Are there any tricks to combine "dots" in mixed pipes?

[Phlogiston]

Trying to fix the intake of a liquid sorter... problem is that "small mixed dots" clog up even if the pipe is far from full (volume-wise).

I've been trying to "compress" the (mixed) content of a pipe but can't find a combination of pipe segments that gives "dots" a decent chance to combine (optimally until they are full size) and then releases them . All I managed to do with piping through inputs / outputs of bridges so far is make a few "full dots" go in circles endlessly while the small dots spill out on the other end of the contraption anyway. Nothing (short of dumping it all out on top of a pump again) seems to work...

Anyone found a solution for this?

[blash365]

I am not sure whether this is what you are describing already, but a pipe bridge does currently combine two following liquids dots of the same type to a combined liquid dot of the aggregated value. (not sure what happens when two maximum value dots follow each other)

I am not sure whether this is intended behaviour or a glitch. So it might be removed in the future. It does also not help too much when the dots alternate.

 

Alternatively you can add some kind of loop to your pipe, which returns half of your output back to the beginning of your pipe, resulting in dots of double value, with half the frequency.

You can see the trick in this video shortly after the linked timestamp.

 

[Saturnus]

The most obvious solution would be to build an old fashioned gravity sorter like this.

That's water, polluted water, petroleum and crude oil. Not sure but I think naphtha would wreck havoc with such a system so it might be advisable to sort that out with a mechanical filter first.

Just build pumps in the respective areas and have hydro sensors to pump out full packets when it reaches a certain level.

If you want absolute guarantee you only get full packets and nothing else then use shut off valves to the sensors instead and have the pumps as slaves.

[Phlogiston]

edit: @blash365

Yes the main problem are alternating liquids, so bridges alone don't help (much). Also tried small loops already, but since liquid dots can be arbitrarily small, that's not really a solution that scales well. And interlocking loops with "spillover release" somehow manage to produce an output that's just as messy as the input, even if it looks promising in between (maybe the big bubbles somehow get trapped and what comes out is actually just exactly what goes in after the interlocking loops are full). 

So that means sadly I didn't miss a really small & easy solution (like the "bridge input for spillover / releasing" or the "bridge output for priority / blocking")?

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, blash365 said:

Alternatively you can add some kind of loop to your pipe, which returns half of your output back to the beginning of your pipe, resulting in dots of double value, with half the frequency.

Doesn't work with mixed fluids (or gases).

Btw, the gravity sorter I posted above can have several vents at the top as long as you take the precaution to have the ability to pump out liquids of the individual type fast enough. 

[HabdomeRaider]

Can you use the liquid filter to separate the different fluids and then combine them?

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, HabdomeRaider said:

Can you use the liquid filter to separate the different fluids and then combine them?

I think that's the whole crux of the problem. A liquid filter uses the same power to sort 1mg or 10kg so really ineffective way to do it.

Mechanical filters with packet stackers or the gravity filter above solves that issue.  

[Phlogiston]

Thanks, I'll keep those alternatives in mind! I'm not really looking for a practical workaround at the moment / just yet. Mostly just stuck trying to "solve that specific pipe puzzle" because those pipes were looking at me funny and "there has to be a way to get the efficiency of that stupid filter closer to 100% dammit!".

 

So, semi-OT:

Yes, The bottleneck in my case is not the throughput in mass (or the power consumption)... just the small size of dots in the input  and to a lesser degree building space / time. The naphtha filter would have the same bottleneck. And there might be a lot of naphtha in that mess, because some of that mess was part of my base at some point.

( I'd like to be able to place and move pumps all across the map more easily, so I'd rather avoid a decentralized structure with tickers or sensors for the pumps... if blueprints were implemented and I could just place each pumping station with a click, that would be nice, but since there are no blueprints, I'd rather just plop down a pump with a valve, run the pipe to the closest other pipe and let a centralized structure in a safe place sort out the mess inbound from a dozen pumps & valves all across the map.

In case you're wondering... I discovered a tiny oil pocket with a million tons of oil stuck in it. And by "discovered" I mean: I don't know where it originally was located, but while I wasn't looking it has consumed all fluids on the map and risen into one huge forest of quivering sky-tentacles with wandering high temperature and pressure bubbles that crush and melt everything. One of those tentacles came knocking on the door of my base ~200 cycles ago. Even though 12 dupes were trying to repair the damage and mop the tentacle to death, it broke through the walls, ate all my plastic and phosphorite and disappeared back into the depths. Now it has settled in the bottom half of the whole map and I'm trying to drain it evenly so as not to wake it. )

[Saturnus]

@PhlogistonNot to worry. I tested it. Naphtha forms a layer between crude oil and petroleum so just add another step on the gravity sorter and you're done. Easy and elegant solution.

[FoxOnTheNet]

The gravity sorter looks very elegant but I hit the same question as for many of the other machinations.

How do you prime it, how do you maintain it? 

If I've got a random mix of liquids dripping in my basic understanding of the sensors etc. just doesn't give me a way to actually continuously and automatically extract the sorted liquids. Does it rely on larger storage reservoirs and some manual pump activations? I feel like I'm missing something obvious. Does it depend on the liquid tiles somehow that gate each layer?

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

34 minutes ago, FoxOnTheNet said:

How do you prime it, how do you maintain it? 

This gravity sorter can deal with four kind of liquid. The fifth kind of liquid, such as naphtha, may destroy it. So be careful.

The first two steps are the key. You can add some mesh tiles and replace tile with airflow tile to beautify your filter , but it is not necessary.

[Saturnus]

I'm not sure I follow you.

As I said you place pumps in the allotted spaces and use hydro sensors to pump out when a certain level is reached of is reached. You prime it by filling each layer separately in order first so you must have about 3 full tiles already sorted to start with. You fill in crude oil first, then naphtha, then petroleum and so on.

You build the outer shell first. Illustrated here by insulated tiles. You put in all the pumps, wiring, piping sensors and so on from the start.

Then you build the regular tiles as each layer is filled up with it's respective liquid.

Note that the top two tile with the vent and just below must be vacuum. You do this by corner building and deconstructing tiles.

It is extremely important that you hook everything up correctly from the start though as correcting it later will be a nightmare.