How to make oil/uranium processing facilities

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KristjanEST
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How to make oil/uranium processing facilities

Post by KristjanEST »

Hello.
My name is Kristjan, I am a rather new player (195h), but it has been all starting new games once I reach blue science.. this is when game gets..weell..overwhelming. I have not the slightst idea of how to make oil/uranium processing facilities, even after watching the tutorial videos. I would really love some guidane on the topic.

Kind regards,
Kristjan

Serenity
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Re: How to make oil/uranium processing facilities

Post by Serenity »

Uranium is really optional. Useful, but you don't need it for progression. It's oil that is essential.

With videos do you mean on YouTube? There are good tutorials there with varying levels of detail and complexity.

Also, basic oil processing is relatively simple. You hook up oil and get only petroleum. It's advanced oil processing where things get complicated. It's just quite a bit of work getting the raw oil, laying pipes and hooking everything up.

One general tip is don't use sections of straight pipe everywhere. You'll block yourself and the pipes will want to connect to each other. Instead use underground pipes (make sure to produce a lot of them once you get near oil). That allows you to walk between them and makes things a lot easier once you deal with multiple fluids in the same area. Something like this is a common setup:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=56447

Tertius
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Re: How to make oil/uranium processing facilities

Post by Tertius »

The way to oil is this:
Locate oil wells on the map. They appear as a cluster of 4-10 purple dots on the map. If you don't see any, explore more of the map.
If you get near, the oil wells are black puddles on the ground. Put one pump jack over each oil well and connect their outputs to pipes. Pipes are for fluids what belts are for items.
Now you need to transport the oil to your base, where you will probably build your refineries. You can either put down a long pipeline of underground pipes, or use fluid wagons with trains.
In your base, put down a few oil refineries and supply them with your oil as well as with water. You get water from any lake using an offshore pump.
The output of the oil refinery is petroleum gas, which is used by chemical plants to produce plastic, and now you have some item again.
Later you will unlock advanced oil processing, which increases your output but requires you to get rid of byproducts (heavy oil, light oil).

To learn about the not obvious properties of fluids, see the wiki: https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system

The way to uranium processing is just another different way to refine crude material to refined material. To be able to mine uranium ore, you need sulfuric acid, which can be produced in chemical plants that require pre-products from oil processing. It's all a big tech and manufacturing tree. To get sulfuric acid to a uranium mine, you will usually use trains. Use specialized trains with one fluid wagon for sulfuric acid and the rest cargo wagons to transport sulfuric acid from your base to the mine, and in return transport ore to the base.

For me, this and having to cope with the enemies at the same time was overwhelming in my first games, so I simply turned off enemies at map creation. Helped to concentrate to the actual task at hand to get familiar with all the factory and tech mechanics.

mmmPI
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Re: How to make oil/uranium processing facilities

Post by mmmPI »

I agree with Tertius that without ennemies it gives some to test things without pressure or distraction, i did that too for uranium, robots, trains, oil ... many things :).

Imo the easiest way to get started after you spotted the purple dots on the map, is to bring electricity over there, and place pumpjacks and refineries there too !

The first product useful you can make with oil i think is plastic. For this you need to transform the crude oil you collect on pipes connected to pumpjacks.

Like water pipes in real life or oil pipeline, you can connect several pumpjacks and refineries together. If the piping is too long the throughput get reduced contrary to belts and the liquid can flow both ways if you don't use pumps; those push the liquid one way to maintain throughput and act as non-return valve. To simplify that piping i advised placing the refineries near oil.

Then refineries have Input and Output, you can see those using the "alt view" you probably saw on videos. You need to make sure you don't have a pipe connection between them, the game doesn't allow placing pipes when you try to directly connect 2 different networks that have different fluids. The input is of course the crude oil from the pumpjacks ! The output can only be "petroleum gas" at first. Later in the game you will have the receipe including water as input too and multiple outputs, which makes the piping puzzle even more interesting when you need to avoid connection between those fluids :D

But the simplest one looks like this : pumpjacks ===pipes with crude oil==== refinery===pipes with petroleum gas=== chemical plant

Because petroleum gas is another fluid like the crude oil, it need to be transformed again to make plastic but this time it's done using chemical plant. Like the refinery it has input and output for fluids but to make plastic you need 1 fluid, the petroleum gas, and 1 solid, coal like for furnaces, with inserter dropping them on the chemical plant that are also filled with petroleum gas . ( at this point it's a good thing to have coal near oil, but in the worse case coal can travel using a super long belt :) ).

You can take the plastic out of the chemical plant with inserter and put it on a belt, inserter are smart enough to not remove an input from a chemical plant like coal in furnace, unlike coal in boilers :) you can use another super long belt, and make a little road with stone brick to go faster when visiting the refineries as without ennemy one doesn't need wall , you can drive on it with a car too if you made the road straight, or if you drive better than me.

Now if you are familar with trains, you can use a train with one or two fluid wagon to carry the crude oil next to your base instead of making 2 super long belts of coal and plastic, or make a super long pipe of crude oil, with 1 or 2 pumps every screen as a rough estimate to keep enough for a starter plastic production. ( barrel are tricky to use and optionnal so i do not recommend early on :).

Those steps are quite important as they represent the 1rst logistical challenge where oil is not a starting ressources, this is made harder when there are plenty of ennemies which can detract from the later steps after plastic where it is more about a pipe puzzle and managing the different fluid quantity in them using pumps tanks and additionnal receipe on chemical plants like on the example cited earlier by Serenity.

Now you don't need those for the uranium facility ( although generally they come in the game progression earlier and uranium is optionnal as mentionned). For uranium you need another fluid, which is sulfuric acid. It is made also using petroleum gas, but this one require an intermediate transformation, where from petroleum gas and water you create sulfur in a chemical plant this is not a fluid so you need inserters/belts to move it around into another chemical plant to finally make the sulfuric acid, adding some water again, and iron plate. 2 solid and 1 liquid as input, 1 liquit as output. This is required for miners to extract uranium on belts which is the first step for the uranirum facility. At this point the logistical challenge is higher because you cannot use super long belts if water oil and uranium are not close to each other and you are forced to move a fluid.

Once you become familiar with fluid transportation maybe the videos will make more sense, why they do this, why this way and so on. The most difficult part is the receipe with multiple outputs, oil processing 2 because you need to automate fluid distribution and consumption using ratios which can block production if not respected. If one of the multiple output is not consumed, then the machine stops and none of the outputs is being produced anymore. To avoid this problem a convenient solution is to have an "oil facility" where everything is taken care of at the same location. This makes it easier to connect things with wire to control pumps.

Then this "oil facility" can be set up a bit differently if you want to use solid fuel or not, or if you plan on using nuclear or solar or swarms of robots at this point it's no longer the easiest method, it's the ""advanced oil processing" !

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