u/JustWantTheOldUi

e: Imgur, since reddit compression seems to really disagree with these screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/1AnW7cj

(As seen from the spaghetti of pipes, this is more of a trivia/discussion prompt than a blueprint)

With everyone dumping their heavy xiranite for gourds, it seems like a waste to not make use of the effluent from purifying unit in the xircon line somehow. What if could route it all back to the line and reduce the xiranite use in that way?

In theory it'd go like that - usually, when we route all the inert effluent to the unit, it's 4/tick for 1/tick regular effluent. If we route it back and reuse it to make xircon, that means crucibles would use that instead of some part of the effleunt they make, thus making less inert and lowering the purification output. But by how much? Well, if we use P in purified effluent, we also make only 4-P inert globally so the output of the purifying unit should be (4-P)/4 which is equal to P. Solving for P gives us an equilibrium value at P=4/5.

Cool, but as anyone who played with expanded crucibles knows, stabilizing sewage can behard enough for a normal efficiency line already. Here we need to somehow route 1/5 unit of inert to the purifier and also handle the fractional sewage which is two problems really - crucibles prioritising output and 1/5 being undoable with splitters only (only fraction with denominators factoring into product of 2s and 3s are possible). Luckily, the plumbing guide comes to the rescue (mainly with flow limiters but also as an inspiration for split inputs).

This line has 4 crucibles. 1 and 2 do only water+xiranite -> effluents, 3 does regular 1 xircon/tick using using the effluent from 2. The last one will handle fractions:

It takes all the (hopefully 4/5) effluent from the purifier in one input and a mix of water and sewage in the other. Why sewage? Because it somehow needs to stabilize at 1/5 sewage used to make effluents - if it does more something, somewhere will clog because the effluent balance will be wrong.

Usually when outputing sewage, because the pipe flow is 2/tick, it will dump everything out and no effluent reaction would take place. What do we do? We use the flow limiters. Yellow 1 forces the output to be capped at 1/tick, yellow 2 and 3 cap the respective flows at 1/5. We make 1 sewage/tick output and put back 1/5 for effective 4/5 output.

Important note - the way fractional flow works in practice is not 1/5 unit per tick - it's 1 every five ticks. You can see the cycle here - every five ticks, when the loopback unit of sewage comes in, the output clogs leaving it inside and allowing it to react (and output a unit of inert effluent):

https://streamable.com/f4tr85

Finally, we get 96 xiranite -> 4 xircon (96*1,25=120)

Is it important? No.
it stable? Idk, maybe it will clog in a few hours, previous attempts did multiple times. So far it's been fine for an hour or two.
Is going down to one battery line or one gourd line smarter? Definitely.
Did i waste way too long on that? Yes