In my cobalt dredging design I want to craft the required sulfuric acid on the dredging platform with importing sulfur and lead plates and locally source the water needed (there is a lot of it around). Alas, the water pump can not be placed on nor near the dredging platform, thus rendering that ~spaghetti~ design inoperable.

Am I mistaken? / Is it an error of some sort? / Is it a feature?

It is intentional that you can’t place the offshore pump on the platform, because I couldn’t see any viable designs that actually utilise cobalt ore processing on the platform, so by preventing offshore pumps I discourage going down rabbit holes that will ultimately not be viable anyway. (The other reason is to discourage steam power, to lead the player towards battery power instead, which is more compact anyway)

However, if you still want to try cobalt ore processing on the platform, you have a few options:
- you can use the method that doesn’t actually consume water, so after seeding an initial amount of water, it won’t require any more
- you can ship in water using tanker ships
- you can place concrete on the platform, and then place the offshore pump on that. This exploit will eventually be fixed but I haven’t gotten around to it yet :) even after fixing it, it won’t break existing builds

I’d be interested in seeing some screenshots of anything you come up with!

Thank you for your quick response. Despite it being not the answer that I wanted (R.I.P. design), it is the one that I needed. As for the options;

1) I am unaware of other methods of fabricating sulfuric acid (I'm not using many other mods)
2) Porting in water would defeat the point on not porting in sulfuric acid (tanker or barreled)
3) I am adverse to using an exploit, especially one that is planned to be patched. I wouldn't be able to create new instances of the design once it is fixed.

Thus I shall forgo the local fabrication of sulfuric acid and port it in by barrel. I am adamant about not using tanker ships as that adds more traffic to the dredger. Since the cargo ship is needed then I shall use it to port needed materials both ways.

As for the defunct design; https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3059415809
Not shown is the dock nor combinator control behavior that I had yet to work on. Obviously I have not tested this design so I am unaware of any errors it may have.

1) ah yes sorry I misunderstood what you were doing. I thought you were trying to turn cobalt ore into cobalt concentrate on the platform, which whilst it requires water, can be done without actually consuming any.

You are merely trying to make sulfur on the platform, which I have no particular objections to, but is not very commonly tried due to space constraints. You’ve done an impressive job of fitting everything in! I’m afraid that due to the aforementioned reasons of wanting to discourage steam and cobalt concentrate production on the platform, I won’t be allowing offshore pumps.

you can also put offshore pumps and all the other blacklisted stuff down if you concrete the dredging platform first

I found this thread when I was about to file a bug about it, so maybe document the decision in the FAQ or add some kind of hint somewhere in-game that it's intended? (Is there one I missed?)

(With respect, I would like to add that I found this jarring because there's no way to justify it in-game or to make it make sense at all: the water is right there, you can pump the same water at different locations. But... just no? So sure it might be dumb or my bad design, but I can do plenty of other dumb stuff in Factorio. :grin:)

While I understand the desire to prevent users from going down rabbit holes, I think you should leave the option to use steam up to the user. I tank in my sulfer and I added a fluid boiler mod so I could tank in petroleum gas and make steam on site. Please DON'T patch out the concrete trick. I think it's a nice mix of your desire and player freedom. If you must, then please add a more expensive version of the offshore pump called the "deep sea pump & desalination" that can be placed on the platform and is unlocked with the dredge. As a balancing mechanic you could make it larger, maybe 2x2 or 2x3, and make it have a lower water output and requires power. This would make it harder to use, but leave the option for players that want to use steam.