Factorio Forums

I'm in the process of setting up my first oil plant, with 8 chem plants making plastic (planning for the future) and just discovered that refineries will not make anything if they cannot make everything. Is there anything that can be done with the light and heavy oils until I'm ready to start using them besides building tank farms?

Advanced oil gives you cracking that makes heavy light, and light gas

But you can make lube and fuel

Setting up storage tanks is a must if you don't want to waste great amounts of the oils. If you're good at getting blue science going, then two tanks per type should be enough. Otherwise, you might want to do four or more.

As LF said though, the only thing you can do with them other than store them, is to convert them into Lube and Solid Fuel.
Having one tank full of lube should be plenty for almost the whole game, and I generally don't do anything other than let that tank of lube sit there until it's time to make belts and engines. For Solid Fuel, Light oil is the most efficient to create it from, and it's great to use for fueling non-automated furnaces (like stone bricks) or fueling trains.

Generally, the first tech I get after oil processing is fluid handling, so that I can put the oils and gas straight into tanks, regardless of the consumers of such being ready or not. After oil and fluid handling, I go for lasers (and it's requirements) and then any techs needed for blue science, then adv. oil processing. Often times, I'll end up doing the oil as one of my later green-level techs due to it having many other techs that need to be researched first in order to use what's being processed. Plus, it reduces the amount of time between starting oil production, and researching adv. processing, which means less capacity is required to ensure continuous production.

Alright so there's no flare stack or anything, on my first map I got as far as producing a few plastic bars and batteries and noticed that my petroleum gas tanks were going down despite 5 pumpjacks and 4 refineries (is there an optimum ratio for these like there is for boilers/engines?). At that point I went to the tech tree to look for improvements that could be made and realized that because I had turned enemy bases off (in a effort to learn instead of die) I could never make tier 4 science, so that game got dumped and this one started, just with rich but very infrequent bases.

ba12348 wrote:(is there an optimum ratio for these like there is for boilers/engines?)

No, because every oil spot has other production values, but two things can help you:

• Look at the pump stations: If all of them work without pauses, than you have perfectly enough or too much refineries.
• You can calculate the needed amount of pumpjacks. One refinery needs 10 oil per 5 seconds, so 2 oil per seconds. If you have 4 refineries, than you need 8 oil per seconds. If you only have "empty" pumpjacks left, than you need 80 pumpjacks. 8.0 oil per second / 0.1 oil per second = 80. If you have "full" oilspots left, than you have to subtract them from the needed amount.

All this doesn't include any modules. With speed modules you can get much more oil out of depleted spots.

ba12348 wrote:I'm in the process of setting up my first oil plant, with 8 chem plants making plastic (planning for the future) and just discovered that refineries will not make anything if they cannot make everything. Is there anything that can be done with the light and heavy oils until I'm ready to start using them besides building tank farms?

plastic production is probably the single thing in factorio that doesn't need more than one facility. maybe two, maximum. 8 plants? total overkill
the production rate is so fast, you usually need to limit plastic output to have some input gas left for other things.

No, 8 plastic plants is not total overkill. If you really want to automate the production of modules, then you need much more plastic than just from 2 chemical plants.

I added two pictures of my plastic production, 7 chemical plants at all. My current game will get even more.

And here two pictures of my production of advanced circuits (the red ones).

The first one was my attemp at making a "space efficient" form (still with belts). Well, it didn't really work as far as I can tell, but it looks nice.
The second one is with logistic robots. The one blue inserter (between the belt and the copper cable assembler) was already replaced with a faster variant, but I didn't want to retake the picture.

Now comes the special part: I got the first "factories" two times and one half of the second factory again! All in all 86 blue assemblers for the production of advanced circuits. The bottleneck lies on the assemblers of processing units (the blue circuits). I don't play this map anymore, but that would be my next update if I wanted to enhance the production on this map.

Oh, and I use mods for some additional stuff, like edge inserters (90 degree), smaller / bigger roboports and logistic robots MK 2.

What I'm currently doing is as follows:

I use liquid priority setups (there's a post somewhere on the forum about how to do it - a couple pumps in a specific configuration) to turn heavy oil into lubricant first, and any excess gets cracked into light oil. Light oil preferentially gets turned into solid fuel for my power setup, with any excess getting cracked into petroleum gas. Petroleum gas preferentially gets turned into solid fuel (but the light oil solid fuel takes priority, so this step doesn't generally happen unless I'm full on petroleum gas and run out of light oil as a result), with excess going into sulfuric acid and plastic, with excess from that going into solid fuel (high priority this time).

This works fairly well. About the only time it could mess up is if I somehow need absurd amounts of lubricant compared to anything else, but that doesn't generally happen.

Other than that, it's foolproof, as far as I can tell. If I use lots of lubricant, heavy oil goes to its production, otherwise it gets cracked. If I use lots of petroleum gas, it cracks everything to petroleum gas. If I don't use much petroleum gas, it uses light oil for solid fuel and stocks petroleum gas until it is full, cracking heavy oil to light oil, then starts using petroleum gas only as little as possible.

If I was crazy, I'd augment the system as follows:

Heavy oil gets turned into flamethrower fuel, then lubricant, then cracked into light oil. Light oil gets turned into flamethrower fuel, then solid fuel, then petroleum gas. Petroleum gas gets turned into backup solid fuel, then sulfuric acid and plastic, then more solid fuel.

...but 4 priority setups are absurd enough, much less 6.

(Actually, what I really want is as follows:

Heavy oil goes to flamethrower fuel, then lubricant, then light oil. Light oil goes to flamethrower fuel, then solid fuel, then *low-priority* petroleum gas. Petroleum gas gets turned into backup solid fuel, then sulfuric acid and plastic, then more solid fuel iff petroleum gas tanks are full and there's not enough lubricant or flamethrower fuel).

What I do is : research oil processing and right after, as soon as possible, advanced oil processing. In between, I store heavy and light oil in tanks, and once I have advanced oil processing, I crack all the stored lignt and heavy oil into petroleum gas.

Ah, so the oils can be refined, did not know this. I was afraid of ending up with dozens of tanks full of oils and production grinding to a halt without me realizing it. Does advanced processing allow the cracking or is there something beyond it that needs to be researched?

Advanced is enough