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Not much to show off today. Just made a little more progress on this factory. I've decided, for now, that I'm gonna try this sheltered-but-open-air kinda design. Basically, just no walls. We'll see if it's viable for the other big segments of the factory.
Also picked out a color scheme, based on these nearby..... mushrooms? Coral? Whatever they are.
Hey, we're currently building in the same area!
I used an impure oil node to run 10 fuel generators, then today finished using a normal and pure node to run 60/min rubber and 480/min plastic, the residue of which is running another 8 generators (and canned fuel for my jetpack).
This is the first playthrough I've done where I seem to have learned the trick to managing fluids. We'll see if I make it past my usual stopping point (aluminum)...
GL;HF
I've honestly only ever had one problem with fluids, and it was a bug in like Update 5 that I believe has been fixed.
Maybe I just have like a good intuition for fluid dynamics, without knowing it? I look at some of the additional tools the gamr provides for working with fluids, like valves and tanks and think "I can't think of any scenario where those are helpful." I tried using valves once, and they actively made things worse. Tanks I can imagine being useful for storage or buffering, like if you're transporting with vehicles, but I hear about people putting them at the end of all their pipes and it kinda baffles me.
With the Oilworks factory I made last week, I thought I was going to finally be able to see some "bad practices" in action, for myself, but everything worked flawlessly. I have pipes coming into machines from underneath, instead of overhead, t-junctions where the incoming fluid hits the dead end of the junction, instead of continuing straight,, a crossover pipe between two separate lines that allows excess to flow from one to the other, with no directional valve in between...
I've also never actually made it to Aluminium, so maybe that is what's going to se me straight.
I am taking a little extra care in isolating pipelines, with this upcoming factory, I suppose. I only actually need 8 machines to fully process a Pure Crude Oil node, but I'm planning for 9, because the downstream will be split into 3 sections, as the final product will need 3 pipelines to handle the throughput. Figured that would be safer than trying to make a 2-input-to-3-output pipeline joint.
My current approach to fluid management is probably overkill, but I had a lot of rough experiences when starting out that completely killed a playthrough or two in the oil stage, so I'm kind of scarred.
Valves are deceptive with their throughput limitation and are the reason for one of my playthrough cancellations. In my experience, fluid buildings in satisfactory will very rarely get fluid at a constant rate, the rate will surge and drop as fluid "sloshes" around in the pipes. As such, limiting a factory to only get the fluid/min required will usually result in a starved machine (instead of filling up instantly during the surges, it only gets the limited amount- then the rate drops below the amount during the the low flow points). This makes it not the most intuitive experience to use valves where one might think they're most useful (right before a machine).
I instead use valves to ensure fluid doesn't flow backwards in my pipes (I also feed from underground, with a single MK2 pump at the beginning of the pipe and valves on all the outputs), and temporarily if I've got a huge line of refineries that I want to get running at max efficiency before the pipes have finished filling up.
My refineries are set up in rows of 6 (two 3-refinery blueprints that sit next to each other), each with a small buffer in the middle that is directly connected to the underground pipe. The buffer is really only used during initial startup to ensure there is enough oil for the full system, but it's peace of mind that if I ever somehow wind up with a total power grid failure it isn't gonna take half an hour for everything to fill back up.