Factorio Forums

Is normal Oil settings for frequency/richness/size large enough?

I haven't played long enough to really get a grasp on if it is enough, but I always read in the forums how people mostly just raise the richness and lower frequency of oil fields in all their games.

In my longest game of 50~60hrs I find I'm always short on Oil and that every walkabout I go on it's mostly to find the best grouping of oil spots. The biggest grouping I've found was 11 oil (2 groups 1 of 5 and 1 of 6) and my factory ate through that in no time. Other than that one spot it usually takes more time to set up a protected outpost than to haul off all the oil.

I suggest an ever so slight decrease in decay rate or change normal settings up to a mean value of 150%.

Did you consider mass boosting your oil pumpjacks with extra productivity and/or speed level 3 modules ? That helps a LOT, even once they're depleted, to sustain a decent oil income.

No, I had converted them over to solid fuel providers to power my steam engines as limitless power source instead of coal... Maybe I will switch half back since I have a huge backlog because I use the steam engines as backup nowadays

For depleted oil wells, (and anything with an infinite amount) speed modules are better than productivity.

As for world gen options (Vanilla only):
On Normal settings, I find that all the resources spawn enough to get to logistic bots, before you'll need to expand once or twice. This goes for all resources except stone.
On V.Low: You might have trouble getting to trains before expanding, if you don't focus research.
On V.High: You'll probably never need to expand. Well, maybe one expansion for oil, if you use solid fuel.

If u have Like Oil Problems u can use the Railtanker mod to Transport oil with the Trains to your Base its really cool and has jet no bugs by my 35+ SP game and my

30+ MP game

Getting the Oil to my base isn't the problem its the slow speed of the oil pumps and constantly having to find new ones, but I'm taking Koub's suggestion and throwing Speed 3's on them. I've finished rocket defense so now I'm not putting the mass drain on my supplies like before when I put my factory into making 50 of each lvl 3 modules. I now have a stock pile and Im mostly building train tracks and will be putting a new base really far away.

P.S. this is my first full play through so no mods on this map

I do tend to put oil way up there on the list on world gen, make sure there's lots of rich splotchs.

I often forget how lame the modules are in the base game compared to my mod, and Dytech, especially how productivity actually makes things slower. it might be worth putting Productivity modules in a brand new fat fast oil well, it will slow down the decrease in mining speed, giving an overall faster mining speed, but when it starts to get down below about 0.5/s, getting near to that 0.1/s infinity point, you want to fill it with speed modules.

n9103 wrote:For depleted oil wells, (and anything with an infinite amount) speed modules are better than productivity.

Not true.

In the long-term you'll do better if you put productivity modules on non-depleted oil wells and speed modules on depleted ones. (Productivity modules don't make the well deplete faster, whereas speed modules do.)

Not sure where you got your info from, but I just ran the test manually.
2x100% oil wells, one with 2xSpeed 3 and the other with 2xProductivity 3 (best possible case for Productivity having an advantage)
Started and stopped at exact same time, and allowed to run until productivity well got to 0.1/s Feel free to run this test from a higher richness yourself.
Speed 3 pumped approx. 9000 units
Prod. 3 pumped approx. 7680 units
The only case where productivity can result in a faster output over time, is one in which the productivity well is always at a significantly higher richness than the speed well it's being compared to (>3x higher). The only way you can get to that point is from either strongly increased richness (~>350%), or some unusual scenario that naturally has a 300% well next to a 100% one.

Note that the point I'm guessing at is the break even on amount over time only. There's a lot more time that's going to be wasted by having the player monitoring the individual wells and swapping out chips without letting them sit too long, lest they lose the time saved with using the productivity modules in the first place.
Also repeating my initial disclaimer about the module levels. Productivity's speed penalty doesn't increase with higher levels, but it still doesn't surpass the output of a non-chipped process. Whereas Speed's output ends up at 2x the non-chipped output.

E:one last observation: The speed well continued to gain distance on the productivity well until the speed well finally hit 0.1/s, at which point the productivity well slowly closed some of the gap, before being left behind yet again.

Could you continue the test until the productivity well has also reached 0.1 oil/s, or at least until they both produce the same amount per second? (The speed well produces more than 0.1 oil per second if it is at 0.1 oil/s. Sounds weird...)

Oh sorry, I did read speed well (or my brain did understand that). ^^

n9103 wrote:E:one last observation: The speed well continued to gain distance on the productivity well until the speed well finally hit 0.1/s, at which point the productivity well slowly closed some of the gap, before being left behind yet again.

I'd like to see your graphs.

Didn't use them, used storage tanks.
If I had taken SS of it, they would've been posted. And if not, I probably would've cleared them out by now

It's just that the big problem I'm having with your figures is that, although the speed upgrades should give 250% the base pumpjack rate while the production upgrades should give 71% of the base rate, the speed pumpjack only produced 17% more oil during that period than the production pumpjack. That screams in my ear "Something fishy is going on."

The rule of thumb is: speed modules on pumpjacks.

Speed modules deplete the level faster than normal, production modules slower.
Over any timeframe of actual use (more than an hour or two) both end up at 0.1 and the speed module makes up the ground it lost.
Your figures depend on the oil levels remaining the same, or at least in sync.

I don't even bother with looking at the size of an oil well. As I play long games, I take it for 0.1/s, and just build on larger groups of wells.

Gammro wrote:I don't even bother with looking at the size of an oil well. As I play long games, I take it for 0.1/s, and just build on larger groups of wells.

Same conclusion I (and most others I would guess) came to.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been any mention of productivity modules in the petrochemical production chain to reduce oil consumption. Let's take batteries as an example. If we put a pair of productivity 1 modules in a chemical plant/refinery you get a 4%*2=8% productivity bonus. Ignoring modules in the cracking plants (since they add complexity to the math) you have modules in the refinery, sulfur plant, sulfuric acid plant, and the battery plant. So total productivity for oil is 1.08^4=1.36. That means you get 36% more batteries for each input unit of oil. With productivity 3s it's 1.2^4=2.07 meaning 107% more batteries per input unit of oil. Modules in cracking plants will increase these numbers a bit.