Problem with hydrocarbons and plastic!!

[Hogweed]

Hi,

Something weird happened to the plastic production. When I first started it, it was pumping out plastic quickly and I was able to keep 4 Advanced Circuit assemblers fully loaded with a large backup of plastic. A while later, the plastic almost dried up. I noticed the pipe that had the pinkish color was clear, like it was empty, and every 7-10 seconds it would show a shot of pink going through, and 2 plastics would come out.

I thought the oil was drying up, but the pipes are at 9.5 + or - a bit. I relocated the Jackpumps (3 of them) to fresh oil spills, but the problem is still there. I removed the whole refinery & pipes and reset them up, what happens is that before I connect it to the Chem Lab, the pink color of the hydrocarbon coming from the refinery is there, like it is full, but as soon as i connect the chem lab, it goes fast for about 10-15 seconds, then back to a crawl.

I now have barely enough plastic for 2 Adv Circuit assemblers - I cant make enough to do anything except maintain a slower Sci Pack 3 research rate.

I am setting up another oil field from the opposite side, and will try a fresh refinery and see what happens.

If anyone can tell me what I am doing wrong I would really appreciate it!!

I realized that I did add on sulfur and battery production, maybe I am stretching the oil to thin? I have 3 refineries and 12 Chem labs. Maybe I will try to turn one off.

[Hogweed]

I just turned off the 2 other refineries, same thing, it does not seem the be the problem. I notice that when I plug the pipe into the Chem Plant, the hydrocarbon shoots to 50, then it slowly drops down to to around 2.2, then to 0.2 and it hovers between the two, moving very slowly. I notice that the hydrocarbon icon flashes on when the burst occurs, otherwise it is not showing.

I noticed the water count on the sulfur and Sulfuric acid Chem Plant is 100 and 200 respectfully. I though the hydrocarbon would be too. But it reads the same on the sulfur Plant as well, staying between 3.4 and 0.8.

Thats all I can come up - I will try a new set of refineries from a fresh oil area and see what happens.

Also - the Heavy and light oils are just making dry fuel, as they have since I set it up. I keep them from filling up, but I notice that the light oil in the refinery climbs up between 6 & 10, even though I have a fast inserter emptying it out. the heavy oil is showing as 0, so I wonder if that could be an issue.

[SilverWarior]

The isue is that you are not using light oil fast enough. If it climgs to 10 this means that the pipe is full and this stops refinery as it has nowhere to pump the light oil.
I recomend building another chemical plant which will turn light oil into solid fuel.
If you wan't to find the proper balance of using light and heavy oil for solid fuel production (how many chemical plants process each one) check the refining recipie you use in your refinery to see how many units of each is generated.
Also version 0.9.1 introduced a few new recipies for light and heavy oil processing.

◦Added cracking recipes (heavy oil to light oil and light oil to petroleum gas).

[Hogweed]

Hi SilverWarior, Thanks for the reply. I was using both the Light and heavy oils for solid fuel. There was no backups as I regularly emptied the chests before they were full. What I tried was, I moved the light oil Chemical plant further away, and reset it again for solid fuel. This seemed to fix that problem, as the light oil number dropped to zero.

However, the hydrocarbon fuel did not change. What I think I need to know if it is normal for plastic to run at this speed. I am getting a pair of plastics every 4 to 7 seconds. Can anyone tell me how fast they should be coming out?

I set up a 2nd set of Jackpumps on some new oil spills, and ran it to a new refinery about 20 pipes away, and set up the plastics on that one. This one ran at giving 2 plastics every 3-4 seconds, which was a little faster, but still seemed too slow to be able to provide the number needed for the amount of Advanced Circuits I would need for both Sci 3 (blue) and the other items that require them. If someone knows what the standard rate that plastic is produced, that would tell me if there really is a problem.

The number of hydrocarbons that shows in the Chemical plant is always under 3 down to 0.8, and I thought that should be like 50 to 100. The light oil is around 40 now, and the heavy oil is around 3 or 4, but the solid fuel for it is produced pretty fast.

Considering the amount of Adv Circuits needed, it seems I would need a lot of these plastic plants, but I think it should be much faster than i am getting.

Would really be grateful if someone could tell me how fast plastic should produce.

[ssilk]

Why don't you just right click into the plant and look what happens? Then watch!
What happens, when, because of what? What happened before? From where does it come?

Just watch it. It is self explaining just by watching it, you just need to find the right points you need to look at. Like with real machines.

Maybe you can turn the game speed a bit down, so that it is a bit slower. Open lua console and type "game.speed=0.5", that may help a lot to see the connections.