Pipes are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ broken

[Evil]

So I just made a massive coal mine/power generator, I put all of the coal power-plants on the nearby cliff to make it look nice, so I naturally placed pumps going to power the plants but the only issue is, they don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work, I've been trying for hours, to the point where I'm placing 3 pumps per upward pipe, I currently have 3 pipes going up the cliff, weird thing is they're 100% full just no water getting to the power plants, first 4 are fine the rest barely get any water and stop generating power after a few seconds, this makes no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense.

[Suzaku]

Make sure the pumps are facing the right direction. Make sure they're powered. Make sure they're providing enough headlift. Make sure you're providing enough water for the coal gens. Make sure you're providing enough coal for the coal gens. Make sure the coal gens are connected to power lines so they have something to generate power for. Consider remaking the pipes just in case they actually are bugged. Consider remaking the entire thing at the water's level so headlift isn't even an issue.

[umop-apisdn]

You misspelled "complicated". Head lift is a thing, and pumps don't "stack".
If you're absolutely certain that your setup is "perfect", then post some screenshots. For that matter, post them anyway; if nothing else, it may make it easy to point out the problems in your setup.

The most likely scenario is that you failed to account for some game mechanic, or forgot to hook power lines to your pumps, or that you simply don't understand fluid dynamics. If (like most of us) you're not a civil engineer, these are all easily forgivable.

Instead of spewing profanity and vitriol, you could try looking up some tutorials on YouTube; perhaps searching for "Satisfactory Coal Generator" or "Satisfactory pipes and pumps" would be a good idea.

In the meantime, start here: https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Head_lift

[Dreadlow]

I had trouble getting fuel upwards to generators. Turned out out replacing the pipe floor hole and the pipes in and out of it did the trick.

[Vectorspace]

How many coal plants? How many water extractors? How many separate pipes? How far apart are your pumps? Is anything overclocked?

Eight coal power plants require 360 water, which requires three water extractors (3x120) and two mk1 pipes (one pipe can only transport 300 water), with careful arrangement to ensure that no one pipe segment has to carry more than 300 water

Water extractors provide 10m of headlift, which means they can push water 10 m (or 2.5 walls or 2.5 of the 4m foundations) high, relative to the hight of the pipe output on the extractor

mk1 pumps add an extra 20m of headlift, or 5 walls.

Headlift does stack, but only to a maximum value of 23 for a mk1 pipe according to the wiki. So if you place 3 pumps right next to each other you may now think you have 60+ headlift, but you only have 23. So you must space your pumps out at 20m (five walls) vertical intervals.

If you have two pipe segments connected together (maybe joined with a support or floor/wall hole), and one has water and the other doesn't, rebuild those pipe segments/supports/holes and see if things change. It is easy to not notice that you have misconnected a pipe, we have all done it.

You say that some generators are working, and others are not. Try switching off the working ones and see if that lets water flow to the non working ones.

Each goal generator has an internal water buffer. Machines closer to supply will hog water, taking more than the normal 45 until their buffers are filled up. Best to shut the coal plants off and wait for their buffers and all the pipes to fill with water before you try and run them all at once.

[XistenZ]

The t1 pump "only" pump 20m upwards, and as someone said they don't stack so you need to space them. If you check the pumps they will tell you how far they're pumping. Check each pipe segment and see where the flow stops and see what you did wrong.

The scale in this game is really weird, 20 meters is shorter than you think

[kLuns]

use wall segments to determine the distance between pumps, 1 wall = 4m, so if you place the next pump a little bit under the 5th wall the headlift keeps going.

Putting a fluid buffer right in front of the manifold feed also balances the distribution

Personally I prefer placing coal generators under water so they always have enough.
Im surprised I even need extractors and pipes :)

[adam.jenkins.1993]

There is an issue that occurs when a pump is placed in a vertical position (Pumping straight up) it will need to maintain a certain amount of flow rate (don't know if this is right, but this seemed to be the issue with my latest set up, for clarification they worked fine at first, but would peter out after a while, purging the pipe network would reset the issue). If your pumps are the same, perhaps try to step the pipes a little so that the pumps are horizontal instead.

[Akatosh]

For very high pipeline, there is a system that shows you where to put the second (and next) pumps precisely.

Put a first pump at the bottom of the vertical pipeline, then try to put a second one above and climb slowly and check the pipre carefully, you'll see a blue hologram ring at the exact spot where theeffect of pump number one stops, pump number 2 will even auto-snap on that ring.

I noticed that few people seems to know that.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by Evil:

So I just made a massive coal mine/power generator, I put all of the coal power-plants on the nearby cliff to make it look nice, so I naturally placed pumps going to power the plants but the only issue is, they don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work, I've been trying for hours, to the point where I'm placing 3 pumps per upward pipe, I currently have 3 pipes going up the cliff, weird thing is they're 100% full just no water getting to the power plants, first 4 are fine the rest barely get any water and stop generating power after a few seconds, this makes no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense.

Don't listen to others about headlift, that is never worth doing if you need more than a few pumps to achieve what you want. You should instead package the water and send it up with chained conveyor lifts. The packager only uses 10MW on both ends per packager needed, and each packager can do 120/min. You also won't suffer the bug with the Mk2 pipes. Remember that each container of water is 1 cubic meter of fluid, so you need a mk4 belt to be faster than mk1 pipes and a mk5 belt to be faster than mk2 pipes.

https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Packaged_Water

[Man's Best Friend]

I just tried to rework my coal plant setup to use a single Mk2 feed pipe instead of a pair of Mk1 feeds.
It failed. Literally no change in supply (480/min) or demand (450/min), or total pipe capacity (600/min), just a reconfigure from two pipes to one. In fact, most of the line was successfully swapped from two pipes to one, so the whole group of plants is fed by a single pipe, but that pipe has to split at the end into two banks of 5, instead of a single bank of 10. When split as two banks of 5, the system works flawlessly. A single bank of 10 though, and the plants start randomly starving. Even if the system is allowed to fill completely first, it'll eventually run out of water and stall for no good reason.

[Akatosh]

Originally posted by HTTP Error 418: I'm a teapot:

Even if the system is allowed to fill completely first, it'll eventually run out of water and stall for no good reason.

This is because it works with the rule "1st arrived, 1st served". The 1st plant will take as much water as possible, then the next one, etc and at the end, the flow is insufficient; just like when you put too much splitters in a raw to feed several machines.

A good way to reduce (and even remove) that problem is to put a vavle on each small pipe going from the main pipe to the plant.

Let's say your plant need 50m³ of water, then put a valve calibrated on 50m³ on each small pipe going from the main pipe to the plant. Like this you can be sure the plant wil only take what it needs, not a single drop more.

[Man's Best Friend]

Originally posted by Akatosh:

Originally posted by HTTP Error 418: I'm a teapot:

Even if the system is allowed to fill completely first, it'll eventually run out of water and stall for no good reason.

This is because it works with the rule "1st arrived, 1st served". The 1st plant will take as much water as possible, then the next one, etc and at the end, the flow is insufficient; just like when you put too much splitters in a raw to feed several machines.

A good way to reduce (and even remove) that problem is to put a vavle on each small pipe going from the main pipe to the plant.

Let's say your plant need 50m³ of water, then put a valve calibrated on 50m³ on each small pipe going from the main pipe to the plant. Like this you can be sure the plant wil only take what it needs, not a single drop more.

First come first served doesn't explain anything though. The first two power plants can only consume 45/min each. That's it. That's their limit. They're not overclocked, so they cannot consume any more. The origin supply is 480. So 390 is left to supply the next stage. Again, two plants wanting 45 each so 300 moves onto supply stage 3. Stage 3 is the same and 210 moves onto stage 4. Same thing, 120 moves onto stage 5.

So the fact that I'm running out of water by stage 5 means that pipes aren't working right. Flow isn't continuous, or there are major losses, or something. I shouldn't need a valve to limit the flow to a device that consumes at a fixed rate.

Now, all of that said, while I was typing this out someone pointed me at a manual for pipes.
It literally says that what I'm trying to do is broken, and will hopefully be fixed in the future. So yeah, mystery solved, pipes are at least partially broken.

[Bubbaganoosh]

Originally posted by Dreadlow:

I had trouble getting fuel upwards to generators. Turned out out replacing the pipe floor hole and the pipes in and out of it did the trick.

This is almost always the problem for me. I replace the floor pipe mount and everything is all good. Saving and backing to menu and reloading fixes other pipe problems. These are just part of the game for me now.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by Bubbaganoosh:

Originally posted by Dreadlow:

I had trouble getting fuel upwards to generators. Turned out out replacing the pipe floor hole and the pipes in and out of it did the trick.

This is almost always the problem for me. I replace the floor pipe mount and everything is all good. Saving and backing to menu and reloading fixes other pipe problems. These are just part of the game for me now.

I just clip the pipes through the floor personally. You know, where the builder tool shows a yellow ghost indicating the item is clipping but still legal. Gimme a bit to take some pics.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777358155

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777358169

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777358181

[DrNewcenstein]

Place the coal generators on the same level as the water source. Problem eliminated.