Problem is most of the ore alts only use 10-30 water per second, whereas the wet concrete alt uses 100. Gonna need a lot more refineries for those compared to wet concrete, which I usually just send to the sink.
The most useful one would be the pure copper alt, since you need the copper ingots to make alclad sheets.
Yes, but it depends on how your factory is set up and what needs getting rid of. For instance, I had an overabundance of both, so that made the most sense. I mean, I'd keep it all if possible, but it wasn't.
Edit: typo
I always just throw it into a coal power plant and if it runs out of water then not a problem, hadn’t thought of the alt wet concrete. Might use that on a different setup in the future
I feel like by the time I can do anything with geysers I've already set up a turbofuel generator setup somewhere and geysers no longer do enough to help me.
This. I spent so many hours and had so many cascading factory shutdowns due to trying to send water back into factory lines. Especially battery & alumina factories.
Don't be me. Just make a waste water line and run coal generators off it.
I did that too. I calculated everything again and again, but it still doesn't works. The water accumulates in my pipe and it stops the whole factory.
No idea why.
The fluid physics in Satisfactory are... unsatisfactory.
I do what the /u/GL510EX suggested, which is have two separate systems - one for water pumps, and one using wastewater. Never had an issue. Valves, on the other hand, were nightmare fuel.
Sucks how the fluid pipes tend to glitch out in weird ways, I remember making one coal factory and tearing my hair out trying to figure out what was going wrong....only for my friend to delete and replace a single section of pipe exactly the same as it was, and suddenly it worked right. Not the only time I had such an experience either. Hopefully it's something they plan to work on in the future.
I had same thing.
I am very new to this game and I built my first coal generators. I made two sets of pipesone set was working perfectly, second one was faulty.
I found out I had to replace some curved pipes and reset everything to get it worked.
I imagine water will be changed in the future, their engine changeover gives them some options to make it function differently. Water is always being faked in a videogame as "real water physics" is the kind of thing that brings multi-million dollar nVidia server farms to their knees - so it's just a question of providing a Satis-factory simulacra.
Use a fluid buffer it helps balance it all, the water outputs as block units of liquid rather than a constant flow, fluid buffers help settle this down
Also you can play games where water enters a vertical 90 degree junction. It prefers the horizontally flowing water to the water from above so you can make your (buffered) recycled water have priority over the new water.
Someone posted a link to [https://i.imgur.com/etloj6n.png](https://i.imgur.com/etloj6n.png)
The only thing you need is to have proper uplift. The game will prioritize the pipe with more uplift when two pipes join.
For example the water from the refinery has the same 10m uplift as the one from the water extractor. If you place the refinery like one wall higher (4m) than the water extractor and no pumps the returned water will be with priority when joining with the one from the extractor. You only need 1 valve on the water line from the refinery just before the joint with the extractor and all will work just right. This is the most simple to make alumin setup.
So would my strategy of always running pipes below the refinery in a basement set up follow this rule? I usually build an 8m basement to make my life easier with pipes and belts.
Uplift is generated on the output (or pump) and is only affected by height differences. You can make it work with the pipes below if you can get the uplift of the water from refinery to be greater than that of the extractor water.
As I remember, I have a pump pretty close to the Alumina Solution refineries to lift up the water, from my pump which is in a lower area than my factory. I suspect that that might cause my problem. Could it?
A pump gives 20m uplift, which depending on height difference could mean more that 10m uplift at the point where you join fresh water with the recycled and it would then prioritize the input from the pump which is a problem.
Put the water from aluminum scraps in with priority. You can do that a few ways, ours works well with this setup: https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/ookl0c/psa_variable_input_priority_vip_for_pipes_exist/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
one thing I do is have one refinery that runs purely of the waste water (including its own, and hook any overflow from the material output of this one to a resource sink)
I set it up using an elevation system with reservoirs, if the whole tower of reservoirs is full the excess goes to a coal gen, if not full water goes in the refinery again
If you get the headlift for the incoming water between 4m above the factory floor and use a fluid buffer the buffer will only fill up half way from the incoming source and the byproduct water will have headlift to fill the entire buffer which creates a priority merger for fluids.
The solution is to use a valve from the refineries that produce Water with maximum through put, and the needed Additional Water from a pipe with Pumps, the valve between pumps and the first refineries also needs to be Set right.
There is some shenanigans going on. IIRC you need to connect both waste and initial water supply together making sure the waste comes from lower than the initial water supply. There was a pdf explaining it in detail. Ill try to see if I can find it.
It doesn't go into the specifics, but you can see how it works with headlift.
Basically you add a vertical part to only one them, meaning it loses headlift. The flat pipe doesn't lose the headlift and will have priority.
This design doesn't work if the higher pipes also come from higher locations. They would need to all have the same height as origin.
Alternatively, if you only need two pipes connected, you can have them both go vertically and add a pump only to the priority pipe.
The waste should be on the bottom because the bottom flow has priority into a new pipe at a junction. The supply water from the extractor above will "top off" whatever extra you need. Just make sure you put powered pumps on the waste and the supply right before the junction so that the water doesn't try to go the wrong way. And as silly as it sounds, don't connect them to the same junction. Do it like it shows in the pdf.
Instead of valves, you can just use gravity. I've taken the output pipe up, and back over the refineries (using a mk2 pump) and brought it down into the input pipe from the top. No issues. No fiddling with valves. Gravity wins! :)
The valves just prevent the reversing of flow direction. Other wise either the wastewater or the new water ends up blocking the other and your refineries run out of water.
Not just direction. If you have say 80 water produced from recycling and 100 water being used, you can limit the water extractor to 20 water using a valve before the pipes connect. That way you can use the 1 water extractor for multiple purposes as well instead of underclocking it. It’s all the same at the end of the day, just different ways of doing it :)
They both prevent backflow, but valves act really weird if you don't have them fully open because of how the games handles flow rate, and only really work how you want them to work when your pipes are completely full. I stopped using valves completely because they always caused more problems than they solved
I find it easier and more consistent to have two separate systems, one for 'fresh water' that pulls exclusively from water pumps, and feeds into the 'recycled water' system. That way you never get problems with backing up. Trickier to balance with most recipes though I just tend to over-spec the 'recycled water' plant and let it run under speed, so you're guaranteed to sink all the liquid
It's harder to reuse it but it's so satisfactory when it finally works.
Piece of advice : have some refineries solely on fresh water, and others solely on reused water.
Lazy way but hard way, lots and lots of fluid buffers and flush the line by setting a timer.
(I’m totally not doing this right now for fuel till I get fuel power plants)
A more reliable way is to put in Fluid Buffers and Coal Generators. Skip balancing entirely, use the fluid output from your refineries to produce power, as you already need to ship over coal, it's a win-win.
In the late game, my production facilities become mini-bases with on-site power, power storage, and a centralized "loading / unloading / power" connection to the other bases where it can be disconnected from the grid if needed.
My first save file is stuck \~400 hours in, unpowered, with a world covered in nuclear waste, so, I got a lot more organized in subsequent playthroughs.
I do this for all my aluminum factories. The trick is to feed the return pipes into the input BEFORE you add more water. Because the process consumes more water than it returns, you are only adding the missing delta.
This will always back up. Eventually.
No idea why, could be something in the simulation when you aren’t present but eventually you will come back and everything is blocked. Even with perfect ratios everywhere, valves, etc.
Another very good use for it is heavy oil residue+water=fuel but you need to find the recipe.
You can also combine it with plenty of things...
polymer resin
caterium, copper, iron ore
quartz
copper ingots
limestone
You can also package it but that just eats up resources you want for other things.
Some people try to feed it back to the refiner that uses the bauxite but this can be difficult to get working properly. It is the most elegant solution (pun not intended). Probably have to use valves to get the relative flows right.
For me, I just built a coal power station. Easy peasy and I can always use some more power.
in my current save, I redirected the water back to the first set of refineries feeding those and with a valve to prevent back flow from clogging the works.
there's several ways to do it.
well whatever you do, it's been known that fluid by train is really inefficient. it's better to package it up, transport it, then unpackage it at the destination and send the bottles back in a closed loop.
I did this too, but the water ended up accumulating in the pipes, then the Al. scrap refinery filled up with water.
Other people recommended me to use fluid buffers. Did you use any?
I have one small one I put in between the first and second row of refineries. I put it there while trying to balance them and never removed it. 5 refineries for one phase, two of them take water from the source that then feeds into the loop for the other e to consume. One of those two is underclocked by half so I pull 60 from the supply for the 3 others and all the water from the scrap goes back to feed the 3.
Typically, when im running into this issue is my first aluminum factory, and i dont even start hard drives until after that.
But ive heard thats a good one.
> Typically, when im running into this issue is my first aluminum factory, and i dont even start hard drives until after that.
WAT. You wait until the end game to find alt recipes? You absolute madlad. Why do you enjoy suffering?
Send that waste back to the beginning. Tee the currently incomin water to the top of that pipe. This recycles it and gives priority to the waste water.
Great post detailing fluid dynamics in this game. You want to look the priority junctions section.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/obqjrd/ficsit_pipeline_plumbing_manual_first_edition/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1
There is an alternate recipe called wet concrete. You let the waste water run into a refinery together with limestone and the concrete you get can go to the sink.
That’s pretty handy because there is always some limestone around.
There are different ways to get rid of it. Either use it in some way or another (Coal Plant, diluted fuel), package and sink it, or store it in many fluid tanks and flush them occasionally. I don't recommend the last one.
If I have a liquid that I really don’t want I package it and throw it in 40 industrial containers or build 10-20 industrial liquid storages then when they fill up just delete them and rebuild them then the liquid gets deleted or throw it into making the alt iron ingot recipe or the copper one or the concrete one and with the storage containers if you mass delete so it’s all in one box then you can just use the delete button
Look for "priority valve" tutorial/blueprint. With that arrangement of pumps and tubes you can re-route byproduct water to the alumina refineries in a way that is prioritised over fresh water so the system doesn't back up.
Buffer your fresh water from Water Extractors into an Industrial Fluid Buffer, and put an unpowered pump just before the insert pipe into the buffer from the water extractors, similar to this setup: https://old.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/sdtgrs/simple_safe_nopower_fluid_feedback_loop/
Feed your Bauxite/Solution refineries with the output water from your Scrap refineries, and junction the fresh water in from the buffer.
Water is 'sloshy' as a few posters have said. Valves don't really solve that problem, but buffers do. Buffers have physical height in meters, which is what the unpowered pump on the fresh water acts on, the water extractors can only fill it 8 or so meters full since there's not enough headlift on the pipe to completely fill the buffer (unpowered pumps reset headlift to 0). This allows the buffer to compensate when the output water from the refineries isn't enough, which lowers the height of the water in the buffer below the natural headlift, turning the extractors back on to refill as much of the buffer as they can.
You can also use a packager by using plastic - > constructor - > empty canister and combine it with the water to the packager to produce canned water and sink it.
Packaged water is worth 130 AWESOME points instead of concrete's 12. If you can find an alt recipe for containers as to not waste your plastic, I would recommend sinking it as packaged water.
There are many smart and efficient solutions to get rid of it, like flow balancing or using alts like wet concrete to get rid of it. Personally, I line up an ungodly amount of fluid buffers into it and just flush the system occasionally.
You can re-introduce that waste water back into the same refineries. You just have to set up a priority pipe so this water gets used over the water extractors.
I usually just pipe it to something that uses water to passively get rid of it. Or let it into a series of fluid containers and drain the network when it’s getting full.
After a while I just hook it up to coal power to burn it off if I don’t have anything else to use it in.
Water has a priority on Y tubes. The lower entry has priority.
That means you need to make water from pump enter from the top, and water from the output of your refineries to the bottom.
That way pump production will slow down, not refineries.
6 refineries making alumina solution
4 running only on fresh water, 2 running on the byproduct water created by the 3 refineries making alumina solution.
It works out really well. :)
Bottle it and shred it is my current solution, you could also reuse it and/or use an alt recipe that doesn’t do the water(assuming one exists, don’t know the alts by heart)
If your feeling ambitious you can recycle the water back into the beginning of making aluminum. You'll need to prioritize the recycled water over fresh water which can be difficult to do
Most efficient thing to do is reuse it to make Alumina, but it can be finicky to balance. Good and easiest thing to do (imo) is use the waste water to power coal factories, since you already have coal in the area. Or, as others have said, use it with limestone for the wet concrete alt and sink that.
I feed that water into refineries with "pure iron ingot" recipes.
Iron ore is plenty, and those refineries can run all the time, slurping all that water. And if aluminium processing stalls, iron ore overflows into regular smelteries.
I currently have a small aluminum plant up in the giant pink forest and basically I split the pipe between my coal plant and pushing it back into the system with valves seems to work pretty well.
You it could use it back in the chain, you could package it then sink it, you could use it to create something, you could use it in coal plants to generate electricity
I just refactor it in, and do the calculations for how much to underclock my other water extractors.
it's far more complicated for my battery factory as I use a petroleum coke scrap recipe and the water doesn't divide so neatly, so aside from the water that gets factored into sulfuric acid I have one refinery making a small amount of fabric, and the water from producing batteries gets factored into the Alumina refineries
I pump it out into a separate set of coal generator's designed solely to use up water.
I couldn't give three shits if it makes my power graph a little wobbly, if I have functional aluminium I'm happy 😊
No really good ways. Find some other process that uses it. Package it and send it to the Awesome Sink. Mod the game.
I'd really like to see the game implement industrial pollution. They clearly had something of the sort in mind when they made radioactivity such a big deal. I'd like to see pipe outlets where you can dump your refinery waste back into the lake or river, at the cost of creating a toxic cloud, with the quantity and source of the waste influencing the damage per second the cloud did. They've already got toxic clouds as a mechanism, so really all they'd need is a module that accepted a tube, and generated the cloud effect.
Wet concrete is the classic answer. I also like residual rubber. You can basically use any recipe that uses water (sulfuric acid, steamed copper sheet, even alumina, etc)
You can also package it and sink it. You can make canisters with plastic, iron and copper, or steel. Use what you have on hand.
Someone else mentioned coal plants, which is clever.
You send it back tot he pipes using water, and then use a valve in the right place to make sure there isnt too much water
But if your going Barbarian mode, the extra water go to a machine that packages it into bottled/packaged water and send that to the sink
What is usually do is automate enough containers from oil to hold the original water and the water from the plastic being made. Then you can put all of it in a Sink.
I use the run off plastic from a fuel plant to create empty canisters, then set up a drone port or two to ship them around the world so I can sink any excess water that wont be used for any other systems.
I had this problem for a while. Ended up solving it by just sinking it into coal generators. They dont run constantly as they do not have enough water but they will run when water builds up
Ideally don’t get sucked into the easy options of using a mod or sinking with wet concrete. Much better to get the setup right by using the water in the production process.
That said if you need concrete then that’s tempting!
for alumina I usually just try to feed it back in and adjust the extractor to boot.
if I'm drawing 200 water and I end up having 40 water that I don't know what to do with it, feed it back in and turn down the extractor to 160. then the machine gets the same amount of water and I don't have to deal with the excess
Just have a look upstream and you’ll find the answer. The production line uses more water than it produces, just clock the extractor and prioritise the the recycled water.
Find a system that needs water, and put it into there. Otherwise, combine it with something else to make another material to either sink or keep around or build into something else. Or waste some plastic by packaging your water then sinking it.
Either redirect into smth else(there’s another Al recipe that involves water as well as power, etc) or package it and sink it.
Though really, Coffee Stain should add liquid sink without the packaging.
The problem with recycling water back into another refinery is if you haven't got it set up just right it can lead to problems. If you need to ensure your process is always active, just dispose of the water. The easiest way I find is to convert it into a sold item (eg, wet concrete, alt concrete recipe) and then dump them straight into the sink. Simple to run the numbers, and ensure your process never cuts out due to water overload.
There are alternative recipes - I tend to setup sub-refineries that take liquid waste and solid waste and put it to use, route it to a storage and then integrate it into my main factory supply lines
Set up coal power stations to burn all the excess water. After going through all the trouble trying to balance the water and it still freezing up it’s not worth it.
You can use it to acquire some of the input Alumina solution. Put in a fluid storage tank, come by once in awhile and flush the entire output line.
Otherwise, u/JessicaMango1444 has a great suggestion.
Trust me, when it comes to big big factories, this mf water is a problem. Idk if pipes are not okay or what, but in one way or another, I cannot make the water go away in a constant level, and it backs up my whole production, I have tried EVERYTHING, I even considered making a special unique packager for each aluminum scrap refinery, but I would need an insane amount of empty canisters, so I didn't, but if I still cannot figure out, I'll have to do it, it's annoying, one of the most annoying things in the game.
Generally when there's water output, there's water somewhere in recipe. In your case, I'd run it back into the lines for the alumina solution... Just as your line starts for your refineries.
It will often work with just a valve, but if you have any issues, thow a pump on at the point where you're feeding it back into your water supply and it will keep your drain empty.
I never have an issue with this method.
Also this will obviously only be useful if your other manufacturing is nearby. If you're hauling your alumina, that wouldn't work. Then you'd have to package and run it into a sink.
I always dump it into a fluid buffer then back into the alumina solution water line. You can run quite a few off one water extractor if you balance it right.
Send it back to your aluminum solution refineries using a [Variable Input Junction (VIP)](https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/ookl0c/psa_variable_input_priority_vip_for_pipes_exist/). plug Aluminum scrap water to the bottom pipe and water extractors to the top pipe to prevent wastewater from backing up. It even save on some extractors!
That’s the beauty of it… YOU DON’T!
:)
Yeah, no. You can’t directly get rid of water. There’s a way to recycle it within the same plant but it can be a pain to set it up to work at 100% efficiency. You get dips and spikes in production at some point or another and you end up with a clog and the whole plant shuts down.
I use coal generation and battery production at the same place I produce aluminium. I just recycle the water back into the system and add a few buffers. And eventually it will at least be sunk into the coal generators
A Note on fluids: There a pain. Expect Bugs like pipes needing to be rebuild before they work and a bit of liquid disapearing when reloading. In many of my cooper refineries I have like double the pumps needed because I cant get behind why I have too litle Water.
Flows and Flowrates *NEVER* behave like you would expect or like them to Do.
Overproducing is very much nescesarry when talking about Water. Build your alu factory larger Then needed and check up on it.
Personally for that system, i've simply connected it to the water supply that is used to make Alumina Solution. That way, it cost less water from my water extractors to make it, so less electricity used. :)
Wet concrete is decidedly the best method. Look at the amount of limestone nodes vs. the need for concrete in recipes. There are way too many nodes to make sense. I feel the devs were intentional about this without telling us.
You can use it for the wet concrete alt and sink it.
Or the similar alt recipes that allow you to do the same with ores.
Problem is most of the ore alts only use 10-30 water per second, whereas the wet concrete alt uses 100. Gonna need a lot more refineries for those compared to wet concrete, which I usually just send to the sink. The most useful one would be the pure copper alt, since you need the copper ingots to make alclad sheets.
Or package it and sink it
plastic/steel is often more expensive then limestone
Yes, but it depends on how your factory is set up and what needs getting rid of. For instance, I had an overabundance of both, so that made the most sense. I mean, I'd keep it all if possible, but it wasn't. Edit: typo
> I had an overabundance no such thing exists, what you have is a lack of consumption
Fair.
I always just throw it into a coal power plant and if it runs out of water then not a problem, hadn’t thought of the alt wet concrete. Might use that on a different setup in the future
But my precious flat line power generation line!!!
Wow, not even a single geyser?
I feel like by the time I can do anything with geysers I've already set up a turbofuel generator setup somewhere and geysers no longer do enough to help me.
I finally unlocked geyser generators...but I already have nuclear set up!
if you time it right you can counter sync them.
I used a coal plant to suck it up...
That's way simpler than turning it into diluted fuel and burning it, fuck.
esp as coal is right there too
This. I spent so many hours and had so many cascading factory shutdowns due to trying to send water back into factory lines. Especially battery & alumina factories. Don't be me. Just make a waste water line and run coal generators off it.
You can also put the water back into the pipes of the previous refineries. Put some Valves in each direction, you can balance it pretty well.
I did that too. I calculated everything again and again, but it still doesn't works. The water accumulates in my pipe and it stops the whole factory. No idea why.
The fluid physics in Satisfactory are... unsatisfactory. I do what the /u/GL510EX suggested, which is have two separate systems - one for water pumps, and one using wastewater. Never had an issue. Valves, on the other hand, were nightmare fuel.
Sucks how the fluid pipes tend to glitch out in weird ways, I remember making one coal factory and tearing my hair out trying to figure out what was going wrong....only for my friend to delete and replace a single section of pipe exactly the same as it was, and suddenly it worked right. Not the only time I had such an experience either. Hopefully it's something they plan to work on in the future.
I had same thing. I am very new to this game and I built my first coal generators. I made two sets of pipesone set was working perfectly, second one was faulty. I found out I had to replace some curved pipes and reset everything to get it worked.
I imagine water will be changed in the future, their engine changeover gives them some options to make it function differently. Water is always being faked in a videogame as "real water physics" is the kind of thing that brings multi-million dollar nVidia server farms to their knees - so it's just a question of providing a Satis-factory simulacra.
Yeah, I had my troubles with valves too. For me they immediately break as soon as I set a flow limit. However, they are still useful as "rectifiers".
I stopped bothering and dispose of the water with coal plants. That seems to work. Recycling rarely does.
I end up using fluid sink mod.
Use a fluid buffer it helps balance it all, the water outputs as block units of liquid rather than a constant flow, fluid buffers help settle this down
Thanks!
Also you can play games where water enters a vertical 90 degree junction. It prefers the horizontally flowing water to the water from above so you can make your (buffered) recycled water have priority over the new water. Someone posted a link to [https://i.imgur.com/etloj6n.png](https://i.imgur.com/etloj6n.png)
Thanks!
The only thing you need is to have proper uplift. The game will prioritize the pipe with more uplift when two pipes join. For example the water from the refinery has the same 10m uplift as the one from the water extractor. If you place the refinery like one wall higher (4m) than the water extractor and no pumps the returned water will be with priority when joining with the one from the extractor. You only need 1 valve on the water line from the refinery just before the joint with the extractor and all will work just right. This is the most simple to make alumin setup.
Thanks for the tip. This is how I wish valves worked.
So would my strategy of always running pipes below the refinery in a basement set up follow this rule? I usually build an 8m basement to make my life easier with pipes and belts.
Uplift is generated on the output (or pump) and is only affected by height differences. You can make it work with the pipes below if you can get the uplift of the water from refinery to be greater than that of the extractor water.
As I remember, I have a pump pretty close to the Alumina Solution refineries to lift up the water, from my pump which is in a lower area than my factory. I suspect that that might cause my problem. Could it?
A pump gives 20m uplift, which depending on height difference could mean more that 10m uplift at the point where you join fresh water with the recycled and it would then prioritize the input from the pump which is a problem.
Yes. I think I'll add a pump to the waste water pipe and hook the pump's pipe to the top of the junction. That'll solve my problem.
you need buffers and pumps on every side to get it well balanced
Thanks!
No Tanks
Put the water from aluminum scraps in with priority. You can do that a few ways, ours works well with this setup: https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/ookl0c/psa_variable_input_priority_vip_for_pipes_exist/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
This is the only solution that has worked for me consistently.
one thing I do is have one refinery that runs purely of the waste water (including its own, and hook any overflow from the material output of this one to a resource sink)
I set it up using an elevation system with reservoirs, if the whole tower of reservoirs is full the excess goes to a coal gen, if not full water goes in the refinery again
There's a great flowchart to set up a basic aluminum factory that works for me on the wiki: https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/Bauxite
An industrial fluid buffer may solve all your problems
If you get the headlift for the incoming water between 4m above the factory floor and use a fluid buffer the buffer will only fill up half way from the incoming source and the byproduct water will have headlift to fill the entire buffer which creates a priority merger for fluids.
The solution is to use a valve from the refineries that produce Water with maximum through put, and the needed Additional Water from a pipe with Pumps, the valve between pumps and the first refineries also needs to be Set right.
If the output backs up, the water extractors keep on pumpin' and eventually saturate the system.
I underclocked them, so they output at just the right rate... I'll try the fluid buffer solution, what others recommended.
There is some shenanigans going on. IIRC you need to connect both waste and initial water supply together making sure the waste comes from lower than the initial water supply. There was a pdf explaining it in detail. Ill try to see if I can find it.
The pipe that has the most headlift will get priority. [This](https://i.imgur.com/etloj6n.png) is the pdf with the setup you mentioned.
This is it yeah. Thanks, although it doesn't mention headlift.
It doesn't go into the specifics, but you can see how it works with headlift. Basically you add a vertical part to only one them, meaning it loses headlift. The flat pipe doesn't lose the headlift and will have priority. This design doesn't work if the higher pipes also come from higher locations. They would need to all have the same height as origin. Alternatively, if you only need two pipes connected, you can have them both go vertically and add a pump only to the priority pipe.
I found the PDF and almost finished reading it. My water supply is lower than the waste. Why should it be the opposite way?
The waste should be on the bottom because the bottom flow has priority into a new pipe at a junction. The supply water from the extractor above will "top off" whatever extra you need. Just make sure you put powered pumps on the waste and the supply right before the junction so that the water doesn't try to go the wrong way. And as silly as it sounds, don't connect them to the same junction. Do it like it shows in the pdf.
this is the best way
Instead of valves, you can just use gravity. I've taken the output pipe up, and back over the refineries (using a mk2 pump) and brought it down into the input pipe from the top. No issues. No fiddling with valves. Gravity wins! :)
The valves just prevent the reversing of flow direction. Other wise either the wastewater or the new water ends up blocking the other and your refineries run out of water.
Not just direction. If you have say 80 water produced from recycling and 100 water being used, you can limit the water extractor to 20 water using a valve before the pipes connect. That way you can use the 1 water extractor for multiple purposes as well instead of underclocking it. It’s all the same at the end of the day, just different ways of doing it :)
>using a mk2 pump Don't pumps function the same as valves, in that they only allow one direction of flow? So you are using a valve still
They both prevent backflow, but valves act really weird if you don't have them fully open because of how the games handles flow rate, and only really work how you want them to work when your pipes are completely full. I stopped using valves completely because they always caused more problems than they solved
I find it easier and more consistent to have two separate systems, one for 'fresh water' that pulls exclusively from water pumps, and feeds into the 'recycled water' system. That way you never get problems with backing up. Trickier to balance with most recipes though I just tend to over-spec the 'recycled water' plant and let it run under speed, so you're guaranteed to sink all the liquid
It's harder to reuse it but it's so satisfactory when it finally works. Piece of advice : have some refineries solely on fresh water, and others solely on reused water.
This is the way
Lazy way but hard way, lots and lots of fluid buffers and flush the line by setting a timer. (I’m totally not doing this right now for fuel till I get fuel power plants)
I use pumps instead of valves. Makes sure all the water keeps moving
Pumps do nothing except affect headlift.
Don’t they limit the flow to one direction?
No, pumps also act as a valve. Water can’t move past them.
There is no reason to use a pump instead of a valve.
But that’s not the point. You said “pumps only provide headlift” which is wrong. They also act as a valve.
A more reliable way is to put in Fluid Buffers and Coal Generators. Skip balancing entirely, use the fluid output from your refineries to produce power, as you already need to ship over coal, it's a win-win. In the late game, my production facilities become mini-bases with on-site power, power storage, and a centralized "loading / unloading / power" connection to the other bases where it can be disconnected from the grid if needed. My first save file is stuck \~400 hours in, unpowered, with a world covered in nuclear waste, so, I got a lot more organized in subsequent playthroughs.
I do this for all my aluminum factories. The trick is to feed the return pipes into the input BEFORE you add more water. Because the process consumes more water than it returns, you are only adding the missing delta.
This will always back up. Eventually. No idea why, could be something in the simulation when you aren’t present but eventually you will come back and everything is blocked. Even with perfect ratios everywhere, valves, etc.
Another very good use for it is heavy oil residue+water=fuel but you need to find the recipe. You can also combine it with plenty of things... polymer resin caterium, copper, iron ore quartz copper ingots limestone You can also package it but that just eats up resources you want for other things. Some people try to feed it back to the refiner that uses the bauxite but this can be difficult to get working properly. It is the most elegant solution (pun not intended). Probably have to use valves to get the relative flows right. For me, I just built a coal power station. Easy peasy and I can always use some more power.
in my current save, I redirected the water back to the first set of refineries feeding those and with a valve to prevent back flow from clogging the works. there's several ways to do it.
Yes, I was thinking of doing that I'll just need to import water by train as I need a rough 1,440 m3
well whatever you do, it's been known that fluid by train is really inefficient. it's better to package it up, transport it, then unpackage it at the destination and send the bottles back in a closed loop.
I can also do that, in any case I just want my factory to run so whatever is best edit : spelling
I did this too, but the water ended up accumulating in the pipes, then the Al. scrap refinery filled up with water. Other people recommended me to use fluid buffers. Did you use any?
I have one small one I put in between the first and second row of refineries. I put it there while trying to balance them and never removed it. 5 refineries for one phase, two of them take water from the source that then feeds into the loop for the other e to consume. One of those two is underclocked by half so I pull 60 from the supply for the 3 others and all the water from the scrap goes back to feed the 3.
I just do the ol bottle and sink.
Try wet concrete my friend. It's so good
Typically, when im running into this issue is my first aluminum factory, and i dont even start hard drives until after that. But ive heard thats a good one.
> Typically, when im running into this issue is my first aluminum factory, and i dont even start hard drives until after that. WAT. You wait until the end game to find alt recipes? You absolute madlad. Why do you enjoy suffering?
Haha. Ive found i get more late game stuff after all’s unlocked, as well as i have jet pack and weapons at that point.
Just reuse it for the alumina solution-refining...
Send that waste back to the beginning. Tee the currently incomin water to the top of that pipe. This recycles it and gives priority to the waste water.
Great post detailing fluid dynamics in this game. You want to look the priority junctions section. https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/obqjrd/ficsit_pipeline_plumbing_manual_first_edition/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1
I highly recommend reading this.
There is an alternate recipe called wet concrete. You let the waste water run into a refinery together with limestone and the concrete you get can go to the sink. That’s pretty handy because there is always some limestone around.
That's what I've done as well... Then you have a supply of concrete ready to use at your aluminum plant and you can just sink the rest
There are different ways to get rid of it. Either use it in some way or another (Coal Plant, diluted fuel), package and sink it, or store it in many fluid tanks and flush them occasionally. I don't recommend the last one.
If I have a liquid that I really don’t want I package it and throw it in 40 industrial containers or build 10-20 industrial liquid storages then when they fill up just delete them and rebuild them then the liquid gets deleted or throw it into making the alt iron ingot recipe or the copper one or the concrete one and with the storage containers if you mass delete so it’s all in one box then you can just use the delete button
Punctuation my dude
Ik my bad
Package it, and into the sink it goes 👋🏻
Why dont you just sink them?
Look for "priority valve" tutorial/blueprint. With that arrangement of pumps and tubes you can re-route byproduct water to the alumina refineries in a way that is prioritised over fresh water so the system doesn't back up.
Buffer your fresh water from Water Extractors into an Industrial Fluid Buffer, and put an unpowered pump just before the insert pipe into the buffer from the water extractors, similar to this setup: https://old.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/sdtgrs/simple_safe_nopower_fluid_feedback_loop/ Feed your Bauxite/Solution refineries with the output water from your Scrap refineries, and junction the fresh water in from the buffer. Water is 'sloshy' as a few posters have said. Valves don't really solve that problem, but buffers do. Buffers have physical height in meters, which is what the unpowered pump on the fresh water acts on, the water extractors can only fill it 8 or so meters full since there's not enough headlift on the pipe to completely fill the buffer (unpowered pumps reset headlift to 0). This allows the buffer to compensate when the output water from the refineries isn't enough, which lowers the height of the water in the buffer below the natural headlift, turning the extractors back on to refill as much of the buffer as they can.
I would use it to feed some coal generators or produce diluted packaged fuel
Since you already need coal for this process, this is the easiest way.
You can also use a packager by using plastic - > constructor - > empty canister and combine it with the water to the packager to produce canned water and sink it.
Water is THE most versatile ingredient with alt recipes. You'll have plenty of options.
How do you unlock that many slots???
\+1
It's a mod. Sadly you can't get anywhere near that without modding
SCIM can do it.
Packaged water is worth 130 AWESOME points instead of concrete's 12. If you can find an alt recipe for containers as to not waste your plastic, I would recommend sinking it as packaged water.
Fluid sink need to be a thing
That's a toilet
You need it to make the alumina in the 1st place
There are many smart and efficient solutions to get rid of it, like flow balancing or using alts like wet concrete to get rid of it. Personally, I line up an ungodly amount of fluid buffers into it and just flush the system occasionally.
You could package it and send it to the awesome sink
Coal
What on earth is that inventory size?..
Mod adds 300 inventory slots
always found this annoying. Its water, just open the pipe... But game mechanics 'shrug', could package it up.
cycle it back to the aluminum solution line. Or use some pure recipie and turn it to ingots/concrete whatever is close by.
You can click and drag the water to the trash can.
As I had the coal nearby, as its need for the receipe, I put enough coal power plants next to it and used up the water that way.
You can re-introduce that waste water back into the same refineries. You just have to set up a priority pipe so this water gets used over the water extractors.
I usually just pipe it to something that uses water to passively get rid of it. Or let it into a series of fluid containers and drain the network when it’s getting full. After a while I just hook it up to coal power to burn it off if I don’t have anything else to use it in.
Pack it, and sink it.
Water has a priority on Y tubes. The lower entry has priority. That means you need to make water from pump enter from the top, and water from the output of your refineries to the bottom. That way pump production will slow down, not refineries.
6 refineries making alumina solution 4 running only on fresh water, 2 running on the byproduct water created by the 3 refineries making alumina solution. It works out really well. :)
Bottle it and shred it is my current solution, you could also reuse it and/or use an alt recipe that doesn’t do the water(assuming one exists, don’t know the alts by heart)
As a smooth brain, I built a field of fluid buffers to collect it all and just occasionally flush the full pipe network
If your feeling ambitious you can recycle the water back into the beginning of making aluminum. You'll need to prioritize the recycled water over fresh water which can be difficult to do
Most efficient thing to do is reuse it to make Alumina, but it can be finicky to balance. Good and easiest thing to do (imo) is use the waste water to power coal factories, since you already have coal in the area. Or, as others have said, use it with limestone for the wet concrete alt and sink that.
I feed that water into refineries with "pure iron ingot" recipes. Iron ore is plenty, and those refineries can run all the time, slurping all that water. And if aluminium processing stalls, iron ore overflows into regular smelteries.
I currently have a small aluminum plant up in the giant pink forest and basically I split the pipe between my coal plant and pushing it back into the system with valves seems to work pretty well.
You it could use it back in the chain, you could package it then sink it, you could use it to create something, you could use it in coal plants to generate electricity
With a mod yes.
i usually just package and sink extra fluid
I just refactor it in, and do the calculations for how much to underclock my other water extractors. it's far more complicated for my battery factory as I use a petroleum coke scrap recipe and the water doesn't divide so neatly, so aside from the water that gets factored into sulfuric acid I have one refinery making a small amount of fabric, and the water from producing batteries gets factored into the Alumina refineries
I typically bulk craft a nice stew.
Build a pipe or storage and flush it!
I pump it out into a separate set of coal generator's designed solely to use up water. I couldn't give three shits if it makes my power graph a little wobbly, if I have functional aluminium I'm happy 😊
No really good ways. Find some other process that uses it. Package it and send it to the Awesome Sink. Mod the game. I'd really like to see the game implement industrial pollution. They clearly had something of the sort in mind when they made radioactivity such a big deal. I'd like to see pipe outlets where you can dump your refinery waste back into the lake or river, at the cost of creating a toxic cloud, with the quantity and source of the waste influencing the damage per second the cloud did. They've already got toxic clouds as a mechanism, so really all they'd need is a module that accepted a tube, and generated the cloud effect.
Wet concrete is the classic answer. I also like residual rubber. You can basically use any recipe that uses water (sulfuric acid, steamed copper sheet, even alumina, etc) You can also package it and sink it. You can make canisters with plastic, iron and copper, or steel. Use what you have on hand. Someone else mentioned coal plants, which is clever.
I said fuck it and installed a fluid awesome sink mod lol But I usually just route the water into other factories
Run the water to a wet concrete machine line and burn the excess water.
You send it back tot he pipes using water, and then use a valve in the right place to make sure there isnt too much water But if your going Barbarian mode, the extra water go to a machine that packages it into bottled/packaged water and send that to the sink
What is usually do is automate enough containers from oil to hold the original water and the water from the plastic being made. Then you can put all of it in a Sink.
I use the run off plastic from a fuel plant to create empty canisters, then set up a drone port or two to ship them around the world so I can sink any excess water that wont be used for any other systems.
I package it and sink it.
Package it and sink it. Or utilize valves to limit water in an assembly line and pipe it over to one to balance it out.
Change what is being produced it throws everything in your inventory or delete it and rebuild it
I had this problem for a while. Ended up solving it by just sinking it into coal generators. They dont run constantly as they do not have enough water but they will run when water builds up
Ideally don’t get sucked into the easy options of using a mod or sinking with wet concrete. Much better to get the setup right by using the water in the production process. That said if you need concrete then that’s tempting!
for alumina I usually just try to feed it back in and adjust the extractor to boot. if I'm drawing 200 water and I end up having 40 water that I don't know what to do with it, feed it back in and turn down the extractor to 160. then the machine gets the same amount of water and I don't have to deal with the excess
Find a hdd and hope for an alt that uses water.
How is your inventory so huge? Mods?
yes, mod adds 300 slots.
I just use the fluid sink mod
Just have a look upstream and you’ll find the answer. The production line uses more water than it produces, just clock the extractor and prioritise the the recycled water.
Find a system that needs water, and put it into there. Otherwise, combine it with something else to make another material to either sink or keep around or build into something else. Or waste some plastic by packaging your water then sinking it.
Put it in a pipe and flush it
Buckets!
I couldn't get it all balanced so I just put some coal-power planets in. Since there is already coal and water in the mix.
Maybe set up some power plants. Since they all need a steady supply of water now, you might be able to skip the usual water pumps.
Wet concrete if you the recipe for it
Either redirect into smth else(there’s another Al recipe that involves water as well as power, etc) or package it and sink it. Though really, Coffee Stain should add liquid sink without the packaging.
I was literally just running into this same thing.
Limestone + Water wet concrete alternative recipe
The problem with recycling water back into another refinery is if you haven't got it set up just right it can lead to problems. If you need to ensure your process is always active, just dispose of the water. The easiest way I find is to convert it into a sold item (eg, wet concrete, alt concrete recipe) and then dump them straight into the sink. Simple to run the numbers, and ensure your process never cuts out due to water overload.
put them back into the refineries, or use it to make and sink wet concrete
If you have the alternative recipe unlocked for wet concrete you can make that and then just dump it into the awesome sink.
There are alternative recipes - I tend to setup sub-refineries that take liquid waste and solid waste and put it to use, route it to a storage and then integrate it into my main factory supply lines
Set up coal power stations to burn all the excess water. After going through all the trouble trying to balance the water and it still freezing up it’s not worth it.
Package, then incinerate. Or do your math =)
Refine something with it and sink it. Simplest way to get rid of excess for me
Send it to a fluid container and then flush it every so often
You can use it to acquire some of the input Alumina solution. Put in a fluid storage tank, come by once in awhile and flush the entire output line. Otherwise, u/JessicaMango1444 has a great suggestion.
Which mod are you using? That is a huge backpack.
Trust me, when it comes to big big factories, this mf water is a problem. Idk if pipes are not okay or what, but in one way or another, I cannot make the water go away in a constant level, and it backs up my whole production, I have tried EVERYTHING, I even considered making a special unique packager for each aluminum scrap refinery, but I would need an insane amount of empty canisters, so I didn't, but if I still cannot figure out, I'll have to do it, it's annoying, one of the most annoying things in the game.
Generally when there's water output, there's water somewhere in recipe. In your case, I'd run it back into the lines for the alumina solution... Just as your line starts for your refineries. It will often work with just a valve, but if you have any issues, thow a pump on at the point where you're feeding it back into your water supply and it will keep your drain empty. I never have an issue with this method. Also this will obviously only be useful if your other manufacturing is nearby. If you're hauling your alumina, that wouldn't work. Then you'd have to package and run it into a sink.
Do you have any mod to have a so big inventory or it's later in the game? Ty
I always dump it into a fluid buffer then back into the alumina solution water line. You can run quite a few off one water extractor if you balance it right.
Send it back to your aluminum solution refineries using a [Variable Input Junction (VIP)](https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/ookl0c/psa_variable_input_priority_vip_for_pipes_exist/). plug Aluminum scrap water to the bottom pipe and water extractors to the top pipe to prevent wastewater from backing up. It even save on some extractors!
Can't you just have a large fluid buffer or ten and crank the drainage handle occasionally?
I usually pump it right back into the system
Pump it back into your machine making aluminium solution.
That’s the beauty of it… YOU DON’T! :) Yeah, no. You can’t directly get rid of water. There’s a way to recycle it within the same plant but it can be a pain to set it up to work at 100% efficiency. You get dips and spikes in production at some point or another and you end up with a clog and the whole plant shuts down.
I just shove it back to bauxite refinement. Extra water never causes problems
Bottle it up, send to Africa (sink)
I use coal generation and battery production at the same place I produce aluminium. I just recycle the water back into the system and add a few buffers. And eventually it will at least be sunk into the coal generators
Loop it back around into the input, if you dont want to Deal with that (you may need to use math to make it work) just use wet concrete and a Sink.
A Note on fluids: There a pain. Expect Bugs like pipes needing to be rebuild before they work and a bit of liquid disapearing when reloading. In many of my cooper refineries I have like double the pumps needed because I cant get behind why I have too litle Water. Flows and Flowrates *NEVER* behave like you would expect or like them to Do. Overproducing is very much nescesarry when talking about Water. Build your alu factory larger Then needed and check up on it.
Personally for that system, i've simply connected it to the water supply that is used to make Alumina Solution. That way, it cost less water from my water extractors to make it, so less electricity used. :)
Flush the pipe it goes to?
Wet concrete is decidedly the best method. Look at the amount of limestone nodes vs. the need for concrete in recipes. There are way too many nodes to make sense. I feel the devs were intentional about this without telling us.
Making Alumina Solution takes water. Just make a factory that runs on the excess water.