Factorio Forums

Is this a good idea? Right now I have coal mines feeding everything that requires energy, so I wonder now that I have oil technology if its worth it to replace my coal industry with solid fuel? The way I set everything up would make it rather easy for me to make this change since all my coal comes from a central point. This way I just make the solid fuel available in the central point instead of coal.

My problem is that I want to know what you guys think that perhaps have already done this, I don't want to remove and destroy without knowing if its worth it (saving time). So what do you think?

Definitely! Solid fuel actually has a higher burn value than coal, so burns a lot slower. It's also good for getting rid of light oil, as you'll find that storage fills up quickly for that and you need to do something with it otherwise your oil industry will stop working.

I actually have a video for solid fuel in my playthrough, check it out if you want to see its effects. The video in question is appropriately named "solid fuel"!

Did you scrap all of your coal industry when you switched to solid fuel? I'll check out your channel

I did. I now only use coal for certain recipes that require it (ie plastic bars, explosives)

I kinda changed my mind on this, since I play with very rich on everything I can use coal mines much longer then I can drill for oil, right now my pumps are only producing 0.2/s from previous 2.0/s. Seems the oil runs dry much faster then ore. Maybe there is a way to set how rich oil is as well but I'll have to do that on my next playthrough. ^^

Oil only decreases in production rate, until they're at 0.1/s. They don't completely deplete, so a well can give you an infinite amount of oil(it'll just take very long)

Oh I see, its infinite but very slow. So I will still be able to make materials used for crafting but not enough to fuel my energy.

I'd use coal because oil wells dry up rather quickly and has more important uses.

Drury wrote:I'd use coal because oil wells dry up rather quickly and has more important uses.

I have to agree here, when you get to the point where you want to crank out CPU tech you tend to want every scrap of Petroleum you can get. Sadly light oil cracking seems to be too good not to do at the moment. Coal is plentiful and really not needed much after you get a decent solar park. I barely ran out of my starter coal patch the size of ~6 electric miners by the time I built my rocket defense.

It would be nice if the solid fuel would do something besides just being longer burning fuel though. Maybe require it for rockets would be a start. It could also be used as an ingredient for carefully treated metal. Anything would be good.