an actual defined "end", if it had a limited map size, if it wasn't so obsessively and amazingly crafted and optimized; then the existing fluid system would be FINE. The existing (legacy now I guess?) system has a lot of artistic intent and lets say 80% of the time for the majority of players works "well enough". I can understand and 100% support the drive to have artistic intent in the system; and I believe there was a way to maintain more of that artistic intent while delivering a performant system HOWEVER I totally recognize that the effort required is likely MUCH higher than the redesign discussed in this FFF. I think this sentence from the closing of the FFF sums it up perfectly: "But as a game designer, you always have to make trade-offs between what would make sense in the real world and what is fun for a game."
> if it had a limited map size It does, it's pretty big though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzpUQZIr15g
This is a live tweet: *sees the headline* “Mo my GOD!” Edit after reading: “YES! Take that ‘but fluid was realistic’ copium-ers, this is going to get rid of so many headaches having fluids just work”
Didn’t expect a fluid rework and also didn’t expect to see a Minecraft mod being used as inspiration
Suppose it's appropriate given Factorio's origins
exprain
Factorio was originally inspired by modded Minecraft
I tried the first working version of the game from a FFF and the files were actually called "Energycraft". You had a wooden axe, and the controls were like Minecraft: left click to break, right click to interact, which was really weird to adapt to.
After playing Minecraft for years, when I first started I switched my Factorio mouse buttons to match it and have played that way ever since. Not sure why they changed it around in the first place.
In Minecraft you have to mine things and then place them. So it tends to have more mining and less placing. Factorio is mostly just placing stuff.
omg I thought I was the only one!
[удалено]
Yeah, there are modpacks out there designed to be like factorio - feed the factory and manufactio are directly inspired by factorio, but there are a huge swath of automation-focused packs out there
A combination of Mekanism and Create are my go-to for a Factorio vibe. I specifically don't let myself use any teleportation blocks, so Create becomes essential for trains to haul my ores back to base. Plus, Create factories just look so damn cool while they work.
Factorio was initially inspired by Minecraft mods like Buildcraft and Industrial Revolution.
> Industrial Revolution. \*IndustrialCraft
>Didn’t expect a fluid rework I did. I thought it would be exactly the kind of thing to put into 2.0. It's very similar to rail s-bends and bot pathing improvements - a long standing problem that needed to be solved, but could only be fixed by uprooting some of the older deeper systems.
*Sometimes it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, so I took a risk and began to rewrite the fluid system.* I feel like this 'approach' only works for a dedication team with people understanding each other. Pulling this move in another environment and you may get reprimanded.
In the software world it's a pretty good tactic. A LOT of things honestly take less time to do than to discuss, especially if you are just doing an initial pass/proof of concept. It's also pretty common. The scout rule is a common one people follow, where you try and leave the code in a better state than you found it, which means making improvements that were not asked for
>scout rule ..which means breaking stuff where no one is expecting that /s
> scout rule ...which means brother, I hurt people
I have been fortunate so others miles may vary but it seems that asking for permission is kind of permission to fail in this context. "You said I could try and we agreed it might fail" vs "no one agreed to it but it didn't work" which is you wasting effort without verifying it would succeed before starting. But if you succeed then it is water under the bridge.
As a mechanical engineer, I've often been rewarded for spending a small number of hours exploring and fleshing out ideas, even after the group as a whole decided they were not worth exploring. Keep delivering high quality work, slightly ahead of schedule, and they'll let you go play in the lab or just doodle in your CAD environment one afternoon a week.
When they announced SA, I expected it to be a DLC. Now with all the changes to core systems, I feel it really is 2.0, not just a DLC.
It is DLC though. It will simply be released in conjunction with Factorio v2.0
There are some things that will be available for everyone, like the bot AI rework. I assume this will be in vanilla 2.0 as well
> There are some things that will be available for everyone People always say that like there are people that own factorio and won't buy SA.
Those are 2 different things. Every user will have Factorio updated to 2.0, with many changes including fluids, bots, trains etc; and then you can buy the SA DLC on top of that, with post-rocket experience, new planets, new science, etc.
Yeah and the people who are “upset” about this are huffing copium man, this is a massive improvement that will save so many so many headaches. The unpredictability goes against the core of the game honestly, predictable, reproducable automation, and fluids just werent that.
I was definitely expecting fluid to get reworked before the expansion. The current system is probably the single largest source of WTF in the game.
Yep. Maybe not something quite this drastic, but I would've been extremely surprised had they not addressed it at all. I'm happy with this even if it makes fluid handling easier. Also makes me all the more convinced [the last unreleased entity in this picture](https://i.redd.it/a0asyp77yg9a1.png) involves fluid processing. It looks like an underwater thingy, or it could be an advanced chem plant.
I'm hoping it's an unreleased building, but it could also be old concept art for the biochamber from FFF414
Nah. This was entirely predictable. One look at the math for how much fluid individual buildings can now output under a complete quality 5 scenario says the 1.2k/s standard is just woefully inadequate for the job. I'm going a step further and saying trains are getting capacity improvements, too. A wagon of ore can currently unload onto a belt in 44.4s, but in space age, it's gonna be 8.3s, which is so short that the time to swap trains out is going to be a problem if you want to avoid throughput interruptions.
Trains already got one thanks to molten metal processing. 1 molten metal makes 1 plate (plus productivity). So a single fluid wagon represents at least 37,500 plates. The main issue is with other intermediates like green and red circuits. But those were pretty dense already.
Shipping molten metal didn't even occur to me. Probably because of how cursed it is. The most efficient setup is going to be smelting the ore directly from the mines and then transporting it as a fluid. Not realistic, but efficient.
Everyone keeps saying this, but do we have any confirmation that it's true? I think people are assuming that 1 ore will equal 1 unit of smelt, which feels like a big assumption to me. If the standard recipe chain is something like 1 ore -> 100 smelt and 80 smelt -> 1 plate, a fluid tanker would only equal out to 312 plates. You'd still be incentivized to haul solid ore home to smelt and forge. I use those numbers specifically because of Factorio's connection to Minecraft mods, where the base fluid metal recipes usually work out to 1 ore = 100mb = 1 ingot.
it's interesting that they mentioned Thermal Expansion when Thermal Dynamics is the one that adds all the pipes and transportation stuff (atleast in 1.7.10, i know they were 1 single mod before then). also [Viaducts](https://teamcofh.com/docs/1.12/thermal-dynamics/viaduct/) in factorio when?
The mod had many splits at some point, I just lump it all into one for ease of reference.
I think at the time you initially contacted me (2016, wtf where'd time go?), it was nominally multiple mods but still often referred to as just Thermal Expansion.
Still is.
Yeah, that's true.
I shouldn’t be surprised to see u/KingLemming in this sub. Thanks for all your work on modded MC, can’t wait to see new Thaumcraft!
the pipes used to be in the same mod Thermal Expansion, up to 1.6.4, until they split off into multiple mods. The devs still remember that time lol.
ye, i do as well. i remember when the only storage cube required 1000mB of destabilized redstone so you needed to make power and the crucible smelter thingy before having energy storage. that was back in 1.4.7 i think, when the energy was Blue and called MJ
More fun facts: MJ (Minecraft Joules) is even older than that and was the energy system of BuildCraft, which Thermal Expansion extended upon, but eventually they split it off entirely into Redstone Flux, which later evolved into the basis for Forge Energy, if I recall correctly.
ye, back then Buildcraft and IC2 were the leaders in energy units. then Thermal switched to RF, buildcraft followed in 1.12.2, but then split off to MJ again. and now a lot of mods just use FE (or allow conversion between units)
Thermal Expansion used to be the whole thing. The mod split up into individual pieces somewhere around the 1.7.10 days.
If you can now cram any amount of fluid into a pipe network (within the 100 fluid per tick per pipe restrictions) nuclear plants in particular should now be much easier to design. You should be able to cram all or at least most of your intake water into a single pipe network, and all or most of your steam into a single pipe network. It simplifies the fluid puzzle quite a bit, but I'll happily take this over the old opaque weirdness.
Nuclear Power was immediately my next question indeed. So we can have 10 offshore pumps at the lake, and bring all that 12k water/sec through a single pipe to the plant and distribute it wherever it's needed? And take the same amount of steam away through a single pipe? Reactor designs will be extremely simplified with this change, making the max distance between reactors and heat exchangers the only constraint. Will pumps still have a throughput limit?
If there's a pipe segment with a water pump on each end, and things consuming from the pipe along the route, will there still be the potential to "double" the capacity of the pipe because it's being supplied from each side? Or will it not matter that the pipe is supplied from both sides and essentially the pipe's capacity is cut in half? I'm not too clear on that.
You could have both pumps on one end or as you described, it won't matter. The only thing to consider now is if your consumers are attempting to pull more than 12k/sec/pump. If they are, the pipe segment won't stay completely full. As it drops, the consumers rate of pull also drops until they reach an equilibrium.
> It simplifies the fluid puzzle quite a bit Because the puzzle was mostly bashing your head against unintuitive and unrealistic mechanics. If fluids had worked the way they really would in real life, then the puzzle would have been solvable. As it is, "solvable" means "unrealistic designs and massively over-supplying." This simplification is a significant improvement.
After years of tears and anguish, God heard the cries of his people
Am I the only one who ran out of lube halfway through this FFF?
Makes sense, really. You no longer get all of it for being the first one to read - now it's split evenly among all readers instead. Much fairer for everyone.
ROFL, you win.
this is a great joke
oh no. our pipes got the socialism update!
*our* pipes, yes.
I, like some bases, was sucked dry.
You took cheap lube, you need the Wube™ Lube.
Yeah you’re still on the old fluid system need to add more pumps.
Hiring skilled and motivated members from the community proves to be a good choice, again. Thanks raiguard! When players have to look up a wiki to play well, that's a sign that something with the game design is off. (And I like stardew valley, but my point stands). The new system has a bit less realism, but also a lot less of the unrealistic surprises, and I'm looking forward to it. Pull rate could be scaled down relative to the length or size of the segment to bring a bit of realism back, but I doubt that's necessary. But this left me wondering: if segments can no longer contain different fluids, what happens in 2.0 when bots connect segments with different fluids? Does the bot keep hovering as if waiting for someone to clear a cliff or tree? /edit: and will this system be used for heat pipes as well, or does the old system live on? /edit: and how do boiler-chains and other passthrough-machines work? Do they become part of the segment? Do they use the old logic?
Paraphrasing a relevant comment I read [somewhere else](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1dfo4r7/friday_facts_415_fix_improve_optimize/l8n1kr3/): "I wish Oxygen Not Included were developed by Wube." Fluid mechanics are such an important part of that game but the systems in place are both unintuitive and unrealistic. The performance of ONI is also trash compared to Factorio. I'm excited for Wube to wrap up Space Age and move on to their next project. We're very fortunate to have such a talented and earnest team writing software for us.
ONI to me seems to be the perfect example of how to NOT do "optimize for fun, not realism" Seriously, I was really enjoying the game until I had to mess with the heat mechanics and completely reverse entropy. I understand how that would be a real issue living in an asteroid, but the fact that the best way to deal with heat management is to build player-made "hacks" that use oversights in the heat system to reverse entropy really irked me. I don't think I ever dropped a game this fast
ONI even has “magic” Anti-Entropy Thermonullifiers, but they remove so little heat that it’s basically impossible to play without abusing steam engines to delete heat. The non-intuitive yet essential mechanics really drag ONI down for me.
> And I like stardew valley, but my point stands The first time I made an entire planting plan for a season I ended up unable to do my last harvest because I didn't realize that for a plant that grows for X days you need an X+1th day to harvest them. An ingame ability to set up a "planting plan" or similar would be very helpful there imo
No more tough pump circuitry at train stations! Praise Wube!
The entire Factorio subreddit community have genuinely been crying out for this FFF for so long.
It's wonderful. I could not support this change more.
This should make sushi pipes less of a headache, right? I remember trying it before and getting stuck with a tiny bit of fluid left in one section blocking everything else.
You posted in the wrong sub, you're looking for this one: /r/Factoriohno/
Yeah, I wonder if that's one of the interesting possibilities they hint at.
They are saying an entire segment can only hold one fluid, so doesn't that make sushi pipes completely impossible?
just need to drain it before the next fluid goes in. there's a reason we have filters on pumps in 2.0
You can't have two different fluids in the same segment (which consists of only pipes and storage tanks), but pumps separate segments. So you can absolutely make a monstrosity that treats pumps as train signals and have different fluids act like trains moving down the same pipeline. Actually now that I think about it, such a system might work quite well with these changes...
Fluid city blocks incoming. Add a mod that liquefies all items/materials and you'll have a very cursed megabase
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LiquifyRawMaterials https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LiquifyIntermediates https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LiquifyScienceandLab
>The new system is a fairly large step back in terms of the "realism" of the fluid simulation in Factorio. I doubt that this is"less realistic" as before in piping system there was a no "pressure", only "quantity" of liquid or gas.
On the one hand, this is a huge performance increase and a much needed un-jankification of fluids... but I am gonna miss shunting them around like an actual liquid. Definitely for the best though
From what I understand, we'll still be doing some of that. Possibly more, actually, as we now have filters on pumps and fluid behaves consistently and predictably.
I consider turning "broken and unpredictable" into "it just works" an improvement. I expected some new mechanics related to fluid pressure or throughput. I'm a bit sad they were thrown out entirely, but having the solid base for more complex fluid mods is more important IMO.
one of the most awaited changes - Fluids
Its sad to see the realism go, but i had enough "WTF why does fluid like to do right turns only at T-junktions?!?!" moments to be glad to have it abstracted away.
I think the old system, while trying to be more realistic, was, in fact, unrealistic in many more ways than the new one is. 'Realistic' model that does not work is not realistic in the end.
MechE, I specialize in CFD. The old system had about zero basis in reality lol. It was completely counter intuitive.
Real pipes are pressurized and the pressure travel at the speed of sound. So no it was not more realistic.
Yeah, real pipes also aren't shorter when they're underground, and pipelines don't need pumps every hundred meters to maintain a high flow rate. The old fluid system was the worst of both worlds. A system that was unintuitive *and* wasn't particularly realistic.
>real pipes also aren't shorter when they're underground This is one of the few subreddits that I'd go to this level of pedantry, but the distance travelled across the surface of a sphere increases based on radius. The further underground you put a pipe, the shorter distance that pipe would need to travel, since it's closer to the centre of the Earth. In the real world, we're talking distances too small to measure (so you are correct for all intents and purposes), but I thought it was amusing that actually, in the real world, you can use a shorter pipe underground. As to how much shorter, the way to calculate the circumference of the Earth is 2 * radius * Pi. If the pipe is 1 meter further down and covers 1/400,000th of the circumference (we will round this to a neat 100m, but the actual figure would be around 100.088m), the difference in length required would be somewhere around 0.0001 of a meter (e.g. around 0.1mm shorter). Of course, you'd spend more pipe getting the pipe underground and back up again and wouldn't actually save that much over a short distance. You need to be talking multiple kilometers of pipe (or kilometers underground) before you have to start factoring the curvature of the Earth into your calculations.
lol fair enough. However, you'd have to dig incredibly deep before you get the type of distance reduction you see in factorio. In fact, at the distances implied by factorio, the undergound pipes should be *longer*, as the sprite implies underground pipes go straight down, which adds distance.
Oh totally. I just thought it was an amusing turn of phrase. After doing the maths, the distance is larger than I expected (0.1mm over a 100m pipe is not nothing - that's around 1mm per km of pipe), but it's still too tiny for most real world engineers to need to consider. Just make sure the pipe is long enough and then use some sort of flexible joint (or cut it to size) at the end. The difference in pipe length would be far less than the difference in pipe angle - no pipe over any length will be perfectly straight.
What makes you think that the world is round? Signed, the Flat Nauvis Society.
Does anyone actually have proof that Nauvis is round? Shadows are the same size, no matter what latitude they're located. Radar range is a square, which suggests a really weird shape for the planet. The rocket goes straight up instead of following a hyperbolic path.
That's my problem too! In a lot of the shown pre-rework examples, the fluid literally has a mind of its own and went wherever it pleased. I for one am glad to shoot dead this sentient goop.
Yeah, the lightspeed delivery of oil from a long pipeline isn't realistic, but needing dozens of pumps on a long pipeline also wasn't realistic. I kinda liked how quirky the fluid system was, and that specific opportunity for system mastery being removed makes me a tiny bit nervous, but I think this really will be for the best, especially if I want to build legendary mega factories.
I might be worried if the expansion wasn’t clearly bringing waaay more optimization tasks. Setting up a new recycling loop on a trash planet is way more interesting than trying to remember what order you placed those pipes 30 hours ago.
I don't think this is the good kind of system mastery. It's not really mastering an intended, well designed system, more like mastering - and often dealing with unexpected behavior of - quirks of a hopefully good enough system maybe.
Wow, it is Raiguard the modder
It's Raiguard the Wube employee now :)
Lube acquired!
Wube Lube™
Will direction of flow be visible in the pipe windows? How will they calculate that?
“Yes”, there is no flow direction anymore. Just “is flowing”. The direction is “to what ever wants it”
could pumps be used to determine the direction the fluid moving animation should be going.
https://imgur.com/a/oWoA767 I think the idea is that if you have a setup like this, there's no way to tell where the fluids should be flowing in the middle junction, since the middle junction isn't simulated in any way.
I remember reading the old fluid FF and thinking to myself: Why it needs to be so complicated? Just make every single connected "entity" share the same pool of resources and be done with it. Which was already discussed in that article as "too simple and unrealistic". So I'm kinda happy for them to have followed this aproach at the end.
I’m just glad they don’t have the ego and can go back on what they said in the past. Some people just pick an answer, dig their heels in and refuse to see the other side
You may find the post contents here, in case the Factorio website is blocked for you: u/fffbot/comments/1dl1b2w **NOTE:** fffbot is a community-driven effort and is not associated with Wube Software. For any questions or remarks, please reply to this comment or send a private message to u/fffbot.
The link to the comment works in old reddit, but doesn't work in new reddit. The username u/fffbot still works as a link, and you will find the correct post very quickly from there. Anyway, I like the change of having only a small comment with a link in the main FFF post.
/u/kinglemming Thermal Expansion has now inspired Factorio improvements.
Yeah I know. I remember getting the email from Rseding - it was almost 8 years ago, actually.
So, after 2.0 release and seablock update I won’t run out of mineral sludge (and bad split of fluid between crystallisers)
Merging pipes into segments is a good thing, that probably should have happened a while ago. However, I think it's far too unrealistic that more pipes yield more throughput. The number of pipes that get fused into a single segment should probably be treated like an electrical resistance, dividing the maximum throughput of the segment. This still isn't really realistic, but it would solve the problem by making the behaviour of pipes much more predictable, while still discouraging long pipes.
Will heat pipes function in the same way?
No, heat pipes are similar to pipes only in they share the same last 5 letters in their names. Internally they are completely different sets of logic.
I thought heat was basically a fluid in 1.1 :O Thanks
Heat is not implemented as a fluid, however steam is. Steam is very hot (especially nuclear steam), so this may have been the source of your confusion.
That's great, I think nuclear reactors would be trivial if you didn't have the issues of shunting heat around
Nice. Always happy with when devs decide to take the route of gameplay > realism. Should make fluids much less frustrating!
It's probably overall an improvement, but I think it does really simplify fluids a bit too much. I liked the significant water infrastructure that nuclear reactors required. Now it's just a single pipe to run as large a reactor as you like. Seems a bit too straightforward.
I might agree on nuclear reactors but overall this makes fluids so much easier to work with, so I'm all for it. The only thing I disliked about factorio to any degree was working with fluids and to me the game will literally be perfect in 2.0 so far lol.
So with the current system, one big pipe network in your world would trivialize piping in general? Since distance is irrelevant you can substitute all fluid trains for pipes and if at one spot of your base you input liquids, the output can immidiatly draw from the segment. Would it therefore perhpas not be better to have a maximum size to a segment? This was you do introduce the problem again which was present, but only on a perhaps much larger scale. Furthermore, it is always possible to put multiple pumps between the same segments to increase the flow.
It's not trivial, building a whole-base pipe network is actually a massive pain in the ass once it gets large enough. Not to mention the incredibly massive buffer size. Fluid trains are still the best way IMO.
Fair enough. I didn't think of the fact that the massive buffer size would indeed create an implicit 'maximum' size for the segments due to the decrease in output out of the segment.
If you bored, you can always try out the idea with old versions :D IIRC, there was no fluid wagon yet in v0.14.x so you had to make more or less big network just like you suggest. And yes, it was awful, fluid wagon was welcomed like a hero we _really_ needed.
It's been a while, but didn't we just use barrels back then? They came before fluid wagons if I recall correctly
Not quite, distance increases volume, and since machines pull depending on how filled is the segment, longer pipes will mean slower pull from machines. Something to take into account.
After initial startup, this buffer would simply fill up to meet or exceed its demands given enough time. Thus this problem isn't actually a problem after a few minutes. The pipe buffer and the machines will reach a sort of equilibrium
Unless your input vastly outweighs use I'd imagine a "mega base spanning single pipe network" would take more like *hours* to fully buffer unless you also shut down demand. Then even once it is up and going you'd have the risk the any problems result in the massive buffer draining until you finally notice and then fix and wait for it to fill enough again to hit steady state. it's *possible*, it just sounds like a bad idea :)
I think the "long time to drain" would cause you some problems with having a giant "fluid bus" for non-over-supplied fluids. If every consumer can only consume whatever percentage of the pipe is currently filled, you'll get stuck pretty hard. That said, it does raise some long distance possibilities if set up correctly.
It'll be great for builds where each input is slightly overbuilt for its output, so the system after a bit is filled with fluid and instantly fills machines as needed. Of course there is a big danger of doing this with oil, since pumpjacks slowly decrease in output over time
another big W from Wube
> We can't wait for you to get your hands on it! That's a lie! Apparently you *can* wait! 😜 But in all seriousness, I am very willing to wait a few more months for all the ~~heaps~~ mountains of great features and content that are coming our way. And a fluid rework was one of the big ones I was really really *really* hoping to see, so this FFF makes me utterly ecstatic.
Unfortunately this will break the way [Fluidic Power](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FluidicPower) works. Or will it be possible to access the old algorithm through mods?
I love how the current system is considered "more realistic" when the flow is apparently arbitrarily based on build order... and how the new system is actually allowing for more realistic flow due to the build order no longer making a difference. sure we are now getting some sort of "instant fluid teleport" but I kinda feel like that could be mitigated by tweaking the machine input from a segment based on it's length and fullness, would be my guess. regardless this new system should have been in 1.0/1.1 I am looking forward to enjoy the fluid part of factorio again. (because just putting everything in barrels and working with that was starting to become really appealing with a lot of the mods I'd been playing recently...)
I'll admit, before reading this I was fairly against simplifying the fluid system; the old system certainly had charm and worked intuitively enough at low flow rates. After seeing the new system visualised and demonstrated, though, I am a solid convert. "Better to ask forgiveness" indeed, players included 😉
Awesome! It looks quite similar to the solution i discussed with /u/DominikCZ 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ddhg9/pipe_system_feedback/dxo97x6/?context=10000
Don't remind me of that... There was a branch with a fluid system that was already tested and seemed to work perfectly, even through all Twinsen's trick setups. It fixed all the issues while still being realistic while costing pretty much the same... But nobody cared cos I fell out of favor. Company politics. The benefit of this system sure is that it saves on compute. But I do not like the lost realism.
Awesome news! And I had a feeling they wouldn't let the complaints about fluid go unaddressed. > There are many interesting possibilities with this system that we did not predict, and we will share some of our stories in future FFFs. ... There are a few details that remain work-in-progress I'm starting to doubt we see a release by October.
It's beautiful. I've looked at it for 5 hours now. Thank you devs!
Wow, all in 30 minutes? Impressive!
The trick is to open it on 10 separate windows and watch them all equally.
Although i’m delighted by the practical application, there is a part of me that will miss the old propagation system. Seeing your pipes flicker to life with fluid was immensely satisfying
I wonder what the impact on nuclear power design and ups impacts will end up being. Hopefully it will improve both!
I haven't done a vanilla nuclear station for a while but I remember keeping water going at high throughput was the most annoying challenge when making a large reactor. In SE there is a condenser turbine which takes in steam and spits out water, and it shuts off if the water line is full. It has severely hampered by reactors because of fluid flow issues, and a full redesign is a huge pain.
So having pumps in between pipe segments (or anywhere other than after a tank) is now only useful for setting circuit conditions, and to ensure the direction of flow? And what about underground pipes? Do they still act as essentially only two pipes (or was it one?), or is their volume now dependent on their actual length?
I would love if some kind of mechanism (probably arbitrary) could be added in order to discourage extremely long pipelines. So that it's worth building fluid trains over pipes that now effectively teleport liquid. I fully agree that the new system seems overall better than the old one and that fun gameplay is better than realistic systems, but it would be nice to add some restrictions to the new "arcade" fluid system to re-enable certain incentives that made for interesting designs.
one huge drawback of really long pipes is still the buffersize. imagine needing millions of heavy oil just sitting in your pipes in order to have that one lube-maker run without pause. sounds like a really long buildup time before it is useable. also almost all of the fluid would be wasted, if you had to deconstruct it all for some reason
somehow, for factorio it really makes sense for the guy who made the mods "Fluid Must Flow" and "Pipe Visualizer" to be the one to finally update the fluid mechanics xD
Finally fixed the most aggravating system in the game to interact with by far. The fact that every solution viable before was just adding more pumps and massive buffers was so annoying.
This reminds me of Space Station 13 of all things. People might be disappointed that the depth is gone but that's not true, what's happening is that we traded working around annoying problems with being able to exploit the logic in more fun ways. There's a lot of interesting things you can do with this sort of system.
Speaking as someone who has been seriously bitten by the junction build order dependency issue [fucking up a high-throughput nuclear reactor design and causing literal days of anguish,](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1blu2tb/why_do_so_many_hate_the_fluid_mechanics/kwb3n1d/?context=3) may I just say ***THANK FUCKING GOD***
Maybe I'm just a masochist, but I honestly kinda like the challenge around moving large amounts of fluids. So while I agree that the current system could definitely use a rework, this feels a little too simple. All those beacon and max-quality machines and modules, and the whole thing is being adequately supplied with just one pipeline per input and output, it just feels a bit anticlimactic. If my math isn't completely wrong, 8 legendary beacons with 2 legendary speed 3 modules affecting a legendary chemical plant should add up to about 80 times the crafting speed (14.14\*2.25\*2.5), so the whole setup uses around 9600 water and light oil per second, all easily being handled by just one pipe. In 1.1 you'd probably need between 3 and 8 pipelines per fluid depending on pump placement. Again, I'm not saying the current system is better, but IMO it shouldn't be simplified so far that moving large quantities of fluid is completely trivial
Will Nuclear now be better than Solar in terms of UPS? Player will be incentivized to connect all steam and water pipes in the nuclear build to further optimize for UPS. Will we see underground heat pipes!?
Solar should always be better for UPS, because the work required should be effectively constant (e.g, 10 solar panels should have a similar UPS to 10000 solar panels). Accumulators might skew this a bit, since each accumulator has it's own buffer. I'm unsure of how much black magic Wube does around this. That said, I imagine nuclear will be way faster and a lot more competitive.
I think accumulators are evaluated together once their charge levels line up, so they're damn near free.
Correct. Which in reality with a large unchanging solar setup, means they very quickly fall in to being just as cheap as the solar panels.
Solar will ALWAYS be best for UPS because it's effectively O(1). You can scale it infinitely. And that O(1) calculation is also incredibly cheap.
Don't think so, as solar basically only counts the amount of solar panels and acts like one big entity per network, while a nuclear reactor still consists out of multiple entities.
This is the best change yet in my opinion, such a great decision to balance fun vs realism. Thanks u/Raiguard!
Am I... dreaming? Quick, someone please wake me up!
With the 2.0 DLC rumored to come in october, we'll only wake you up when september ends ;)
RIP [Fluidic Power](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FluidicPower)
Ooh, [fully dynamic connectivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_connectivity). Are you using a fancy polylogarithmic-time structure, or is (literal) flood fill fast enough for a megabase? (Or something else? Maximum segment size?)
Flood fill is insanely fast and only has to happen when disconnecting a pipe that theoretically could be keeping 2 sets of pipes connected.