Water Pump

The Water Pump is a building used to extract Water from a Water Ocean and directly deposit it onto a belt. On planets with Sulfuric Acid Oceans, it can also harvest Sulfuric Acid in the same way. It is a shoreline-only structure, so it must be placed on the edge of a liquid body rather than inland.

A Water Pump has a base output of 50 items/min and its production is affected by Vein Utilization upgrades. Because liquids are effectively inexhaustible, pumps can continue operating indefinitely as long as the source ocean remains available. If a planet’s liquid surface is filled in before pumps are placed, that liquid can no longer be harvested there, so preserving access to the shoreline is important.

Practical notes:

• After placing a pump, you can cover the liquid with foundations and it will still extract normally. This makes it possible to use more pumps on large bodies of water.
• Pumps can be rotated similarly to Mining Machines, which helps them cover irregular coastlines and edges.
• If a pump is built first and the surrounding liquid is later reclaimed, it will keep working, but if it is removed afterward it may no longer be possible to place it again in that spot.
• The output can exceed the capacity of a Conveyor Belt Mk.III and begin stacking. This starts after Veins utilization Level 351, and the stack limit increases by 1 for every additional 1800 items/min of pump output, up to 4 stacked items. A Mk.III belt with 4-stacked output becomes fully saturated at Veins utilization Level 1430.
• The stacking limit applies regardless of the belt tier connected to the pump.
• A useful sizing formula for belt supply is: P = (6 * Bs) / (5 + (0.5 * Vu)), where P is the number of pumps needed, Bs is belt speed in items per second, and Vu is the number of Veins utilization upgrades completed.