I created a large quarry, flooded with water to take care of lava along the way, and now I want to empty the quarry out to get a large "room" where I can build stuff.
I built a water pump in the center at the top, and I'm now slowly draining the top layers of water into tanks.
When building the tanks, I used a teleport pipe and connected the tanks around this in a star pattern, however, due to the way the pipes are laid out, the two closest tanks are filled now, and the rest are slowly building up.
I gather this has to do with how junctions are in these mods, where items/fluids seem to be equally distributed along the paths from the junction.
My question is this: The full tanks, will they still "get" water? They don't seem to overfill and spill, so my question is really this: The design I picked, which makes some tanks fill faster than others, will this make me lose water units?
I guess this question isn't really important in the context of water, seeing that it is abundant, but I'd still like to know so that I can plan the tanks correctly when/if I get started with lava tanks.
Best Answer
No, they will not fill and overflow, nor will they just lose liquid. When the tank fills, then your pipe will start to back up until the pipe is completely full at which point the pump will stop pumping as it has nowhere to pump to.
This means that your water tank design is perfectly fine. When one tank is full, water will bounce back from the tank and then it will just be forced to go to one of the other three junctions.
In addition, pipes distribute things randomly, not evenly. Liquid pipes seem to work out via the law of averages pretty well though. Just keep it in mind for item pipes however as they rarely work out evenly.
My only suggestion is to raise the teleport pipe up one block so that it is feeding into a normal pipe as the junction. This should lessen the chance that water will feed back through the teleport pipe. I would recommend against using "Can receive: false" on the pump end as I've found that things that get pushed into a teleport pipe without a receiver that isn't the sender just get lost until you hook up a receiver, so you may lose water or whatever liquids you are transporting that way.