There are dozens of different resources in Satisfactoryall waiting for you to start digging them up. Taking advantage of the alien planet's natural beauty, you can instead transform it into a utopia of efficiency, with machines, assembly lines, trains and more covering the planet's surface.
One type of important resource you'll unlock early on is liquids. These are very different from the usual solids you've dealt with so far, and effectively producing and handling liquids can be a bit confusing at first. Below we take a look at everything you need to know about liquids in general in Satisfactory.
The basics of liquids
Liquids represent a category of resources in Satisficing that work differently than solids. One of the biggest differences between liquids and solids is their mode of transport. While solid objects use conveyor belts, liquids must be transported through pipes, which have a different set of rules that we'll look at below.
You cannot put liquids in your inventory unless you package them first.
Head lift
Due to gravity, liquids cannot travel very far vertically on their own. For example, the Water Extractor has a head lift of 10 meters, which allows it to pump water up to 10 meters in the air before it can travel no further. If you need water to go higher than that, you need to use one Pipeline pump.
Nitrogen gas does not need to be lifted upwards to flow upwards
because it is a gas.
When energized, the pipeline pump can provide a another 20 meters of head liftwhich allows the liquid in the pipe to travel up to 20 meters more vertically. Pipeline pumps can be combined to lift liquid higher than that, but the second pump should be located near the end of the first pump's 20-meter head lift to maximize the vertical distance traveled.
Pipeline pumps do not affect the flow, so they
cannot be used to increase the velocity of a fluid
travels through the tube.
Flow rate
The flow rate of a liquid is is determined by how much liquid is currently in the pipe. As a pipe fills, the pressure inside will increase, and thus the flow of the liquid will increase as it is pushed into the next segment of the pipe. The flow rate will increase or decrease as machinery along the pipeline uses the fluid, or as it travels further down the line.
Fluid will always try
level at its original starting point
. This means that liquid flowing through a U-shaped pipe from the top left will make its way up to the right without the need for a pipeline pump.
The same concept applies when using one Pipeline Junction to divide the flow of a liquid. A Pipeline Junction is essentially both a conveyor splitter and merge, but for liquids. Fluids passing through the Pipeline Junction will be distribute evenly between all connected pagesequalization where possible.
Because of this, you don't have to worry about balancing how much fluid travels through each tube, as it will Always try to distribute all pipes equally. This means that you really only need to focus on giving the right amount of fluid to the machines you use.
Say you have eight coal-fired generators that each require 45 cubic meters of water per minute to operate. In total, you would need to provide 360 cubic meters of water per minute to provide enough for each generator. Since Water Extractors produce 120 cubic meters of water per minute, you need exactly three to provide enough.
But since the flow on a Mk.1 tube is only 300, you can can't have all this water in the same pipeotherwise you will lose some. To fix this, you need to place a water extractor at the other end of the pipe. This makes it so that all 360 cubic meters of water is inside the pipes, but it does not all flow in the same place (the “entrance” to the pipeline).
Valves let you limit the flow rate of a pipeline. Using our previous example, this can be useful if you instead have Mk.2 Pipes, which have a flow of 600 cubic meters, but you only need 360 from that. You can use a valve at the beginning of the pipeline to limit how much water can flow into the next segment, so you can use the remaining water elsewhere.
Ultimately, you don't really need to focus on optimizing a pipe's flow. As long as there is enough fluid in the pipeline to supply each connected machine, the rate at which it flows is immaterial.
