Pipeline Manual

Those three lead to the behaviour you actually see in the field:

• Pipes build up pressure as they fill. The fuller they are, the faster they flow — a pipe on its own contributes about 1.2 m of head lift.
• Fluid flows from high pressure to low pressure, which in practice means from a full pipe towards a less full one.
• Until a pipe’s internal volume is full, it cannot transmit Head Lift from a machine or a pump.

A pipe can only flow at maximum speed if it is full. At 50 % full it flows half as fast. The manual’s own example: a Mk.1 pipe holding 6 of 10 m³ flows at 180 m³/min, not 300.

Rule Full Pipes are happy Pipes

The same rule explains a display that confuses almost everyone. A Water Extractor at 100 % clock speed produces 120 m³/min — but its gauge reads 300 m³/min, and it says its maximum is 600.

• Max Flow Rate is the speed at which pipes can flow and machines can empty themselves.
• Flow Rate is the speed at which the machine is outputting fluid at this instant.
• Pipes try to flow at maximum speed when they are full — and machines do this all the time. Every time a machine produces fluid, it tries to empty itself as fast as the connected pipe allows.
• So the extractor empties at 300 m³/min (the Mk.1 pipe’s limit) until it is empty, then waits. On average it still puts out its 120 m³/min. The 600 is what it could do with a Mk.2 pipe and no valve in the way.

The two are Head Lift and Work Pressure. We will only talk about head lift here, because work pressure is neither easily manipulated nor easily noticed.

• Head lift determines the maximum height fluid can flow to. Everything else about it follows from that one sentence.
• It is transmitted through full pipes and does not decline along them. A 50 m pump still has 50 m at the far end of a full pipe.
• The exception is an unpowered pump: it sets the head lift on its exit side to 0 m. Valves do not block head lift.
• Head lift is only about verticality. Horizontal pipes do not need it to keep their flow rate up.

Take six machines that each need 100 m³/min, on Mk.1 pipe. Feed the row with 300 m³/min from the left and 300 m³/min from the right and it works: the left 300 is exactly enough for the first three taps, the right 300 for the other three. In fact the pipe in the middle is not even needed — the two halves never exchange fluid.

Now make each output 150 m³/min and feed the row from two points inside it. It looks like a bottleneck, and it is not: the junction in the middle reads In: 450 / Out: 450, while no single pipe ever carries more than 300.

Eight inputs of 100 m³/min each are 800 m³/min in total. How many pipes do you need to carry that away? Three — and each of them carries 266.66 m³/min, not 300 / 300 / 200. Pipes try to have equal pressure everywhere, so the work pressure divides evenly over the three outputs: 800 / 3 = 266.666.

A pipeline pump – a Pipeline Pump Mk.1 or a Pipeline Pump Mk.2 – raises head lift, and nothing else. It does not increase flow rate, and it is not needed on pipelines that never move upwards.

• They prevent backflow — pumps are one-directional.
• They generate a blue hologram ring that stops where their head lift ends. The ring can travel at most 100 m, so on a long diagonal pipeline you may not see it stop.
• They have no flow rate limit of their own; Mk.1 and Mk.2 pipes both work with them.
• They snap to the hologram ring of other pumps, which makes spacing a long climb easy.
• Pump head lift does not stack with another pump’s — but it does stack with head lift gained from gravity after the pump.

• Head lift is measured from the centre of the pipe or pump, and always upwards — never downwards. Fluids flow down on their own; they do not need to be pushed.
• The output side always has the striped ring. If you are not sure which way a pump faces, look for the stripes.
• A pump on a flat, horizontal pipe shows about 1.5 m of head lift. That is the default pressure, not a bug.
• Pumps also apply head lift when they sit on the horizontal part of a pipeline — the fluid will rise once the pipe starts going up.

To fill a buffer, the connected pipe has to supply a head lift equal to the buffer’s height: 8 m for the small one, 12 m for the industrial one. A machine’s 10 m will fill a small buffer, but not an industrial one.

What a buffer gives back is proportional to the fluid inside it. A half-full industrial buffer generates 6 m of head lift, a half-full small buffer 4 m.

Buffers that are connected to each other try to balance themselves out. In series that leads to heavy sloshing back and forth; in parallel the odd sloshing is mostly resolved.

• A valve – the Valve – is a pipe attachment that does not allow backflow and makes it possible to limit the pipe’s flow rate.
• Set the limit by moving the slider or typing a number — press Enter to confirm.
• Valves have a slight display bug: the flow rate they show is inaccurate. Used correctly they still do their job.

The catch is the same one as everywhere else in this guide. When the pressure inside the pipe is not big enough — that is, when the pipe is not full — a valve outputs less than the limit it is set to. The manual’s example: 240 m³/min arriving, valve set to 120, and only 60 m³/min coming out. Once the pipe is full and the pressure is back, the valve passes its 120.

That self-balancing is what makes manifolds attractive: build a row of machines, run one feed pipe past them, and the network sorts out the distribution on its own. As easy as that sounds, there are rules that decide whether it works well or badly.

1. 1
   Build the feed pipeline level with or above the machine inputs

   Never below them. Head lift is the same for every pipe in the network, so a feed pipe that sits low has to raise the whole network to the same fluid height before any machine is served.

2. 2
   Prefill the machines

   A machine input can hold 50 m³ of fluid. Make sure it is full — a full internal storage means the machine only ever consumes as much as it actually needs.

3. 3
   If problems remain, close the network into a loop

   A loop injects fluid from both ends and avoids losses. It also resolves the backflow issue from knowledge check 3.

Basic aluminium processing: 120/min Bauxite and 180 m³/min Water go into the first Refinery, which produces 120 m³/min Alumina Solution plus 50/min Silica. The second one turns that Alumina Solution and 60/min Coal into 180/min Aluminum Scrap — and 60 m³/min of Water.

Most pioneers try to feed that water back into the first refinery. Without any additional work the second refinery gets clogged: the junction in front of the first refinery now carries 240 m³/min — 180 fresh plus 60 returned — into an input that only takes 180.

These are not really “circuits” — they are pipe builds — but it is easier to refer to them that way. Both leave the valve limit untouched: they change how steady the flow is, not how much of it there is. If a circuit feels unstable, try adding pumps to its input and output.

The Flow Equalizer reduces flow rate fluctuations. It stores fluid when there is too much and discharges it when there is too little. In the manual’s example a pipe swinging between 30 and 150 m³/min comes out at 65 to 115 m³/min.

The Flow Compensator is an improved Equalizer — you could call it the Equalizer Mk.2. It reduces fluctuations even more, but it is much slower and a bit unstable. The same 30 to 150 m³/min pipe leaves it at roughly 90 m³/min. Even the very dynamic Mk.2 pipes, which often fluctuate wildly, can be tamed by it.

The VIP prioritises the lowest input. The pipe at the very bottom flows freely, while the ones above it are blocked — unless the output allows more flow. Remember to power the pumps. For more priority levels, extend the VIP upwards with more inputs; the minimum is 2 inputs and 1 output.

The VOP prioritises the lowest output. It fills the output pipe at the very bottom first; once that is full, it fills the next one up. It is essentially an expanded Overflow Junction. Valve limits on the branches set the desired flow per pipe. Extend it upwards for more levels; the minimum is 1 input and 2 outputs.

The Overflow Junction diverts any flow that does not fit into the bottom pipe. It only becomes active once the bottom exit backs up — then the extra flow moves over a little “heap”, around 8 m tall. The pump is there to give the fluid enough head lift to cross that rise no matter what; it does not make the overflow active any earlier.

The Water Tower is a Fluid Buffer many metres off the ground. Every pipe connected below it runs without pumps, as long as it stays below the buffer. The valve set to 0 m³/min in the diagram is what keeps the tower full: without it, the tower has to be constantly refilled.

The Two-Way Pump lets fluid move both up and down. It gives the pipe connected to it the head lift to rise, but does not prevent backflow. That makes it a good partner for the Water Tower — and it means fluid can run backwards during a blackout, which is sometimes exactly what you want and sometimes not.