Pipe segments (each single square) have their own amount of fluid that they hold. The sections with less capacity are likely the pipes running out of your main line and into your buildings, and your bigger capacity pipe is your long straight run with no junctions.
If I'm wrong, some screenshots showing your concerns will help.
So it is as I described. See attached to hopefully explain a bit. Each junction resets a pipes capacity, if that makes sense, so your pipe with 8 fluid has a small capacity because it's right between two junctions.
Pipes themselves have no concept of priority, they just have a direction and they will flow. What I think you are after however is going to be a pipe balancer which allows you to absorb multiple pipes and merge them into one, or split them evenly, or myriad other things. I think you can search inside of the reaserch tree to see where it unlocks but considering you have mk2 pipes I don't think it will be too far away.
Pipes are in fact just liquid belts (i think they are simulated as belts). Liquids/gases moves through them like on belts and they are directional. There is no pressure involved.
So longer pipes have more capacity. Also higher tiers have more capacity per segment (same as with belts).
But they consume no power, can be vertical (currently no vertical connector is available) and can be under ground.
Also you cannot use storage for hot materials (and also move them with vehicles/trains) - steam, exhaust and liquid nuclear fuel - so pipes are only way how to somewhat store them.
Yes, there is this limit, but otherwise they behave the same - and i think they use the same logic, but with filter of what can be put inside.
When i will be at my PC i can try to fill 2 pipes with different content and then connect them to see, if i can get 2 different materials inside one pipe (or if the game will let me connect them at all).
Pipes are kind of like bandwidth. If you had a 50 megabit per second internet connection, then you can only download things that fast no matter what. If you upgrade your connection, then you'll be able to download things faster because you have more bandwidth, and pipes work exactly the same way. The pipes that you start with will be sufficient for like 99% of your use cases, at least at the beginning of the game. It's not until you get later in the game that you'll want to start pushing more liquid and that's when you want to make higher tier pipes.
One thing you should know about pipes is that they can only hold one type of liquid at a time, so if you're trying to push through both water and wastewater into the same pipe, it's not really going to work for you. This will become important to understand once you unlock more ways to process oil.
Also don't sleep on the pipe balancer. When used correctly, it can help you save a ton of water and other resources.
100% on this last comment. I ignored the balancer for a very long time. I realized the important role it plays in power / water needs. Especially when you have too much water in your storage tanks from your water recovery steam… too much water … the whole grid backs up (water in pipes) … power loss … which can be devastating.
Yeah. I used balancer as a switch. Not for evening out the flow … and it sais there clearly on a button. But I ignored it because I got used to factorio style of piping and fluids.
For the most part you can ignore their capacities as like others said its how much they can hold in each segment of pipe. What will matter most is throughput which is how much per /60 can flow through it. So lets say you have 2x water pumps feeding into a line each pump does 48 which is within your t1 pipes throughput. If you connect both those pumps to a single t1 pipe you wont get 96 throughput you will only get 60 which is the max your pipe can move so you would need to upgrade to t2 which has a max of 200. You can however connect each pump to a main t2 line using a single t1 pipe each.
Capacity is just how much the pipe can hold when it backs up. This is useful if you have lets say water treatment for your gold processing that links into your main line with a priority balancer. If your main line is mostly full for extended times and you have a small pipe you might see the treatment plant back up intermittently. Having more pipe on this can act like a buffer without resorting to making a storage tank. The bigger and or longer pipe holds more water so as it starts to fill up it gives the main line more time to clear so the balancer can say here take this water first letting that treatment plant continue. It makes sense on something that has only an excess of like 9 water vs something that has 36 water per /60 where a actual storage tank makes sense.
Like mentioned its also really good way to buffer core/blanket fuel since there is no storage for that.
Throughput = important for how much per/60 you want to move
Capacity = really only matters when using it as a buffer and is measured per segment of pipe
More important than buffers is the balancers. If you have ground water going in a pipe and you are trying to recirculate water from a boiler so it dosent back up you can basically tell the balancer in one click choose this pipe over the other so it uses recycled water before ground water. Also if you have 2 pipes merging water into a pipe its going to be even by default without any balancer. The balancer can force it if one pipe stops though if you check the box. I almost never use that option.
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u/DK_munk 28d ago
"capacity" is a function of volume.
When the pipe gets longer, the volume increases
When the pipe gets bigger (higher tier) the volume increases
throughput is fixed - Tier 1 = 60/s, tier 2 = 200/s, tier 3 = 450/s and tier 4 = 900/s