Sometimes I just need to be completely honest. The 'maybe' part is important though. There might be situations or applications that I haven't considered where barrels might be transformative in vanilla. I left myself just enough wiggle room on that one!!
My favorite use of purple chests (the "get this stuff outta here" logistic chest) is to get the empty barrels away from an unbarraling station as soon as possible.
I like using barrels for liquids mostly because it's easier for me to visualize an empty belt to indicate a shortage of material supply to a process than it is follow back pipes and tanks to figure out I'm not making enough sulfur somewhere upstream
I heavily used barrels when I challenged myself to use only bots for transportation. It worked very well, but you need a good infrastructure to handle the empty barrels.
This sounds like a great solution for Krastorio gasses. I was always just making huge gas builds on-site in my Krastorio runs, and it would always cause them to be much larger than initially planned. The high volumes of the gasses would quickly hit flow limitations as well, it was generally very frustrating thing to deal with. There are a number of high value fluids in SE that this would be useful for too. I think it's cool that SE actually forces the player to use barrels for interplanetary logistics as well, really trying to get the player to understand how useful they can be for certain applications.
Have you thought about using railcars as buffer storage? And setting train stop conditions to move the entire buffer railcar to deep storage if it gets too full, with an empty replacement waiting in the wings for the buffer stop to open up?
Theorycrafting here... Train stop at the bottling station releasing the car at it if the car is full or if the car is empty. If the car is full, a circut sets the train stop to request an empty car, and if the car is empty, the stop requests a full one. Deep storage becomes a railyard, and can be shared across all bottling plants through the train logistics network. This is probably flawed somewhere, starting with the assumption that the actual barrel loop itself is still belt based, other than the buffer.
I currently (only) use barrels for sulfuric acid for uranium mining. Barrels are filled at the train station in my base, each train has dedicated slots for filled and empty barrels. The mine needs a kickstart with filled barrels, then it's running quite well (trains only check for full / empty uranium ore and an inactivity timer to allow for loading / unloading barrels).
I've been sitting here for a good 5 minutes trying to think of what the implications of using trains with barrels would be on barrel flux. I think, because you are introducing a time delay to both the feed and the return, that they are both flux, and they therefore even each other out. I think. I can't be certain though.
@@theotherbigfoot For my setup, each train adds a fixed amount of barrels (I calculated the needed sulfuric acid per uranium ore train. The mine doesn't consume sulfuric acid fast or much of it. In the beginning, I connected the mine with two belts (Full barrels in, ore and empty barrels out).
I think 1200-1500 units per second is a reasonable assumption for flow rate in pipes. that depends mostly on the number of pipe segments, where for an underground pipe the entrance and exit are counted as only 1. So doing one long pipe vs lots of undergrounds is _vastly_ less efficient. 1200 is roughly the rate for 17 pipes between two pumps 1500 is around 7. To keep flow rate up one can just add a pump every ~5 undergrounds (=10 pipes) or so. On the other hand a blue belt transports up to 45 barrels a second, or 45*50 = 2250 units per second. So 16 lanes of pipes should easily outperform 8 barrel loops. But in theory 8 liquids might be ok if they shared 4 lanes for empty barrels for example, but I haven't played with barrels, yet.
If we are talking purely flow rate then yes, the whole underground thing is better. But I have found that by constructing actual pipes rather than u/g ones there is a kinda storage effect that comes into play. Where there is so much liquid being stored in the pipes themselves that flow rate becomes less of a problem. 16 lanes of pipes, say 3000 long, thats 4.8million units of liquid effectively in storage.
I havent ever gone too crazy with barrels, but for the most part i just sorted one side of the belt to dedicate to filled barrels, and the other side using empty barrels in a big loop like that
I since came up with an even better solution than in my previous comment thread: You designate one lane of all your belts as "usually full" and the other as "usually empty". The output of both barreling and un-barreling machines output prioritizes going onto the "usually full" lane, and the input prioritizes taking from the "usually empty" lane. And you fill half the space on the belts with items. Your max belt throughput will still be a full belt (2 lanes), and you can even merge and split these belts as you wish. [Edit:] The downside is that the maximum throughput of the belts drops to a single lane (two half lanes, really). But that's easy to deal with: you just build twice as many belts.
if you also take into acount that some overhauls add in high flow pipes may make the calculation for barrel loops make even less sense. but I aggree that each game is our own and if you want to do it in a complicated non-elegent way, then freaking do it, there is no "one correct way" to play factorio, and that is one of the things that is beautiful about this game.
Barrels are badly designed So, i'll use my fluid wagon. More fluid per unit wagon and less complicated since i dont need barrels at the input and output portions. For short distance transportation, barelling is still hard to justify. Let's assume 1 blue belt pair (one to send barelled fluid and one to return empty barrel) vs 2 pipe (2 output) 2 Lanes of pipe vs 1 lane of belt to make it closer to practicality since you need 2 lanes of belt to make a system while only needing 1 for pipe Rate when using belt = 45 items / sec (50 fluid unit / item) = 2250 fluid unit / sec at best Rate when using pipes with pump = ( 10000 / (3 * pipes - 1) + 1000) * 2 The breakeven point is when you have 27 pipes between 2 pumps for each lane or 3 pipe between 2 pump if you wish to compare it to one pipe lane. A pump per 27 pipe isn't hard to make but a barelling station is. You have to find a way to transport empty barrels without it causing a bottleneck, implement a counter so it adapts to change in demand of fluid barrels, finding ways to fit in a barrel extractor everywhere and more. The only benefit of barrels i can think of is its bot compatibility and the ability to sushi belt a bunch of fluid together.
I find barreling to be useful when transporting sulfuric acid from my uranium processing outpost. A train with two cars comes in, one car is empty, the other car is loaded with sulfuric acid, and 2 slot filters, one for empty barrels, and one for u235. The train is set to leave if the sulfuric acid runs out OR if it gets a stack of u235 OR if the dedicated u238 car is full, then set to return once it has deposited all uranium and it is full of sulfuric acid barrels.
I'm going to be trying train based barel loops in my vanilla recipie set up. I'm gonna combine it with bob's warehouses, bob's miniloaders, and ltn to try and make my factory just run off of normal train wagons, so I can make 1 pick up and 1 drop off station for every production site.
I think that it could be better to build your barrel assembly intake on the unbarreling side, rather than on the barreling side. Barrel flux originates from belts before the chests with the "accept new barrels from assembly when empty" circuit condition. I'm pretty sure that belts which come after that chest shouldn't contribute to barrel flux. The circuit condition would probably need to be somehow changed, though I'm just spitballing though, I haven't actually tested it
A saturated blue belt of barrels transports about 2000 units of liquid. A pipeline with a pump every 50 pipes transports about 1000 units of liquid. Honestly, for the same capacity, the pipes are definitely less annoying.
instead of building massive barreling loops for water.....you could ...learn when to use regular pipe sections, when to replace long stretches with undergrounds, and when to add pumps between pipe sections or place tanks. 1) If an underground can be used to reduce the total number of tiles containing pipes, use an underground. 2) subdivide long sections of pipes/undergrounds that have flow rate issues and add pumps between them. for maximum flow rate of 12,000/s, only two pipe sections can be placed inbetween pumps. 3) strategic placement of tanks with directly-connected pumps solve all kinds of flow rate vs production rate issues. 4) fluid trains > every other solution currently. 5) if tanks at a fluid station that pump into or out of a single/shared buffer tank have loading/unloading imbalance.... use underground pipe sections to connect the separate tanks (that push into or pull out of individual cargo wagons) in order to make all the tanks connected without the need for circuit-controled pump loops.
Because... where's the fun? It was a really interesting challenge to take on and I learnt a lot from it. Besides, it was in angel and bob where barrels really made the difference. In vanilla it's difficult to come to a firm conclusion as to whether they are worthwhile or not, but in angel and bob I found them invaluable. The barrelling water thing was only in vanilla and was after a+B, I wanted to find out whether it was worth it or not. Were they as invaluable in vanilla? Possibly no. But also possibly yes.
Cheers dude. That is exactly what I thought when I made the video but looking at the video stats is telling a completely different story. I expected a couple hundred views...
@@theotherbigfoot there's no rhyme or reason to TH-cam viewing stats. My one viral video is a bug report about factorio train schedules. FYI I'm considering moving all fluid by train next game within the factory. Everything else by belts. For the same reasons you're describing.
@@mrpocock So true. So so true. My old boss used to say 'there are a dozen ways to skin a cat'. It applies to factorio just as much as it does in engineering. PS I'm guessing elevated trains will be coming in useful for you. Being able to have several overlapping independent railway networks feels like it might be transformative also.
@theotherbigfoot I am definitely excited by the elevated rails possibilities! As you say, being able to fully partition rail networks will be amazing. There are a host of bio-inspired designs that it will enable.
I was excited to try barrels on my first playthrough but then I made calculations and asked "why use barrels if pipes + fluid wagons are better in every way". Maybe will need a calculated output of liquid when more advanced but can't imagine a way of not using circuits + valves anyway
since ther are priority splitters i unse a system were the barrel filling side is fild up with barrels and new barrels can only enter the system if the loop dos not have enaughe barrels in it to fill the hole fiilling station. also i unse basicly one line of empty barrels to go back to all filling stations. yea i had some problems with seting it up but after i mad sure everything is set up corectly i never had any isiu
Why are you adding and removing from the same side (on the fill side) Plug the master buffer belt directly into the first splitter with priority on the return side, then on the empty side have a self side balancer directly followed by an overflow splitter with priority to the loop. Just make sure your buffer is big. This will minimize the "flux" and you don't need a big system using chests (you can have an inline buffer if you need one between the under flow splitter and overflow splitter) I love breals on a belt, they are stupid but so satisfying
Finally another genuine barrel enthusiast!! There are probably many different subtle ways to arrange these kinds of barrel loops. Your inline buffer idea, I like it, I'm not going to use it, I think I've reached the end of my barreling education, but it shows that I can't think of everything and that many people will see these things differently. Can I ask you a question? There seems to be a lot of skepticism in the comments about my whole 'barrel flux' concept, and you have even directly referenced it in your comment, am I living on a different planet? Is the idea of barrel flux a relevant one in your opinion? (I know you have explained an alternative barrel setup but it is really difficult to visualise a factory configuration just from a verbal description. I would love to actually see what you have come up with.)
Fact of the matter is, barrelling all liquids optimizes my gameplay by cutting out the only part that makes me want to quit. I don't care how suboptimal barrelling is. Belts deliver dopamine and pipes deliver cortizol.
Ok ok ok, let me get this straight. You have a factory where every single liquid is put into a barrel? Is there a way I can see this factory? That sounds incredible I was speaking to someone yesterday on the subject of barrels and they pointed out that barrels can be justified on a power consumption basis. The amount of power a barrel loop consumes is fixed regardless of the distance the belts need to travel, but a pumped pipe system requires pumps at regular intervals. They worked out that a barrel loop pays for itself, power wise, when the distance between barrelling and unbarrelling is more than 850 tiles. I thought that was a clever way of justifying the use of barrels. I'm going to use that justification somewhere...
My biggest complain is using the term "flux" to describe a quantity (probably better called capacitance) rather than a rate. Flux would be units through a cross-section per second (e.g. red belts have a flux of 30/s per tile wide), and thus would not be affected by length at all.
Or use trains in your return barrel loops. Then the number of trains themselves become the buffer and are freely upgrade-able. Having 4 cargo cars replaces 200 belts worth (At 8 a belt.) of flux belts.This also reduces the amount of uncompressed belts you have. A blue belt take 35.5 seconds to fill all 4 cars with barrels. (45/1600= 35.55...) So if the round trip including filling and emptying is less than that you only need one train and track. Don't know the purpose of the race track, but you might have to take into account crossings blocking train flow into account. Might work better in a railway city block design.
I haven't tried barrels on trains. I'll be honest, it scares me a little bit. I generally only use trains to move material into a factory, I don't use them to transport stuff around it, and even then I have had several factories fail because there were too many trains and they kept jamming. The idea of putting more trains onto a network is not something I like. It's not personal. It's just a gut reaction. Maybe with elevated rails it would be possible, we would be able to have a dedicated route that doesn't intersect with anything else. In my mind that could work. But not at the moment, in my opinion, for me anyway.
@@theotherbigfoot Understandable everyone has something they don't like doing. I usually avoid trains for more than ore and oil. But that is more for fps reasons. (Side note: Train jamming is usually too many trains for the station wait area size or lacking of chain rail signals at intersections.)
There is one thing I do not understand here. why is it so crucial that your return line is emptied immediatly? What is the downside of having barrels stack up in the return line. as long as the total number of barrels does not exceed the room on both belts, this should be fine. Even better, you do not need to take care of barrel storage. The return line can act as your storage.
You can absolutely do this if you wish. I think you are running a dicey game though because even small amounts of fluctuation in the amount of barrels in the system can lead to it backing up all the way to the emptying station and then stop the whole process. My even better reason for doing it this way would be error detection. If I know there shouldn't be any barrels on that belt then if I see barrels backing up then I know there is a problem. If they are allowed to back up as you suggest then if there are any problems with that then it is much more difficult to notice. But I haven't really tried. I've only really tried to get my way to work.
@@EvilCooky Assuming the amount of fluid being used over time stays constant, yes. If the amount of fluid being used varies then no. The amount of barrels in the system needs to vary to allow for this differing amount of use. I've been using water barrels to fuel my nuclear power. Power goes up and power goes down, the amount of barrels in the system needs to match this.
@@theotherbigfoot if more full barels are getting used that means more empty barrels are being filled. so the ammount of empty barrels on the return belt should stay the same. Unless your filling setup is too slow. you of course need to leave a bit of space on the return belt to buffer the influx of barrels that happens when there is sudden change in liquid use. But as soon as the filling setup starts up too, the barrel ammount should stabilize again. If you're worried about this, you can leave more free space. But since there is a hard limit on barrels in a closed system, the two belts will never fill up completely.
@@EvilCooky I've built these loops several times in several different factories. I have had issues with too many barrels in all of them. The only reasonable explanation I can come up as to why this happens is the one I have presented in the video. I don't know what more I can say other than to suggest trying it out for yourself. Barrels are not intuitive.
A lane balancer won't balance both sides of the belt with each other. It will balance the left with the left and the right with the right. A barrel put on the left side of a belt, then put through a belt balancer, will still be on the left side of the belt.
The text at 6:55 is just... yeah, chef's kiss or something. This is so it. Also, what are you doing to _use_ all that water? Power, I guess? But like.......... that's a lot of water! :D
@@DavidLindes I wanted to figure out barrels!! Every factory I have made in the last couple years has been set up with barrel loops feeding nuclear power. I wanted to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
@@theotherbigfoot so, it was a _race_ to the bottom? 😉🙃 That’s what the “racetrack” at e.g. 6:29 was about, too, I guess? 😉Well, you win! 🏁🎉 (🙃😁😉) (I tease. This was genuinely wonderful, and I love that you explored the topic so deeply. I learned things. I just somehow find it comedic (probably just because I’ve always mostly hated barrels, I guess?), and I hope I’m not coming across as a prick by playing that up. Sincerely, thank you for sharing all this. It’s definitely interesting! I do think I’ll be sticking with tanks and fluid wagons, but I’ll be applying lessons I’ve learned here for other things. Like that j-hook splitter thing for pulling from both sides of a belt… elegant simple solution; love it.) [edited to add more emoji indicators, and earlier, that I’m kidding up top.]
@@DavidLindes No offense taken buddy, I got pretty thick skin!! The barrels came from my experience with angel and bob. Prior to this youtubing malarky I spent about two years building and rebuilding the same factory in a&b and the barrels were just so damn useful. When I started on youtube and went back to vanilla I wanted to try them out, but my first approach didn't work. Neither did my second, or third, or fourth etc. There are different units in a&b which are not in vanilla and these make barrel loops much more straight forward. It got to a point in vanilla where I had tried so many different ways to get barrels to work that I couldn't just give up on them. Here I am, 2 years later with a dozen factories with barrel loops and finally a video to show for all that effort!! That is a good way of describing it, the j-hook, I might have to steal that!!
@@theotherbigfoot no need to steal, I gift it to you freely. :) Though I stole it from the amateur radio world, where there’s a type of antenna configuration called a “j-pole”, that this reminded me of. :)
Why is barrels backing up onto the return belt so bad? I feel like that is just as valid of storage as a chest, even if its not particularly space efficient. If you figured out roughly what the maximum capacity is including filled AND empty and had ~60% of that max capacity the system would work at 'full speed' no matter if that full speed is your belt speed, or your fluid input speed or your consumption speed. If your input is adequate your filled barrel belt will be full and your extra barrels will sit on the return belt and always be available to the filling station. If your input is low that will back up, but your filled barrel belt will have room to fill barrels as fast as your making, and that will make room for emptying barrels on the other end. You may end up with some filled barrels sitting on the belt waiting, but your unloading will still be exactly as fast as your loading so fluid throughput is still 100% of fluid availability.
You aren't wrong, it just feels like there would be a fair amount of user intervention required. That balanced number of barrels in the system needs to be found. Can that number be found with circuit networks so that it is automated? And so that it naturally updates to any change in usage your factory might experience? The setup I am explaining is one that can basically be built once and then left completely alone. Everything is automated. Everything updates automatically without me doing anything at all. If I overbuild my barrel storage by a factor of 2 or 3 then I don't even really need to calculate that number either. Am I saying that what you are describing is incorrect or won't work? Not at all. This is the system that I have gotten to work and I am so confident in it that I made a video about it. Are there other systems out there that work? Entirely possible, I've just not been looking for them. I've been looking for this one.
It's interesting how differently each of us plays factorio. To me, the most surprising thing is that you put the storage next to each barrelling assembler. I would put the storage on the belt right before it enters the barrelling assembler block. This would allow you to convert the "empty barrel belt that shouldn't ever be backed up" to an "empty barrel belt that can be completely filled" (because it is backed up by storage). (Also, because the problem scales with the size of the belt / train system length, not the amount of barrelling assemblers.) Anyhow, here is my quick experiment to build out that idea (with only vanilla entities): 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
The Solution is Clear, You can fix any problem easily if everyone was an EXPERT with Factorio Circuit Logic. LMAO Edit: This situation is exactly like a sushi loop if you've ever tried it. You MUST Keep track of all Barrels in loop with circuits. It has to be perfect.
@@niamhleeson3522 I've been bitten by this one a few times, protect your critical circuit infrastructure, especially anything acting as a counter, by isolating it to it's own independent power network of a solar panel+accumulator, so that it effectively has a UPS. If power goes low you might get some stuff messed up from circuits elsewhere but the need for manual intervention to recover drops dramatically. Works well for me until it accidentally gets connected to the main grid with a stray wire
There's a story to that. Originally there was no fluid wagon and the game pushed you into barrelling anything that needed to be transported by train. With a stack size of more than 10 you would have been able to seriously cheese the fluids in the game. The fluid wagon's capacity is still related back to the maximum amount of fluid that could be put on a normal train with barrels, there is still a marginal benefit to transporting fluids in barrels on trains.
@@theotherbigfoot Interesting, indeed. At the same time, barrels are the only way to transport fluids by robots, which comes in handy for jump-starting of coal liquification. This is my typical use-case scenario for barrels in the game.
It must be massively inefficient compared to pipes and pumps or trains. I didn't get to the end but there must be a formula for resources expended to build each setup and achieved flow rate. Surely the barrel flux (not sure why you use the term flux which is more akin to current rather than current times distance) is more costly for a given flow rate times distance than pipes or trains. I think for any system you could calculate the backlog material cost, that is the cost in terms of materials of everything in pipes and belts and chests. I guess area is also a consideration. I wonder if there are mods that could calculate these things for a selected area. Backlog material cost isn't all negative, sometimes it is useful buffer which can allow production to continue for a while even while consumption isn't running.
I am a structural engineer so I'm not all that familiar with moving objects!! Flux is the word that came to my mind, someone else suggested capacitance which is probably more accurate but less fun to say. If you can think of something better I am all ears. But it is also worth keeping in mind that flow rate is not necessarily constant. I use barrels for water for nuclear power. Power goes up, barrel usage goes up. Power goes down, you get the idea. The return conveyor belts are like a recorded timeline of the power you have used recently. The quantity of barrels on that conveyor belt is always changing. It isn't just flow rate times distance. Another commenter ran the numbers on power consumption of a barrel loop vs pumped piped system. Because a conveyor belt uses no power and we need pumps at regular intervals for a piped system, these barrel loops start paying back when the distance needed to travel is about 850 tiles. At that point the pumps start consuming more electricity than the barrels. Material cost is something completely different. I tend to view all materials used in building the factory as 'necessary'. If I'm building a big factory then it stands to reason that the material cost of that is going to be large. But once it is built, there is no further material cost. Then all material can be sunk into science and that is the moment I start caring about material usage. The cost of the materials of the barrels is one such 'necessary cost'. It only happens one time. The material cost of the barrel loops will not effect the end stage science that I care about.
@@theotherbigfoot it seems that the most important thing is that the empty belt doesn't overfill. So, efflux, or as a cheeky negation, imflux of enflux. Maybe something like backpressure, you don't want too much backpressure (too many empty barrels per tile on the back line)... This would give you nice terms like tuning for backpressure, and trying to avoid situations of bad resonance where there is no more compressive wave motion. Quite a bit of a reach there. I think using the opposite term of expansion wave motion (because the barreling station expands the backpressure of efflux). Damping?
I'm now at 7 minutes into the video, but doesn't a train store as much liquid as 50 stacks of barrels? UPD:I'm still at 7 minutes and i google it: if you make a pipe from electric pumps it will have a throughput of 12000 units per second (240 barrels) and costs slightly less than 160 steel chests filled with barrels :-) Yes, it cannot turn, BUT if you make a pipe in which electric pumps and steel pipes alternate, you will get a throughput of 6000 units per second (120 barrels) and in this case you will be able to turn the pipe... Isn't it funny that people are willing to do this nerdy stuff but aren't willing to read the wiki? 🙂 UPD UPD: the offshore pump produces 1200 units of water per second so you need to somehow aggregate the water from at least 5 offshore pumps to get close to the capacity of the pipes and electric pump...
@@ЕвгенийБагрянов-н9э Someone did the mathes (not me), it turns out that, if you think of barrels from purely a power perspective, because distance doesn't alter how much power they use and because to get a pumped pipe system to work you need pumps at certain intervals, a barrelled system starts paying for itself in power at a distance of about 850 tiles.
@@theotherbigfoot If you have a base producing 5000 iron per minute, then you need 76.8 minutes just to extract the necessary resources to fill 160 steel chests with barels, not counting the time and resources and ENERGY to turn them into steel, damn you need more than a minute of time to extract resources just to make your own chests without contents :-) Sorry, but I can’t imagine a universe in which it costs less than, I don’t know, solar panels? For example, even if there is a pump at each point of an 850-meter pipe, then that is 425 pumps that consume 12,750 kW. To produce such an amount of energy, you need 303.5 solar panels, which cost 12,142 iron, and the equivalent of 160 chests of steel can produce 9,600 solar panels. Since I also googled it from yesterday, I know that the underground sections of the pipe are not entities and do not affect the flow, so in the scheme underground pipe-pump-underground pipe-underground pipe-pump-underground pipe, these are TWO pipes between the pumps and you get the flow at 3000 u/sec having a pump every 13 blocks which gives 65 pumps, 1961 kW, and 46.7 solar panels for one 850 meter pipe, once again I can’t imagine it could be more expensive than one hundred and sixty chests of barrels... I started looking into transporting water by train and this seems like a much more tolerable solution. 2-3 trains for 50 Fluid wagons should be enough even for a 5 GW power plant...
@@ЕвгенийБагрянов-н9э I can't fault your logic, but here's the thing, it's a game. People will do things in a game for reasons of entertainment or interest or even novelty, it doesn't always make sense. Not everyone produces a detailed mathematical breakdown of a single concept before they try it out. Most people will just try it out. It feels like this video almost offends you just for existing but the fact is that it is getting significantly more attention than I thought it would when I made it. Clearly there was a latent desire for a video like this, not for you maybe, but certainly for others.
@@theotherbigfoot I thought about what to answer you, but nothing particularly smart came to mind, oh well... Yes, indeed this is a game and everyone plays as they like and has the right to do all sorts of crazy things, like rushing into solar energy with the first research of green science, building furnaces on resource deposits, throwing resources directly from miners, build a setup smelting one yellow belt of steel at the very beginning of the game, having said all this... Do I feel offended by the video that suggests spending 160 STEEL CHESTS OF BARRELS on a water pumping system? No I'm just shocked :-)
For the case where the belt of filled barrels is always full: Why couldn't you just fill the whole system up to 98% with barrels? It would be equivalent to the solution at 20:43, except that you store empty barrels on the belt instead of in 5 extra chests. The only thing you have to make sure when choosing the number of belts is that the empty barrels can't back up to _any_ of the unbarrelling machines. You might argue that you'll still get a problem if you don't have enough water (or whatever fluid) coming in to keep the line of full barrels stacked all the way up. But that, by definition, is a condition where you can't have 100% throughput on the empty side either. All you could hope for is that the belt with the full barrels keeps supplying them to the receiver until all the fluid has left the barrel system. I.e. the most you can gain (or loose) here is some buffer of liquid. And buffer of liquid is better achieved by having storage tanks at the destination. Since this fault can spread between loops, you have to keep in mind that you can't combine the empty barrel return belts and barreling stations for different unbarrelling stations. (But combining the usually-full belts is fine, at least as long as the barreling stations draw from sources that can only dry up together - like a shared pipe. And of course this whole paragraph is moot when the source can't dry up, like with offshore pumps.) If your full barrel lines are usually half-empty, you flip "empty barrels" and "full barrels", and "barreling" with "unbarreling": You can't combine full-barrel belts and unbarrelling stations for different barrelling stations, and have to make sure that your closest barreling machine can't be backed up with full barrels. Alternatively, if you WANT to both have combined/branching belts for empty barrels and combined/branching belts for full barrels, you could also set up logic so that a barrel coming out of a branch and a returning barrel going into that branch can only happen simultaneously. (And you'd keep the fill level at 98%).
It feels like you have done some fairly extensive testing on barrels as well. I don't fully get this 98% thing. Are you saying to calculate how many barrels are in a loop when it is full and then apply the 98% to that? Because I wouldn't know how to calculate how many barrels are in a loop. Well, at least not within 2% accuracy anyway. I don't know if this makes a difference to what you are saying but the barrel loops I am explaining in this video work at 100%, they are able to transport and refill 45 barrels a second indefinitely.
@@theotherbigfoot, I think I get what Pystro is saying because I had the same initial thoughts. I don't think the 98% is a crucial number, but rather that it seems there should be a constant number of barrels for any system that guarantees correct operation. This is all based just on intuition. I suspect there is some breaking reason that I'm missing, though. The basic argument is this: Say you have a consumption of 45 barrels per second and it takes say 100 seconds for a barrel to run the loop from just being emptied to just about to become emptied again. This means the machine you have emptying barrels will need a 100 second buffer, or 4500 barrels. If you clumped these barrels up right at the output of the emptying station, then you would have ~100 seconds of no barrels, but then it should naturally spread out to be always running. There are of course several simplifying assumptions: 1. We're only discussing one product loop. If other products are sharing empty barrels then there can be interactions that make this much more complex. 2. Only one lane is considered. As you showed in your first example, lane sharing is not trivial and can cause imbalances. (Note that this is effectively the same assumption as the first one).
The supply line of barrels has to be completely filled in order to get the full output of a conveyor belt. If it isn't filled then there will be a gap between barrels, and at full capacity that translates to a loss in performance. The only way the amount of barrels in a system/loop can be kept constant is if the use of the fluid is kept constant, i.e. the same amount of barrels being used every second forever. If the use of the fluid varies at all then there will be a change in the amount of barrels being used at any one time. This is why I spent so long explaining barrel flux. It isn't that I'm using 45 barrels a second. It is that I am using 45 barrels this second, and in the next second I might be using none. The system needs to be able to store those 45 barrels a second, ready for the next time I need that maximum throughput again. Intuitively, this whole barrel theory I have put together seems overblown, I get that. But I know my numbers. I haven't just cobbled this together. The way these barrels behave, in my opinion, is not intuitive.
@theotherbigfoot No, I don't even own the game. It's all theory crafting. @@toddblackmon You are right, the 2% empty belt space is just an example number that I pulled out of my ass that _seems_ like it would be just below the fill level where the machines can start to sometimes back up. No, I in fact didn't arrive at my suggestion by thinking the same way that you did, but they seem to be equivalent. See the following point and the following post: @theotherbigfoot "The supply line of barrels has to be completely filled in order to get the full output of a conveyor belt." Yes, but also no. The supply line just has to be completely filled (backed up) on the parts where the inserters are. Beyond that, you just need as many barrels to flow into that backed up sections as the inserters take out of it. The big problem is that if the belt of fulls fills up, then the belt of empties empties (and vice versa). See the following post. @theotherbigfoot "The only way the amount of barrels in a system/loop can be kept constant is if the use of the fluid is kept constant [...]" I disagree. Your buffers show that you can keep the number of barrels in the whole system (including buffer) constant, while the throughput of fluids fluctuates. You'd just ideally want to achieve that buffering in a way that saves space and complexity, for example by incorporating it into the belts. @theotherbigfoot "Intuitively, this whole barrel theory I have put together seems overblown". Only at first glance if you try to come up with a solution that works in any circumstance. My solution for example works only in the case where one side of the system can't be forced externally to slow down.
*More detailed explanation of the whole "just fill up the belts very full" solution:* First of all, you don't really want a system like this to consume a number as high as 45 barrels per second. At least not for an example, because it means that your "mostly full" belts and your "mostly empty" belts both have 8 items on every belt piece. So let's instead assume that your system uses one red belt per direction and consumes 25 barrels per second, so that 5 belt spots per second can be gaps. Also, let's assume the same 100 second loop-around time. First edge case: let's assume that both ends work at those 25 barrels per second. Then both belts will look as follows. 25/30th of the belt spots are filled with barrels (of the full or empty kind) and 5/30th will be gaps on the belts. Your belts will have to be _at least_ 25/30th full (as in, I think it's pretty clear that you won't get the throughput that we assumed with less barrels). If you ADDITIONALLY want to assure that one belt is backed up (at it's end), you need to go a liiiiitle bit beyond that, and the excess barrels will back up at one of the two sides. Any bit helps, because one of your sides is the one constraining the barrel throughput (with lubricant overflow that goes into blue belt production it would be the barrel filling side), and the other side (blue belt production) will be able to just send the extra barrels to that side. If your round-trip time is 100 seconds, that works out to be 2500 barrels needed total, just as @toddblackmon says. Now, let's look at the case where the usually constraining side gets throttled (lubricant goes into science again, and only a trickle is left for blue belts). Worst case, you'll have 1 barrel per second being filled, while the emptying side could still handle 25/s. Now, the part of the full-barrel belt immediately out of the barreling station is 1/30th full (and flowing). And obviously, the belt of empties fills up to the brim very very quickly. But that only accounts for 26/60th of all barrels. The remaining barrels will back up at the _input_ side of the emptying station, on the belt of filled barrels. The fluid being trapped on the belts look undesirable, but it doesn't actually affect throughput: Any time the filling station grabs a barrel, the belt of empties moves and you have a gap appearing at the output of the un-barreling station. That station can thus only empty only 1 barrel per second; (not that it could work faster with the filling side only working at 1/s). And any time the emptying station can output an empty, it can grab one of the full barrels from the backed up part of the belt of fulls. The case where the usually unconstrained side becomes constrained (not much need for blue belts) is pretty much the same as above, but with the roles flipped. The previously completely free flowing belt will become the completely backed up belt, and the state of the other belt will depend on the actual flow rate. If the flow rate is low enough, the belt that usually has a backed up section at the input side of the machines will still have a backed up section. If the flow rate that the constraining end is so high that the amount of gaps it leaves on the belt is less than twice the usual amount of gaps (in this example, below 2*5/s of unused capacity, above 20/s barrels flow rate), then the usually free-flowing belt will not back up fully. This means that your assumption of "usually constrained side always has barrels available" is violated. But as soon as that happens, it will be grabbing the barrels from the usually backed up and now free flowing belt at a slower rate than 20 barrels per second, wouldn't it seem like that? But that immediately means that there's 20/s barrels flowing into that end of the belt and less than 20/s barrels getting grabbed off the belt, which means that it has to accumulate a back-up. In this way, the lubricant filling machines and their belt buffer are self-balancing and the throughput remains (on average) above 20/s. Now, you luckily don't really need to know the maximum throughput of your system. The only explicit assumption that I made are that the filling of the belts with barrels is _at least_ a certain (theoretically calculable) amount. And the only implicit assumption that I've made is that the rate-constraining side will want to have it's input side filled and it's output side empty, so that it can achieve it's full throughput (both applying only really to the piece of belt right under the inserters). How many barrels can you put in at maximum? Well, it's no real problem if the whole usually-backed-up belt is full, as I've explained 2 paragraphs above. The usually-unconstrained station will just output barrels onto the fully backed up belt whenever a gap appears, and then they can grab a new one from the other belt. Implicit in the assumption that they are not the rate-constraining machines is that they still work at a high enough throughput even if their output inserters have to wait a few ticks to place a barrel on the belt. So, one belt can be _completely_ full. How full can the other belt be? Well, the gaps only count of the inserters can place items into them, so the belt can be backed up all the way to the first inserter that would want to place onto it. You might think that these gaps can escape you and be at any other position on the belts instead. But total gap space in fact travels in the opposite direction to the items. So it will always accumulate at the inserters that place onto the belt. That's in fact how I came up with that idea at first: from the perspective of what the _maximum_ belt filling is.
I don’t think I quite understand what the purpose of the whole “barrel flux” abstraction is. Surely all that matters is that the line 1) isn’t a bottleneck, and 2) doesn’t get clogged, both of which are pretty standard conditions in factorio, right?
Well, to be honest, that is what I thought at the beginning of this whole thing. And if I was sat in your position then I would probably be thinking the same thing. But no.
@@teddy4271 In normal standard conditions having too much of something is a good thing. With barrels, having too many empties is a bad thing. In normal standard conditions (in vanilla) we are always dealing with primary products, things we want. With barrels we are dealing with the rejects, the excess, the stuff left behind after the primary process. It is a completely different dynamic.
Yeah, i get that, that’s the “doesn’t get clogged” bit. As long as the empty barrel return line has enough space for the unbarreling machines to drop their contents, it’s fine. The belt speed has nothing to do with it, since a given belt can buffer the same number of items regardless of speed. Belt length just changes the size of that buffer, but it stays constant once the loop is established. You should never need to take barrels out of the system, since the buffer size is constant, and the belt should be buffer enough. Your gatekeeper inserters will prevent clogging by themselves, if set up correctly. If I’ve learned anything in my factorio years, it’s that excess buffering anywhere but train stations is unhelpful at best, and it’s useful there only because of the intermittent nature of trains.
@@teddy4271 Believe me when I say that I have had significant problems with excess barrels. 1000s of the damn things. And everything is set up perfectly. I don't know if there is anything else I can say other than to suggest that you try it out for yourself. If you want a real challenge try it out with nuclear power and build it absolutely miles from the filling station and, oooh boy, you will be in for some fun. I'll be here waiting.
I had an idiot moment here. It took me 27 minutes into the movie before I understood what problem you were trying to solve. Have I understood correctly that barrel flux is the probability that the system will stop because it is full of empty barrels? and if this is true, maybe update the movie with this explanation: "you must always be able to remove empty barrels. otherwise the system will freeze. due to the fact that you can no longer empty "full barrels" which will allow you to put more "full barrels" on the belt" Not sure how to explain this better.
I define barrel flux as the number of empty barrels that are on the return conveyor belt making their way back to the barreling station. I'm not a huge fan of probability!! Barrel flux is important because when it is high we need more barrels in the system to allow for the high barrel flux. When the barrel flux is low, many of the barrels that were being used now need to be removed from the system to prevent it from backing up. This is the part of the video where I tried to explain this (th-cam.com/video/5eFVsBc0HKk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=QpwGi7T6OkysE0C3&t=339). Clearly I failed!!
@@theotherbigfoot so max barrel fluxis: the system has stopped because it is full of empty barrels. 100/100 is full barrel flux. stopped/stock full 50/100 is half barrel flux. is half capacity
If a loop is a closed system that nothing new can be hooked up to shouldn't this be solvable by properly counting how many barrels it will take to fill up the belt all the way to the dumping stations via a memory cell then counting how many barrels it will take to fill up the return belt all the way to the barreling stations buffering the presumably, since belt length is roughly equal very similar difference of barrels (either full or emtpy ones depending on which number is bigger) and then calling it a day? Balancers should be able to make sure that no single station ever runs out of anything no? do your systems use balancers? you can alleviate issues with items that are only put on one side of a belt via a splitter that outputs to both sides of one belt this will result in it splitting left and right side perfectly no matter what configuration of those comes in and it will guarantee that whatever is happening it will never back up beyond that point unless there is actually more barrels coming in than being used which should never happen in a closed system. other measurements to be taken would maybe be the full barrel belt fully minus the distance of the return belt between the dumping station that is closest to the barreling station that measurement should probably be your concept of barrel flux as it is the worst case for using the return belt as your buffer. maybe a solution would be to add some extra space to the return belt up to the last dumping station and there make, let's say you are using 2 belts, we are adding one extra for that distance and then there make a 2x3 balancer. This Idea would rely on amount on the full barrel belt *2 being in the system which when I now think about it is probably a better Idea and probably workable as long as you are prepared to buffer some excess and are prepared to make sure no dumping station can be backed up to I have honestly never bothered with barrels unless I had to. my only Factorio experience is pretty much 550 hours into a single space exploration run so just shooting them onto another planet dump what I need from them and then scrap them for steel is the only thing I ever really did lol, might as well look into some way to use them though lol hope this made at least some sense
I'll be completely honest with you buddy, a lot of people have come forward to suggest possible barrel system alternatives and I've tried to understand as best I can but it's really difficult. These are the kinds of things that need to be seen. Also, I have a lot of experience with the exact kind of barrel loop I am explaining in the video but no experience of any alternatives. And the experience that I do have was painful, a lot of time and thought went into this and it still persisted in going wrong. An alternative might work really well in theory and on paper but because of my experiences I am permanently skeptical that they will work in an actual factory environment. So far, only one person has actually taken on the challenge to prove to me that their system works and as a result I have a viable alternative barrel system that I'm going to test and make a video about at some point in the future. That is what it is going to take though, from here anyway. If you think you have a viable alternative I am genuinely interested, and I will make a video about it if it is good, but if you don't want to put in the work in trying it out and testing it then it is difficult for me to take it seriously. Sorry to be blunt but that's just the reality.
@@theotherbigfoot I'll be the second one then. I just built a 2x2 nuclear reactor supplying it trough a pretty long 4 belt barrel loop it works fine without a single chest in the system. put under load it managed, because the reactor is overbuilt, to use up heat buffer up to 528 (normal max for such a reactor is 480) and also not die when it is not under load Using 4 belts which is more than it needs feels a bit like cheating though I'll be honest also in many ways the dumping stations ended up looking a bit like what you did according to my memory cell there were 57k barrels in the system though in hindsight a memory cell to count anything was not really needed just needed to block of a section of the belt so that it could not back up to the stations (via a balancer) and let it fill up completely up to that point would you like screenshots or like a safe file? how would I get those to you? for video I would probably take longer as I have never done that before. the safe file happens to have my mods on but no component built into the loop is modded at all and afaik nothing actually in the loop is altered by any mod. the dumping stations might also need to be changed a bit as long handed inserters might end up being a bottleneck if you happen to have less inserter speed and capacity researched than I have in that run I genuinely feel like a lot of your problems stem from not using (enough?) balancer to fully utilize the buffering capability of your return belt for empty barrels It is worth mentioning though that this method might get expensive with probably roughly 20k-25k more barrels used than your method for the same scenario the way it is right now. I feel like I could cut it roughly towards the same numbers you use without loosing any functionality though
@@freaki0734 I understand your solution now, I think it is similar to the one already suggested to me. That is absolutely fine by the way, I will put them side by side and test them against one another!! This other user found a potential pitfall of running the return line completely full and that was that it can't be split off or branched in any way. I have thought about how this might be achieved, I have some ideas, I'm going to test this out as well. I'm in the middle of a K2 run at the moment so it might be a month or two before the test takes place. You can catch me on discord at Bigfoot#1982
@@Asdayasman Forget smooching, we should go straight to the dirty stuff!! On a more serious note, steam barrels on a train for power, how do you manage the variation between supply and demand for those barrels?
@@theotherbigfoot I wasn't kidding when I said I was an idiot - I have a or some trains running a loop between places that need steam, stopping until they're inactive for a little bit, and moving on. The barrels get unloaded into some buffer, and are spent on the power needs. They then get loaded onto a smaller train that waits until it's full, then goes and puts them back in the main steam generation place. If stuff starts getting out of power, I add more storage and steam generation manually. There is zero concept of doing things right in my bases.
@@Asdayasman Amazing. That is one hell of a crazy contraption you have there. In my mind, if I was doing this, I would have just one train, with a storage cart for full barrels and a storage cart for empties, both going back and forth at the same time. Would that not work better?
It can solve a few problems pipes have. 1) Barreled fluids on a belt never have to worry about pipe pressure killing throughput over long distances. 2) Sometimes items can be easier to transport and manage with things like bots and splitters. 3) you might only need a relatively small amount of several different fluids delivered by train and instead filling multiple tanker cars for each fluid, assigning a few slots for barreled fluids and the return barrels is all the throughput you need for that outpost. Those first to apply easily to both vanilla and mod packs, that 3rd one is rather less common in vanilla (only really uranium mining comes to mind), but can be quite a regular challenge in some mod packs.
The real answer is they existed before fluid wagons were added into the game a long time ago you needed barrels if you wanted to put fluids on a train. They are a relic of the past
What? You can easily calculate a flow rate with the circuit network. All you have to do is connect a solar panned to a an accumulator and dump a bunch of fluid once a day. With a few more cominators you can regulate it much more precisely than a belt lol. Just because you dont know how it works doesn’t mean it isn’t possible buddy
I'm not trying to calculate flow rate. I'm trying to calculate how many barrels are being transported by a conveyor belt that is like 3000 tiles long. I could connect every conveyor belt to a circuit network and that would get some way there but it wouldn't include u/g belts or splitters. Not to mention that this would be an incredible amount of work.
oh in the video you said something else. if thats all youre trying to do just use a stack inserter and set it to read hand contents and just add it up with a counter. use 3 of them to fill a blue belt...@@theotherbigfoot
@@theotherbigfoot maybe some kind of tutorial, with how to work with delays on combinators, or how to create some custom conditions, i know that in vanilla there are not much entities that can be connected to network, but i saw some guys which have created fully automated factoried
@@wilk85 The things you are talking about are well above my pay grade!! I can do simple circuit networks but anything more than that and you'll need to find a different youtuber!!
You'd have to be smoking crack to actually consider barreling. Takes steel and I can regulate oil conversion by attaching a red wire to a tank and pump to keep the ratios perfect. Barreling would require a stupid amount of lane balancers or bots to keep it running. Imagine trying to run a nuclear reactor on bottled water and steam 💀💀💀
I do believe that you could much more easily manage barrel flow by reading all the inputs and outputs and then adjusting one or the other conditionally based on what kind of behaviour you're looking for. However, I frankly don't have a lot of experience with barrelling so this is just spitballing like some of the other commenters.
this feels like a uni lecture on factorio i love it
haha so true :DD
This is exactly why I was immediately drawn in by the video's presentation
Feels like electrical engineering.
I loved it.
Love the conclusion "Barrel Loops in Vanilla.. Maybe a complete waste of time"
Sometimes I just need to be completely honest. The 'maybe' part is important though. There might be situations or applications that I haven't considered where barrels might be transformative in vanilla. I left myself just enough wiggle room on that one!!
My favorite use of purple chests (the "get this stuff outta here" logistic chest) is to get the empty barrels away from an unbarraling station as soon as possible.
I like using barrels for liquids mostly because it's easier for me to visualize an empty belt to indicate a shortage of material supply to a process than it is follow back pipes and tanks to figure out I'm not making enough sulfur somewhere upstream
I heavily used barrels when I challenged myself to use only bots for transportation. It worked very well, but you need a good infrastructure to handle the empty barrels.
This sounds like a great solution for Krastorio gasses. I was always just making huge gas builds on-site in my Krastorio runs, and it would always cause them to be much larger than initially planned. The high volumes of the gasses would quickly hit flow limitations as well, it was generally very frustrating thing to deal with. There are a number of high value fluids in SE that this would be useful for too. I think it's cool that SE actually forces the player to use barrels for interplanetary logistics as well, really trying to get the player to understand how useful they can be for certain applications.
Holy crap.
Moral of the story: pipes
Have you thought about using railcars as buffer storage? And setting train stop conditions to move the entire buffer railcar to deep storage if it gets too full, with an empty replacement waiting in the wings for the buffer stop to open up?
Theorycrafting here... Train stop at the bottling station releasing the car at it if the car is full or if the car is empty. If the car is full, a circut sets the train stop to request an empty car, and if the car is empty, the stop requests a full one. Deep storage becomes a railyard, and can be shared across all bottling plants through the train logistics network.
This is probably flawed somewhere, starting with the assumption that the actual barrel loop itself is still belt based, other than the buffer.
I currently (only) use barrels for sulfuric acid for uranium mining. Barrels are filled at the train station in my base, each train has dedicated slots for filled and empty barrels. The mine needs a kickstart with filled barrels, then it's running quite well (trains only check for full / empty uranium ore and an inactivity timer to allow for loading / unloading barrels).
I've been sitting here for a good 5 minutes trying to think of what the implications of using trains with barrels would be on barrel flux. I think, because you are introducing a time delay to both the feed and the return, that they are both flux, and they therefore even each other out. I think. I can't be certain though.
@@theotherbigfoot For my setup, each train adds a fixed amount of barrels (I calculated the needed sulfuric acid per uranium ore train. The mine doesn't consume sulfuric acid fast or much of it.
In the beginning, I connected the mine with two belts (Full barrels in, ore and empty barrels out).
I think 1200-1500 units per second is a reasonable assumption for flow rate in pipes. that depends mostly on the number of pipe segments, where for an underground pipe the entrance and exit are counted as only 1. So doing one long pipe vs lots of undergrounds is _vastly_ less efficient. 1200 is roughly the rate for 17 pipes between two pumps 1500 is around 7.
To keep flow rate up one can just add a pump every ~5 undergrounds (=10 pipes) or so.
On the other hand a blue belt transports up to 45 barrels a second, or 45*50 = 2250 units per second. So 16 lanes of pipes should easily outperform 8 barrel loops. But in theory 8 liquids might be ok if they shared 4 lanes for empty barrels for example, but I haven't played with barrels, yet.
If we are talking purely flow rate then yes, the whole underground thing is better. But I have found that by constructing actual pipes rather than u/g ones there is a kinda storage effect that comes into play. Where there is so much liquid being stored in the pipes themselves that flow rate becomes less of a problem.
16 lanes of pipes, say 3000 long, thats 4.8million units of liquid effectively in storage.
Some people like to solve puzzles. Some people like to play with pipes and fluid wagons.
Nobody tell this man that recycling is coming.
The problem with barrels being consistent is that, ultimately, you're going to have to move the liquid through a pipe at some point.
Yup true, if you only use a single pipe to link them. If you used 2 pipes (or more) then problem solved.
I havent ever gone too crazy with barrels, but for the most part i just sorted one side of the belt to dedicate to filled barrels, and the other side using empty barrels in a big loop like that
I since came up with an even better solution than in my previous comment thread:
You designate one lane of all your belts as "usually full" and the other as "usually empty". The output of both barreling and un-barreling machines output prioritizes going onto the "usually full" lane, and the input prioritizes taking from the "usually empty" lane. And you fill half the space on the belts with items. Your max belt throughput will still be a full belt (2 lanes), and you can even merge and split these belts as you wish.
[Edit:] The downside is that the maximum throughput of the belts drops to a single lane (two half lanes, really). But that's easy to deal with: you just build twice as many belts.
if you also take into acount that some overhauls add in high flow pipes may make the calculation for barrel loops make even less sense.
but I aggree that each game is our own and if you want to do it in a complicated non-elegent way, then freaking do it, there is no "one correct way" to play factorio, and that is one of the things that is beautiful about this game.
Barrels are badly designed
So, i'll use my fluid wagon. More fluid per unit wagon and less complicated since i dont need barrels at the input and output portions.
For short distance transportation, barelling is still hard to justify.
Let's assume 1 blue belt pair (one to send barelled fluid and one to return empty barrel) vs 2 pipe (2 output)
2 Lanes of pipe vs 1 lane of belt to make it closer to practicality since you need 2 lanes of belt to make a system while only needing 1 for pipe
Rate when using belt = 45 items / sec (50 fluid unit / item) = 2250 fluid unit / sec at best
Rate when using pipes with pump = ( 10000 / (3 * pipes - 1) + 1000) * 2
The breakeven point is when you have 27 pipes between 2 pumps for each lane or 3 pipe between 2 pump if you wish to compare it to one pipe lane. A pump per 27 pipe isn't hard to make but a barelling station is. You have to find a way to transport empty barrels without it causing a bottleneck, implement a counter so it adapts to change in demand of fluid barrels, finding ways to fit in a barrel extractor everywhere and more.
The only benefit of barrels i can think of is its bot compatibility and the ability to sushi belt a bunch of fluid together.
I find barreling to be useful when transporting sulfuric acid from my uranium processing outpost. A train with two cars comes in, one car is empty, the other car is loaded with sulfuric acid, and 2 slot filters, one for empty barrels, and one for u235. The train is set to leave if the sulfuric acid runs out OR if it gets a stack of u235 OR if the dedicated u238 car is full, then set to return once it has deposited all uranium and it is full of sulfuric acid barrels.
I'm going to be trying train based barel loops in my vanilla recipie set up. I'm gonna combine it with bob's warehouses, bob's miniloaders, and ltn to try and make my factory just run off of normal train wagons, so I can make 1 pick up and 1 drop off station for every production site.
I think that it could be better to build your barrel assembly intake on the unbarreling side, rather than on the barreling side.
Barrel flux originates from belts before the chests with the "accept new barrels from assembly when empty" circuit condition. I'm pretty sure that belts which come after that chest shouldn't contribute to barrel flux. The circuit condition would probably need to be somehow changed, though
I'm just spitballing though, I haven't actually tested it
A saturated blue belt of barrels transports about 2000 units of liquid.
A pipeline with a pump every 50 pipes transports about 1000 units of liquid.
Honestly, for the same capacity, the pipes are definitely less annoying.
instead of building massive barreling loops for water.....you could ...learn when to use regular pipe sections, when to replace long stretches with undergrounds, and when to add pumps between pipe sections or place tanks.
1) If an underground can be used to reduce the total number of tiles containing pipes, use an underground.
2) subdivide long sections of pipes/undergrounds that have flow rate issues and add pumps between them. for maximum flow rate of 12,000/s, only two pipe sections can be placed inbetween pumps.
3) strategic placement of tanks with directly-connected pumps solve all kinds of flow rate vs production rate issues.
4) fluid trains > every other solution currently.
5) if tanks at a fluid station that pump into or out of a single/shared buffer tank have loading/unloading imbalance.... use underground pipe sections to connect the separate tanks (that push into or pull out of individual cargo wagons) in order to make all the tanks connected without the need for circuit-controled pump loops.
Because... where's the fun? It was a really interesting challenge to take on and I learnt a lot from it.
Besides, it was in angel and bob where barrels really made the difference. In vanilla it's difficult to come to a firm conclusion as to whether they are worthwhile or not, but in angel and bob I found them invaluable. The barrelling water thing was only in vanilla and was after a+B, I wanted to find out whether it was worth it or not. Were they as invaluable in vanilla? Possibly no. But also possibly yes.
A subject that literally 3 people actually care about. Great video.
Cheers dude. That is exactly what I thought when I made the video but looking at the video stats is telling a completely different story. I expected a couple hundred views...
@@theotherbigfoot there's no rhyme or reason to TH-cam viewing stats. My one viral video is a bug report about factorio train schedules. FYI I'm considering moving all fluid by train next game within the factory. Everything else by belts. For the same reasons you're describing.
@@mrpocock So true. So so true.
My old boss used to say 'there are a dozen ways to skin a cat'. It applies to factorio just as much as it does in engineering.
PS I'm guessing elevated trains will be coming in useful for you. Being able to have several overlapping independent railway networks feels like it might be transformative also.
@theotherbigfoot I am definitely excited by the elevated rails possibilities! As you say, being able to fully partition rail networks will be amazing. There are a host of bio-inspired designs that it will enable.
The legend returns
I was excited to try barrels on my first playthrough but then I made calculations and asked "why use barrels if pipes + fluid wagons are better in every way". Maybe will need a calculated output of liquid when more advanced but can't imagine a way of not using circuits + valves anyway
since ther are priority splitters i unse a system were the barrel filling side is fild up with barrels and new barrels can only enter the system if the loop dos not have enaughe barrels in it to fill the hole fiilling station.
also i unse basicly one line of empty barrels to go back to all filling stations. yea i had some problems with seting it up but after i mad sure everything is set up corectly i never had any isiu
its very much like your 4th version but with only 1 line (sometimes with more then 1 belt) for all the empty barrels from all the loops
Why are you adding and removing from the same side (on the fill side)
Plug the master buffer belt directly into the first splitter with priority on the return side, then on the empty side have a self side balancer directly followed by an overflow splitter with priority to the loop.
Just make sure your buffer is big. This will minimize the "flux" and you don't need a big system using chests (you can have an inline buffer if you need one between the under flow splitter and overflow splitter)
I love breals on a belt, they are stupid but so satisfying
Finally another genuine barrel enthusiast!!
There are probably many different subtle ways to arrange these kinds of barrel loops. Your inline buffer idea, I like it, I'm not going to use it, I think I've reached the end of my barreling education, but it shows that I can't think of everything and that many people will see these things differently.
Can I ask you a question? There seems to be a lot of skepticism in the comments about my whole 'barrel flux' concept, and you have even directly referenced it in your comment, am I living on a different planet? Is the idea of barrel flux a relevant one in your opinion?
(I know you have explained an alternative barrel setup but it is really difficult to visualise a factory configuration just from a verbal description. I would love to actually see what you have come up with.)
Fact of the matter is, barrelling all liquids optimizes my gameplay by cutting out the only part that makes me want to quit.
I don't care how suboptimal barrelling is. Belts deliver dopamine and pipes deliver cortizol.
Ok ok ok, let me get this straight. You have a factory where every single liquid is put into a barrel? Is there a way I can see this factory? That sounds incredible
I was speaking to someone yesterday on the subject of barrels and they pointed out that barrels can be justified on a power consumption basis. The amount of power a barrel loop consumes is fixed regardless of the distance the belts need to travel, but a pumped pipe system requires pumps at regular intervals. They worked out that a barrel loop pays for itself, power wise, when the distance between barrelling and unbarrelling is more than 850 tiles. I thought that was a clever way of justifying the use of barrels. I'm going to use that justification somewhere...
My biggest complain is using the term "flux" to describe a quantity (probably better called capacitance) rather than a rate. Flux would be units through a cross-section per second (e.g. red belts have a flux of 30/s per tile wide), and thus would not be affected by length at all.
I wondered how long it would take...
Or use trains in your return barrel loops. Then the number of trains themselves become the buffer and are freely upgrade-able. Having 4 cargo cars replaces 200 belts worth (At 8 a belt.) of flux belts.This also reduces the amount of uncompressed belts you have.
A blue belt take 35.5 seconds to fill all 4 cars with barrels. (45/1600= 35.55...) So if the round trip including filling and emptying is less than that you only need one train and track. Don't know the purpose of the race track, but you might have to take into account crossings blocking train flow into account. Might work better in a railway city block design.
I haven't tried barrels on trains. I'll be honest, it scares me a little bit. I generally only use trains to move material into a factory, I don't use them to transport stuff around it, and even then I have had several factories fail because there were too many trains and they kept jamming. The idea of putting more trains onto a network is not something I like. It's not personal. It's just a gut reaction. Maybe with elevated rails it would be possible, we would be able to have a dedicated route that doesn't intersect with anything else. In my mind that could work. But not at the moment, in my opinion, for me anyway.
@@theotherbigfoot Understandable everyone has something they don't like doing. I usually avoid trains for more than ore and oil. But that is more for fps reasons.
(Side note: Train jamming is usually too many trains for the station wait area size or lacking of chain rail signals at intersections.)
There is one thing I do not understand here. why is it so crucial that your return line is emptied immediatly?
What is the downside of having barrels stack up in the return line.
as long as the total number of barrels does not exceed the room on both belts, this should be fine.
Even better, you do not need to take care of barrel storage. The return line can act as your storage.
You can absolutely do this if you wish. I think you are running a dicey game though because even small amounts of fluctuation in the amount of barrels in the system can lead to it backing up all the way to the emptying station and then stop the whole process.
My even better reason for doing it this way would be error detection. If I know there shouldn't be any barrels on that belt then if I see barrels backing up then I know there is a problem. If they are allowed to back up as you suggest then if there are any problems with that then it is much more difficult to notice.
But I haven't really tried. I've only really tried to get my way to work.
@@theotherbigfoot if you design it as a closed system, so no way for barrels to get added or subtracted, then there should never be an issue.
@@EvilCooky Assuming the amount of fluid being used over time stays constant, yes. If the amount of fluid being used varies then no. The amount of barrels in the system needs to vary to allow for this differing amount of use.
I've been using water barrels to fuel my nuclear power. Power goes up and power goes down, the amount of barrels in the system needs to match this.
@@theotherbigfoot if more full barels are getting used that means more empty barrels are being filled. so the ammount of empty barrels on the return belt should stay the same.
Unless your filling setup is too slow.
you of course need to leave a bit of space on the return belt to buffer the influx of barrels that happens when there is sudden change in liquid use. But as soon as the filling setup starts up too, the barrel ammount should stabilize again.
If you're worried about this, you can leave more free space. But since there is a hard limit on barrels in a closed system, the two belts will never fill up completely.
@@EvilCooky I've built these loops several times in several different factories. I have had issues with too many barrels in all of them. The only reasonable explanation I can come up as to why this happens is the one I have presented in the video. I don't know what more I can say other than to suggest trying it out for yourself. Barrels are not intuitive.
10:40 cant you just put a lane balancer in that belt?
A lane balancer won't balance both sides of the belt with each other. It will balance the left with the left and the right with the right. A barrel put on the left side of a belt, then put through a belt balancer, will still be on the left side of the belt.
The text at 6:55 is just... yeah, chef's kiss or something. This is so it.
Also, what are you doing to _use_ all that water? Power, I guess? But like.......... that's a lot of water! :D
P.S. You know about fluid wagons, right? ;) ;) ;)
@@DavidLindes I wanted to figure out barrels!! Every factory I have made in the last couple years has been set up with barrel loops feeding nuclear power. I wanted to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
@@theotherbigfoot so, it was a _race_ to the bottom? 😉🙃 That’s what the “racetrack” at e.g. 6:29 was about, too, I guess? 😉Well, you win! 🏁🎉
(🙃😁😉)
(I tease. This was genuinely wonderful, and I love that you explored the topic so deeply. I learned things. I just somehow find it comedic (probably just because I’ve always mostly hated barrels, I guess?), and I hope I’m not coming across as a prick by playing that up. Sincerely, thank you for sharing all this. It’s definitely interesting! I do think I’ll be sticking with tanks and fluid wagons, but I’ll be applying lessons I’ve learned here for other things. Like that j-hook splitter thing for pulling from both sides of a belt… elegant simple solution; love it.)
[edited to add more emoji indicators, and earlier, that I’m kidding up top.]
@@DavidLindes No offense taken buddy, I got pretty thick skin!!
The barrels came from my experience with angel and bob. Prior to this youtubing malarky I spent about two years building and rebuilding the same factory in a&b and the barrels were just so damn useful. When I started on youtube and went back to vanilla I wanted to try them out, but my first approach didn't work. Neither did my second, or third, or fourth etc. There are different units in a&b which are not in vanilla and these make barrel loops much more straight forward. It got to a point in vanilla where I had tried so many different ways to get barrels to work that I couldn't just give up on them. Here I am, 2 years later with a dozen factories with barrel loops and finally a video to show for all that effort!!
That is a good way of describing it, the j-hook, I might have to steal that!!
@@theotherbigfoot no need to steal, I gift it to you freely. :)
Though I stole it from the amateur radio world, where there’s a type of antenna configuration called a “j-pole”, that this reminded me of. :)
Why is barrels backing up onto the return belt so bad? I feel like that is just as valid of storage as a chest, even if its not particularly space efficient. If you figured out roughly what the maximum capacity is including filled AND empty and had ~60% of that max capacity the system would work at 'full speed' no matter if that full speed is your belt speed, or your fluid input speed or your consumption speed.
If your input is adequate your filled barrel belt will be full and your extra barrels will sit on the return belt and always be available to the filling station.
If your input is low that will back up, but your filled barrel belt will have room to fill barrels as fast as your making, and that will make room for emptying barrels on the other end. You may end up with some filled barrels sitting on the belt waiting, but your unloading will still be exactly as fast as your loading so fluid throughput is still 100% of fluid availability.
You aren't wrong, it just feels like there would be a fair amount of user intervention required. That balanced number of barrels in the system needs to be found. Can that number be found with circuit networks so that it is automated? And so that it naturally updates to any change in usage your factory might experience?
The setup I am explaining is one that can basically be built once and then left completely alone. Everything is automated. Everything updates automatically without me doing anything at all. If I overbuild my barrel storage by a factor of 2 or 3 then I don't even really need to calculate that number either.
Am I saying that what you are describing is incorrect or won't work? Not at all. This is the system that I have gotten to work and I am so confident in it that I made a video about it. Are there other systems out there that work? Entirely possible, I've just not been looking for them. I've been looking for this one.
It's interesting how differently each of us plays factorio.
To me, the most surprising thing is that you put the storage next to each barrelling assembler.
I would put the storage on the belt right before it enters the barrelling assembler block. This would allow you to convert the "empty barrel belt that shouldn't ever be backed up" to an "empty barrel belt that can be completely filled" (because it is backed up by storage). (Also, because the problem scales with the size of the belt / train system length, not the amount of barrelling assemblers.)
Anyhow, here is my quick experiment to build out that idea (with only vanilla entities):
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
The Solution is Clear, You can fix any problem easily if everyone was an EXPERT with Factorio Circuit Logic. LMAO
Edit: This situation is exactly like a sushi loop if you've ever tried it. You MUST Keep track of all Barrels in loop with circuits. It has to be perfect.
and don't you dare have a power shortage ever lol
@@niamhleeson3522 I've been bitten by this one a few times, protect your critical circuit infrastructure, especially anything acting as a counter, by isolating it to it's own independent power network of a solar panel+accumulator, so that it effectively has a UPS. If power goes low you might get some stuff messed up from circuits elsewhere but the need for manual intervention to recover drops dramatically. Works well for me until it accidentally gets connected to the main grid with a stray wire
@@explodinggreen Ya just gotta be vigilant about that. You can always take those power connections away using the copper cable
You can stack 50 factories, but you cannot stack more than 10 barrels. Factorio physics.
There's a story to that. Originally there was no fluid wagon and the game pushed you into barrelling anything that needed to be transported by train. With a stack size of more than 10 you would have been able to seriously cheese the fluids in the game. The fluid wagon's capacity is still related back to the maximum amount of fluid that could be put on a normal train with barrels, there is still a marginal benefit to transporting fluids in barrels on trains.
@@theotherbigfoot Interesting, indeed.
At the same time, barrels are the only way to transport fluids by robots, which comes in handy for jump-starting of coal liquification. This is my typical use-case scenario for barrels in the game.
It must be massively inefficient compared to pipes and pumps or trains. I didn't get to the end but there must be a formula for resources expended to build each setup and achieved flow rate. Surely the barrel flux (not sure why you use the term flux which is more akin to current rather than current times distance) is more costly for a given flow rate times distance than pipes or trains. I think for any system you could calculate the backlog material cost, that is the cost in terms of materials of everything in pipes and belts and chests. I guess area is also a consideration. I wonder if there are mods that could calculate these things for a selected area. Backlog material cost isn't all negative, sometimes it is useful buffer which can allow production to continue for a while even while consumption isn't running.
I am a structural engineer so I'm not all that familiar with moving objects!! Flux is the word that came to my mind, someone else suggested capacitance which is probably more accurate but less fun to say. If you can think of something better I am all ears. But it is also worth keeping in mind that flow rate is not necessarily constant. I use barrels for water for nuclear power. Power goes up, barrel usage goes up. Power goes down, you get the idea. The return conveyor belts are like a recorded timeline of the power you have used recently. The quantity of barrels on that conveyor belt is always changing. It isn't just flow rate times distance.
Another commenter ran the numbers on power consumption of a barrel loop vs pumped piped system. Because a conveyor belt uses no power and we need pumps at regular intervals for a piped system, these barrel loops start paying back when the distance needed to travel is about 850 tiles. At that point the pumps start consuming more electricity than the barrels.
Material cost is something completely different. I tend to view all materials used in building the factory as 'necessary'. If I'm building a big factory then it stands to reason that the material cost of that is going to be large. But once it is built, there is no further material cost. Then all material can be sunk into science and that is the moment I start caring about material usage. The cost of the materials of the barrels is one such 'necessary cost'. It only happens one time. The material cost of the barrel loops will not effect the end stage science that I care about.
@@theotherbigfoot it seems that the most important thing is that the empty belt doesn't overfill.
So, efflux, or as a cheeky negation, imflux of enflux.
Maybe something like backpressure, you don't want too much backpressure (too many empty barrels per tile on the back line)... This would give you nice terms like tuning for backpressure, and trying to avoid situations of bad resonance where there is no more compressive wave motion. Quite a bit of a reach there. I think using the opposite term of expansion wave motion (because the barreling station expands the backpressure of efflux).
Damping?
I'm now at 7 minutes into the video,
but doesn't a train store as much liquid as 50 stacks of barrels?
UPD:I'm still at 7 minutes and i google it:
if you make a pipe from electric pumps it will have a throughput of 12000 units per second (240 barrels) and costs slightly less than 160 steel chests filled with barrels :-)
Yes, it cannot turn, BUT if you make a pipe in which electric pumps and steel pipes alternate, you will get a throughput of 6000 units per second (120 barrels) and in this case you will be able to turn the pipe...
Isn't it funny that people are willing to do this nerdy stuff but aren't willing to read the wiki? 🙂
UPD UPD: the offshore pump produces 1200 units of water per second so you need to somehow aggregate the water from at least 5 offshore pumps to get close to the capacity of the pipes and electric pump...
To be honest, now that I know this, I would like there to be diesel power plants in the game
@@ЕвгенийБагрянов-н9э Someone did the mathes (not me), it turns out that, if you think of barrels from purely a power perspective, because distance doesn't alter how much power they use and because to get a pumped pipe system to work you need pumps at certain intervals, a barrelled system starts paying for itself in power at a distance of about 850 tiles.
@@theotherbigfoot If you have a base producing 5000 iron per minute, then you need 76.8 minutes just to extract the necessary resources to fill 160 steel chests with barels, not counting the time and resources and ENERGY to turn them into steel, damn you need more than a minute of time to extract resources just to make your own chests without contents :-)
Sorry, but I can’t imagine a universe in which it costs less than, I don’t know, solar panels?
For example, even if there is a pump at each point of an 850-meter pipe, then that is 425 pumps that consume 12,750 kW. To produce such an amount of energy, you need 303.5 solar panels, which cost 12,142 iron, and the equivalent of 160 chests of steel can produce 9,600 solar panels.
Since I also googled it from yesterday, I know that the underground sections of the pipe are not entities and do not affect the flow, so in the scheme underground pipe-pump-underground pipe-underground pipe-pump-underground pipe, these are TWO pipes between the pumps and you get the flow at 3000 u/sec having a pump every 13 blocks which gives 65 pumps, 1961 kW, and 46.7 solar panels for one 850 meter pipe, once again I can’t imagine it could be more expensive than one hundred and sixty chests of barrels...
I started looking into transporting water by train and this seems like a much more tolerable solution. 2-3 trains for 50 Fluid wagons should be enough even for a 5 GW power plant...
@@ЕвгенийБагрянов-н9э I can't fault your logic, but here's the thing, it's a game. People will do things in a game for reasons of entertainment or interest or even novelty, it doesn't always make sense. Not everyone produces a detailed mathematical breakdown of a single concept before they try it out. Most people will just try it out.
It feels like this video almost offends you just for existing but the fact is that it is getting significantly more attention than I thought it would when I made it. Clearly there was a latent desire for a video like this, not for you maybe, but certainly for others.
@@theotherbigfoot I thought about what to answer you, but nothing particularly smart came to mind, oh well...
Yes, indeed this is a game and everyone plays as they like and has the right to do all sorts of crazy things, like rushing into solar energy with the first research of green science, building furnaces on resource deposits, throwing resources directly from miners, build a setup smelting one yellow belt of steel at the very beginning of the game, having said all this...
Do I feel offended by the video that suggests spending 160 STEEL CHESTS OF BARRELS on a water pumping system? No I'm just shocked :-)
I like this.
For the case where the belt of filled barrels is always full:
Why couldn't you just fill the whole system up to 98% with barrels? It would be equivalent to the solution at 20:43, except that you store empty barrels on the belt instead of in 5 extra chests. The only thing you have to make sure when choosing the number of belts is that the empty barrels can't back up to _any_ of the unbarrelling machines.
You might argue that you'll still get a problem if you don't have enough water (or whatever fluid) coming in to keep the line of full barrels stacked all the way up. But that, by definition, is a condition where you can't have 100% throughput on the empty side either. All you could hope for is that the belt with the full barrels keeps supplying them to the receiver until all the fluid has left the barrel system. I.e. the most you can gain (or loose) here is some buffer of liquid. And buffer of liquid is better achieved by having storage tanks at the destination.
Since this fault can spread between loops, you have to keep in mind that you can't combine the empty barrel return belts and barreling stations for different unbarrelling stations. (But combining the usually-full belts is fine, at least as long as the barreling stations draw from sources that can only dry up together - like a shared pipe. And of course this whole paragraph is moot when the source can't dry up, like with offshore pumps.)
If your full barrel lines are usually half-empty, you flip "empty barrels" and "full barrels", and "barreling" with "unbarreling": You can't combine full-barrel belts and unbarrelling stations for different barrelling stations, and have to make sure that your closest barreling machine can't be backed up with full barrels.
Alternatively, if you WANT to both have combined/branching belts for empty barrels and combined/branching belts for full barrels, you could also set up logic so that a barrel coming out of a branch and a returning barrel going into that branch can only happen simultaneously. (And you'd keep the fill level at 98%).
It feels like you have done some fairly extensive testing on barrels as well.
I don't fully get this 98% thing. Are you saying to calculate how many barrels are in a loop when it is full and then apply the 98% to that? Because I wouldn't know how to calculate how many barrels are in a loop. Well, at least not within 2% accuracy anyway.
I don't know if this makes a difference to what you are saying but the barrel loops I am explaining in this video work at 100%, they are able to transport and refill 45 barrels a second indefinitely.
@@theotherbigfoot, I think I get what Pystro is saying because I had the same initial thoughts. I don't think the 98% is a crucial number, but rather that it seems there should be a constant number of barrels for any system that guarantees correct operation. This is all based just on intuition. I suspect there is some breaking reason that I'm missing, though.
The basic argument is this: Say you have a consumption of 45 barrels per second and it takes say 100 seconds for a barrel to run the loop from just being emptied to just about to become emptied again. This means the machine you have emptying barrels will need a 100 second buffer, or 4500 barrels. If you clumped these barrels up right at the output of the emptying station, then you would have ~100 seconds of no barrels, but then it should naturally spread out to be always running.
There are of course several simplifying assumptions: 1. We're only discussing one product loop. If other products are sharing empty barrels then there can be interactions that make this much more complex. 2. Only one lane is considered. As you showed in your first example, lane sharing is not trivial and can cause imbalances. (Note that this is effectively the same assumption as the first one).
The supply line of barrels has to be completely filled in order to get the full output of a conveyor belt. If it isn't filled then there will be a gap between barrels, and at full capacity that translates to a loss in performance. The only way the amount of barrels in a system/loop can be kept constant is if the use of the fluid is kept constant, i.e. the same amount of barrels being used every second forever. If the use of the fluid varies at all then there will be a change in the amount of barrels being used at any one time.
This is why I spent so long explaining barrel flux. It isn't that I'm using 45 barrels a second. It is that I am using 45 barrels this second, and in the next second I might be using none. The system needs to be able to store those 45 barrels a second, ready for the next time I need that maximum throughput again.
Intuitively, this whole barrel theory I have put together seems overblown, I get that. But I know my numbers. I haven't just cobbled this together. The way these barrels behave, in my opinion, is not intuitive.
@theotherbigfoot No, I don't even own the game. It's all theory crafting.
@@toddblackmon You are right, the 2% empty belt space is just an example number that I pulled out of my ass that _seems_ like it would be just below the fill level where the machines can start to sometimes back up.
No, I in fact didn't arrive at my suggestion by thinking the same way that you did, but they seem to be equivalent. See the following point and the following post:
@theotherbigfoot "The supply line of barrels has to be completely filled in order to get the full output of a conveyor belt."
Yes, but also no. The supply line just has to be completely filled (backed up) on the parts where the inserters are. Beyond that, you just need as many barrels to flow into that backed up sections as the inserters take out of it.
The big problem is that if the belt of fulls fills up, then the belt of empties empties (and vice versa). See the following post.
@theotherbigfoot "The only way the amount of barrels in a system/loop can be kept constant is if the use of the fluid is kept constant [...]"
I disagree. Your buffers show that you can keep the number of barrels in the whole system (including buffer) constant, while the throughput of fluids fluctuates. You'd just ideally want to achieve that buffering in a way that saves space and complexity, for example by incorporating it into the belts.
@theotherbigfoot "Intuitively, this whole barrel theory I have put together seems overblown".
Only at first glance if you try to come up with a solution that works in any circumstance. My solution for example works only in the case where one side of the system can't be forced externally to slow down.
*More detailed explanation of the whole "just fill up the belts very full" solution:*
First of all, you don't really want a system like this to consume a number as high as 45 barrels per second. At least not for an example, because it means that your "mostly full" belts and your "mostly empty" belts both have 8 items on every belt piece. So let's instead assume that your system uses one red belt per direction and consumes 25 barrels per second, so that 5 belt spots per second can be gaps.
Also, let's assume the same 100 second loop-around time.
First edge case: let's assume that both ends work at those 25 barrels per second. Then both belts will look as follows. 25/30th of the belt spots are filled with barrels (of the full or empty kind) and 5/30th will be gaps on the belts. Your belts will have to be _at least_ 25/30th full (as in, I think it's pretty clear that you won't get the throughput that we assumed with less barrels). If you ADDITIONALLY want to assure that one belt is backed up (at it's end), you need to go a liiiiitle bit beyond that, and the excess barrels will back up at one of the two sides. Any bit helps, because one of your sides is the one constraining the barrel throughput (with lubricant overflow that goes into blue belt production it would be the barrel filling side), and the other side (blue belt production) will be able to just send the extra barrels to that side.
If your round-trip time is 100 seconds, that works out to be 2500 barrels needed total, just as @toddblackmon says.
Now, let's look at the case where the usually constraining side gets throttled (lubricant goes into science again, and only a trickle is left for blue belts). Worst case, you'll have 1 barrel per second being filled, while the emptying side could still handle 25/s. Now, the part of the full-barrel belt immediately out of the barreling station is 1/30th full (and flowing). And obviously, the belt of empties fills up to the brim very very quickly. But that only accounts for 26/60th of all barrels. The remaining barrels will back up at the _input_ side of the emptying station, on the belt of filled barrels.
The fluid being trapped on the belts look undesirable, but it doesn't actually affect throughput:
Any time the filling station grabs a barrel, the belt of empties moves and you have a gap appearing at the output of the un-barreling station. That station can thus only empty only 1 barrel per second; (not that it could work faster with the filling side only working at 1/s). And any time the emptying station can output an empty, it can grab one of the full barrels from the backed up part of the belt of fulls.
The case where the usually unconstrained side becomes constrained (not much need for blue belts) is pretty much the same as above, but with the roles flipped. The previously completely free flowing belt will become the completely backed up belt, and the state of the other belt will depend on the actual flow rate. If the flow rate is low enough, the belt that usually has a backed up section at the input side of the machines will still have a backed up section.
If the flow rate that the constraining end is so high that the amount of gaps it leaves on the belt is less than twice the usual amount of gaps (in this example, below 2*5/s of unused capacity, above 20/s barrels flow rate), then the usually free-flowing belt will not back up fully. This means that your assumption of "usually constrained side always has barrels available" is violated. But as soon as that happens, it will be grabbing the barrels from the usually backed up and now free flowing belt at a slower rate than 20 barrels per second, wouldn't it seem like that? But that immediately means that there's 20/s barrels flowing into that end of the belt and less than 20/s barrels getting grabbed off the belt, which means that it has to accumulate a back-up. In this way, the lubricant filling machines and their belt buffer are self-balancing and the throughput remains (on average) above 20/s.
Now, you luckily don't really need to know the maximum throughput of your system. The only explicit assumption that I made are that the filling of the belts with barrels is _at least_ a certain (theoretically calculable) amount. And the only implicit assumption that I've made is that the rate-constraining side will want to have it's input side filled and it's output side empty, so that it can achieve it's full throughput (both applying only really to the piece of belt right under the inserters).
How many barrels can you put in at maximum?
Well, it's no real problem if the whole usually-backed-up belt is full, as I've explained 2 paragraphs above. The usually-unconstrained station will just output barrels onto the fully backed up belt whenever a gap appears, and then they can grab a new one from the other belt. Implicit in the assumption that they are not the rate-constraining machines is that they still work at a high enough throughput even if their output inserters have to wait a few ticks to place a barrel on the belt. So, one belt can be _completely_ full. How full can the other belt be? Well, the gaps only count of the inserters can place items into them, so the belt can be backed up all the way to the first inserter that would want to place onto it.
You might think that these gaps can escape you and be at any other position on the belts instead. But total gap space in fact travels in the opposite direction to the items. So it will always accumulate at the inserters that place onto the belt.
That's in fact how I came up with that idea at first: from the perspective of what the _maximum_ belt filling is.
The only truly useful case for barrels in my 2500+ hours of factorio is jumpstarting coal liquefaction
But what about Barrels and Barrel loops in Space Exploration?
Maybe we will find out... (I'm going to run a poll of my subs to see which set of overhaul mods they want me to do next. Spacex is on the list)
the sanest factorio player be like
I don’t think I quite understand what the purpose of the whole “barrel flux” abstraction is. Surely all that matters is that the line 1) isn’t a bottleneck, and 2) doesn’t get clogged, both of which are pretty standard conditions in factorio, right?
Well, to be honest, that is what I thought at the beginning of this whole thing. And if I was sat in your position then I would probably be thinking the same thing.
But no.
But why?
@@teddy4271 In normal standard conditions having too much of something is a good thing. With barrels, having too many empties is a bad thing. In normal standard conditions (in vanilla) we are always dealing with primary products, things we want. With barrels we are dealing with the rejects, the excess, the stuff left behind after the primary process.
It is a completely different dynamic.
Yeah, i get that, that’s the “doesn’t get clogged” bit. As long as the empty barrel return line has enough space for the unbarreling machines to drop their contents, it’s fine.
The belt speed has nothing to do with it, since a given belt can buffer the same number of items regardless of speed. Belt length just changes the size of that buffer, but it stays constant once the loop is established.
You should never need to take barrels out of the system, since the buffer size is constant, and the belt should be buffer enough. Your gatekeeper inserters will prevent clogging by themselves, if set up correctly.
If I’ve learned anything in my factorio years, it’s that excess buffering anywhere but train stations is unhelpful at best, and it’s useful there only because of the intermittent nature of trains.
@@teddy4271 Believe me when I say that I have had significant problems with excess barrels. 1000s of the damn things. And everything is set up perfectly.
I don't know if there is anything else I can say other than to suggest that you try it out for yourself. If you want a real challenge try it out with nuclear power and build it absolutely miles from the filling station and, oooh boy, you will be in for some fun.
I'll be here waiting.
I had an idiot moment here.
It took me 27 minutes into the movie before I understood what problem you were trying to solve.
Have I understood correctly that barrel flux is the probability that the system will stop because it is full of empty barrels?
and if this is true, maybe update the movie with this explanation:
"you must always be able to remove empty barrels. otherwise the system will freeze. due to the fact that you can no longer empty "full barrels" which will allow you to put more "full barrels" on the belt"
Not sure how to explain this better.
I define barrel flux as the number of empty barrels that are on the return conveyor belt making their way back to the barreling station. I'm not a huge fan of probability!! Barrel flux is important because when it is high we need more barrels in the system to allow for the high barrel flux. When the barrel flux is low, many of the barrels that were being used now need to be removed from the system to prevent it from backing up.
This is the part of the video where I tried to explain this (th-cam.com/video/5eFVsBc0HKk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=QpwGi7T6OkysE0C3&t=339). Clearly I failed!!
@@theotherbigfoot so max barrel fluxis: the system has stopped because it is full of empty barrels.
100/100 is full barrel flux. stopped/stock full
50/100 is half barrel flux. is half capacity
If a loop is a closed system that nothing new can be hooked up to shouldn't this be solvable by properly counting how many barrels it will take to fill up the belt all the way to the dumping stations via a memory cell then counting how many barrels it will take to fill up the return belt all the way to the barreling stations buffering the presumably, since belt length is roughly equal very similar difference of barrels (either full or emtpy ones depending on which number is bigger) and then calling it a day? Balancers should be able to make sure that no single station ever runs out of anything no? do your systems use balancers?
you can alleviate issues with items that are only put on one side of a belt via a splitter that outputs to both sides of one belt this will result in it splitting left and right side perfectly no matter what configuration of those comes in and it will guarantee that whatever is happening it will never back up beyond that point unless there is actually more barrels coming in than being used which should never happen in a closed system.
other measurements to be taken would maybe be the full barrel belt fully minus the distance of the return belt between the dumping station that is closest to the barreling station that measurement should probably be your concept of barrel flux as it is the worst case for using the return belt as your buffer.
maybe a solution would be to add some extra space to the return belt up to the last dumping station and there make, let's say you are using 2 belts, we are adding one extra for that distance and then there make a 2x3 balancer. This Idea would rely on amount on the full barrel belt *2 being in the system which when I now think about it is probably a better Idea and probably workable as long as you are prepared to buffer some excess and are prepared to make sure no dumping station can be backed up to
I have honestly never bothered with barrels unless I had to. my only Factorio experience is pretty much 550 hours into a single space exploration run so just shooting them onto another planet dump what I need from them and then scrap them for steel is the only thing I ever really did lol, might as well look into some way to use them though lol
hope this made at least some sense
I'll be completely honest with you buddy, a lot of people have come forward to suggest possible barrel system alternatives and I've tried to understand as best I can but it's really difficult. These are the kinds of things that need to be seen.
Also, I have a lot of experience with the exact kind of barrel loop I am explaining in the video but no experience of any alternatives. And the experience that I do have was painful, a lot of time and thought went into this and it still persisted in going wrong.
An alternative might work really well in theory and on paper but because of my experiences I am permanently skeptical that they will work in an actual factory environment.
So far, only one person has actually taken on the challenge to prove to me that their system works and as a result I have a viable alternative barrel system that I'm going to test and make a video about at some point in the future.
That is what it is going to take though, from here anyway. If you think you have a viable alternative I am genuinely interested, and I will make a video about it if it is good, but if you don't want to put in the work in trying it out and testing it then it is difficult for me to take it seriously. Sorry to be blunt but that's just the reality.
@@theotherbigfoot I'll be the second one then.
I just built a 2x2 nuclear reactor supplying it trough a pretty long 4 belt barrel loop it works fine without a single chest in the system.
put under load it managed, because the reactor is overbuilt, to use up heat buffer up to 528 (normal max for such a reactor is 480) and also not die when it is not under load
Using 4 belts which is more than it needs feels a bit like cheating though I'll be honest
also in many ways the dumping stations ended up looking a bit like what you did
according to my memory cell there were 57k barrels in the system though in hindsight a memory cell to count anything was not really needed just needed to block of a section of the belt so that it could not back up to the stations (via a balancer) and let it fill up completely up to that point
would you like screenshots or like a safe file? how would I get those to you? for video I would probably take longer as I have never done that before. the safe file happens to have my mods on but no component built into the loop is modded at all and afaik nothing actually in the loop is altered by any mod.
the dumping stations might also need to be changed a bit as long handed inserters might end up being a bottleneck if you happen to have less inserter speed and capacity researched than I have in that run
I genuinely feel like a lot of your problems stem from not using (enough?) balancer to fully utilize the buffering capability of your return belt for empty barrels
It is worth mentioning though that this method might get expensive with probably roughly 20k-25k more barrels used than your method for the same scenario the way it is right now.
I feel like I could cut it roughly towards the same numbers you use without loosing any functionality though
@@freaki0734 I understand your solution now, I think it is similar to the one already suggested to me. That is absolutely fine by the way, I will put them side by side and test them against one another!!
This other user found a potential pitfall of running the return line completely full and that was that it can't be split off or branched in any way. I have thought about how this might be achieved, I have some ideas, I'm going to test this out as well.
I'm in the middle of a K2 run at the moment so it might be a month or two before the test takes place. You can catch me on discord at Bigfoot#1982
I like using barrels for steam so I can run rail tracks instead of power poles.
Because I'm an idiot.
I have spent about two years playing around with barrels so that I could make a 30 minute video.
Because I'm an idiot.
@@theotherbigfoot We should smooch sometime.
@@Asdayasman Forget smooching, we should go straight to the dirty stuff!!
On a more serious note, steam barrels on a train for power, how do you manage the variation between supply and demand for those barrels?
@@theotherbigfoot I wasn't kidding when I said I was an idiot - I have a or some trains running a loop between places that need steam, stopping until they're inactive for a little bit, and moving on. The barrels get unloaded into some buffer, and are spent on the power needs. They then get loaded onto a smaller train that waits until it's full, then goes and puts them back in the main steam generation place.
If stuff starts getting out of power, I add more storage and steam generation manually.
There is zero concept of doing things right in my bases.
@@Asdayasman Amazing. That is one hell of a crazy contraption you have there. In my mind, if I was doing this, I would have just one train, with a storage cart for full barrels and a storage cart for empties, both going back and forth at the same time. Would that not work better?
Gets all the way to the end: can I ask a question, what's the purpose of using barrels?
In vanilla? Or not in vanilla?
It can solve a few problems pipes have. 1) Barreled fluids on a belt never have to worry about pipe pressure killing throughput over long distances. 2) Sometimes items can be easier to transport and manage with things like bots and splitters. 3) you might only need a relatively small amount of several different fluids delivered by train and instead filling multiple tanker cars for each fluid, assigning a few slots for barreled fluids and the return barrels is all the throughput you need for that outpost.
Those first to apply easily to both vanilla and mod packs, that 3rd one is rather less common in vanilla (only really uranium mining comes to mind), but can be quite a regular challenge in some mod packs.
The real answer is they existed before fluid wagons were added into the game a long time ago you needed barrels if you wanted to put fluids on a train. They are a relic of the past
@@rerwrererwewr2540 An elegant tool for a more civilized age.
What? You can easily calculate a flow rate with the circuit network. All you have to do is connect a solar panned to a an accumulator and dump a bunch of fluid once a day. With a few more cominators you can regulate it much more precisely than a belt lol. Just because you dont know how it works doesn’t mean it isn’t possible buddy
I'm not trying to calculate flow rate. I'm trying to calculate how many barrels are being transported by a conveyor belt that is like 3000 tiles long. I could connect every conveyor belt to a circuit network and that would get some way there but it wouldn't include u/g belts or splitters. Not to mention that this would be an incredible amount of work.
oh in the video you said something else. if thats all youre trying to do just use a stack inserter and set it to read hand contents and just add it up with a counter. use 3 of them to fill a blue belt...@@theotherbigfoot
but i still dont know how that is easier than just doing it with a fluid pipe and tank and some pumps.
Maybe coule you create some logic circuit network with advanced settings?
I have tried a lot of things, including a few different kinds of circuit networks. Do you have anything specific in mind?
@@theotherbigfoot maybe some kind of tutorial, with how to work with delays on combinators, or how to create some custom conditions, i know that in vanilla there are not much entities that can be connected to network, but i saw some guys which have created fully automated factoried
@@wilk85 The things you are talking about are well above my pay grade!! I can do simple circuit networks but anything more than that and you'll need to find a different youtuber!!
@@theotherbigfoot haha ok, thx
This video was my introduction to your channel. :|
I can't tell whether finding my channel is a good thing or a bad thing
@@theotherbigfootWe're factorio nerds! It's too late for all of us.
Interesting content just make your point once
Glad i never got into barreling. Seems like a waste of time.
YES
You'd have to be smoking crack to actually consider barreling. Takes steel and I can regulate oil conversion by attaching a red wire to a tank and pump to keep the ratios perfect.
Barreling would require a stupid amount of lane balancers or bots to keep it running.
Imagine trying to run a nuclear reactor on bottled water and steam 💀💀💀
This video only exists because I've spent two years feeding nuclear power with barreled water.
I've never smoked crack
I do believe that you could much more easily manage barrel flow by reading all the inputs and outputs and then adjusting one or the other conditionally based on what kind of behaviour you're looking for. However, I frankly don't have a lot of experience with barrelling so this is just spitballing like some of the other commenters.