Description

Adds a water pumpjack to provide an alternative source of water.

• The water pumpjack becomes available with the "Fluid handling" technology (this technology is part of the base game, this mod doesn't introduce any additional technologies)
• It looks like a normal pumpjack, but it's blue (graphics by BrutusMaximus)
• It can be placed anywhere (on solid ground)
• It pumps 300 water per second (25% of the water output of an offshore pump)
• It requires electricity (300 kW, 1 kW per water unit)
• The recipe is based on the normal pumpjack
• [Space Age] It can only be used on Nauvis and Gleba
• Supported languages:
  • english
  • german
  • chinese (by SpringPizazz)
  • russian (by dyxshooter)
  • spanish (by IvnSrv)

The low pumping speed and the power requirements are a tradeoff for the benefit to extract water anywhere you want. You are supposed to consider if you rather build near a water body, or if you rather train the required water in, or if you rather build some bulky water pumpjacks instead.

Known issues

1. The Fulgoran enemies mod v0.1.2 somehow interferes with how the remnant graphics are defined and loaded into the game. v2.4.1 of the water pumpjack mod will now fallback to the base pumpjack remnant graphics when the Fulgoran enemies mod is used and enabled. This means, that the remnants of a destroyed water pumpjack are not blue when both mods are used. This is not a fix. It is a workaround to at least allow for both mods to be enabled at the same time. UPDATE: v0.1.3 of the Fulgoran enemies mod addresses this issue. The workaround will be removed with the next release.

Balancing

Originally I wanted a water pumpjack, which behaves like an offshore pump, looks like a normal pumpjack, requires electricity and only extracts a fraction of water, compared to the normal offshore pump. Initially I experimented with several numbers for water extration. Since you could place it anywhere, I didn't want it to be overpowered. Also, when I learned that I couldn't implement the electricity requirement (due to limitations of Factorio's 1.1 mod API), I reduced that number even further. So I ended up with 240 water per seconds. It wasn't based on any calculations though. In fact, I eyeballed it. Plus, it felt reasonable for most scenarios. In addition to the missing electricity requirement, I decided to increase the crafting materials instead. I was never really happy with that solution, but there was not really anything I could do about it. Now with the 2.0 release, electricity for offshore pumps (API-wise) is finally possible. So I put it in. At first, I used the normal pumpjack as a guidline as for how much energy it should require, without putting too much thoughts in it.

As the general result of some play-testing (also on larger scales), I often found the water extraction of 240 kind of an odd number and often not so easy to work with. So I slightly increased the water output from 240 to 300. With electricity now being a thing, and also a regulator for balancing, I decided to line up the power demands with the water extraction rate. So I increased it from 90 kW (normal pumpjack) to 300 kW. It also feels fitting to invest 1 kW of power for 1 unit of water. I concider 300 water per second still to be a fraction of what the offshore pump does (within the spirit of the original idea), and 300 seems to be a nicer number than 240, and should make quick calculations easier. It's also the smallest round number possible. As for the crafting requirments, I decided to remove the increased number of ingredients, and go back to the original recipe, which is based on the normal pumpjack, because of electricity.

I'm still open to the idea of increasing the power demands even further. Getting water in the middle of nowhere should come at a price. So maybe this will be changed again in the future. If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know ;)

Language

If your language is not supported yet, I want to encourage you to let me know. It would be awesome if you could provide an already translated version of the locale.cfg file with the following content (otherwise I have to use a translator). Feel free to open a discussion. I will put it in as soon as I can ;)

[mod-name]
water-pumpjack=Water pumpjack
[mod-description]
water-pumpjack=A water pumpjack to extract water anywhere from the ground at a low speed.
[entity-name]
water-pumpjack=Water pumpjack
[entity-description]
water-pumpjack=Pumps water from the ground.