Biofluid Network Problems

[AFranticTypist]

Mod source

Factorio Mod Portal

Operating system

=Windows 10

What kind of issue is this?

• Compatibility
• Locale (names, descriptions, unknown keys)
• Graphical
• Crash
• Progression
• Balance
• Pypostprocessing failure
• Other

What is the problem?

I have noticed three problems with the current Biofluid system:

(1) The concept of a "well-supplied" Provider Tank greatly increases throughput for fluids which have an excess of production behind them. However, it is not working as well as it can because the current threshold for "well-supplied" status is 100% full. In practice this does not happen very often due to how slowly Provider tanks fill from 90% to 100% full. This reduces the benefits of "well-supplied" systems.

(2) Biofluid critters scale in two different ways: more advanced critters are faster, and more advanced critters carry more fluid. There is nothing wrong with the speed increase, however in practice the extra fluid capacity is almost never used.

The reason is this: the Biofluid system has a minimum delivery amount of 10k fluid units, and once a biofluid ticket is written as assigned to a biofluid creature it never changes.

In a running system there are two situations which dominate biofluid activity: a requestor tank which is being drawn down and a provider tank which is receiving a trickle of input.

In the case where a Requestor tank is being drawn down, it will attempt to write a new ticket until it can accept the 10k minimum order, at which time its ticket is accepted and a critter is dispatched to deliver exactly 10k.

In the case where a Provider tank is being slowly filled, it won't be available to deliver any fluid until it can meet a minimum order, which is again 10k.

So in both cases the biofluid request ticket will be written for 10k fluid, and since biofluid tickets never change, 5k of the Huzu's 15k storage capacity and 10k of the Chorkok's 20k capacity will never be used.

(3) The Requestor Tank allows you to enter an integer between 0 and 100,000 for the amount of fluid that tank should request. However, values below the minimum delivery size will be ignored without any feedback to the player. Since small numbers are allowed, they should work. But they do not.

Steps to reproduce

Use Biofluid, watch numbers.

Additional context

No response

Log file

No response

[AFranticTypist]

I have submitted a pull request for these issues, here:

pyanodon/pyalienlife#515

And the fixes are:

(1) The concept of a "well-supplied" provider tank now kicks in at 80% full (80,000 fluid units). This gets around the slow top-off rate of the provider tank and increases throughput if you can keep the provider tank supplied.

(2) The minimum biofluid order size is now 20k, or one Chorkok. When the system detects an order will be above the minimum threshold of 20k it picks the closest biopyanoport to the requestor, and then the most advanced creature inside (Chorkok > Huzu > Gobachov). In the best case, 1 Chorkok is sent (20k fluid). In the middle case, 1 Huzu is sent (15k fluid). In the worst case, 1 Gobachov is sent (10k fluid). This system maximizes the carrying capacity of each biofluid tier and is much more efficient compared to the current implementation.

(3) Special logic is now used in the case the user sets a Requestor tank to ask for less fluid than the minimum threshold, 20k. In this case, the new minimum threshold will be 20% of the request size. Small orders now work.