heavy oil production problem - overflow tanks ARE NOT full

[coffee_fiend]

Ok I've read over and over how oil stops if something backs up.
So I have overflow tanks to help with that.
They are NOT full but yet some of the just stops..

In this case heavy oil stops, which I'm using for lubricant.
I have bottleneck installed and it says everything but the lubricant is working just fine.
And it is the pipes that are showing the problem with the lack of oil

I have a large number of crude oil tanks between the jacks and the refineries and they're almost full.
I have pumps in between the 2 "just in case"
So I doubt there's a lack of crude coming in and the pipes themselves show pretty much full.
Everything seems perfect and NOT backing up yet heavy oil just isn't working.

Water input is great is as well.

But really if the crude or water wasn't working then nothing would work...

If I click on any of the refineries it shows a nice smooth production over and over over 5 second intervals of the 3 products.
Yet the heavy oil just isn't there.

So any other suggestions on what could be going wrong here?


Also when I was hooking up the lubricant, it screwed up the first few times and magically turned heavy oil to gas in the pipes even though I confirmed 100% that there was absolutely no connection to the gas pipes.
Basically I had some pipes hooked to brand new chem plants, to the heavy oil input just suddenly start saying they had gas in them rather than heavy oil
I have to remove all the pipes a few times and replace them and suddenly it started working without touching any other outside connections.
Just reading and deleting the same pipes as 3-5 times did it.
There was no place for the gas to come from yet it appeared.

Honestly I'm not convinced that oil production is bug free based on this and other outages in other attempts.

[Serenity]

Refinery production stops if any of the three outputs backs up. You will stop producing heavy oil if light oil backs up for example. You need to set up oil cracking as soon as possible (comes with advanced oil processing). In time that will get rid of the overflow by turning everything into petroleum gas. Which is consumed mostly by plastics.

Pipe contamination is nasty. You need to remove everything to clear it out. This will be fixed in 0.17 where you can't connect different pipes anymore.

Otherwise make sure you connected everything. Easy to miss something as there so many pipes going everywhere


This is also where you want to use the circuit network to manage things. There are several ways to do that. What I like is this:
1.) Hook up a single tank each of heavy, light, petroleum and lubricant to a wire. The tanks will be roughly equal when placed next to each other, so you only need to read one
2.) Place a pump in the line feeding heavy oil to the lubricant plant. Connect the wire to it. Enable the pump "if heavy oil > 10000"
3.) Do the same with light oil cracking and enable the pump "if light oil > 10000"
4.) Place two deciders next to heavy oil cracking and connect their inputs to the wire. Set one to "if lubricant > 24900" and another to "if heavy oil > 10000". Output a green square each. Connect the outputs to the pump feeding heavy oil cracking and set it to enable when "green square = 2". This is essentially an AND gate

This will produce lube only when there is enough heavy oil. It will only crack heavy oil when there is enough lube. And it will only crack light oil to gas when there is enough of it. The reason I leave that 10000 reserve (per tank) of heavy and light is to produce flame thrower ammo. Light oil is also needed for flame thrower turrets.

You can also do a hysteresis here to make it neater, but that needs more combinators

[coffee_fiend]

This is not a "something is backed up" situation.

Please NOTE the statement in the title and elsewhere about "overflow tanks are NOT full"
So how is it backed any where?

I have refineries with tanks between them and the chem plants.
NONE of those tanks are full or even near full!

So how exactly is this a backed up item situation?

Please explain.

Everything is flowing EXCEPT heavy oil.
There is no backup anywhere. Unless overflow sort of tanks just don't work. Which would sort mean there's a defect here.

As for pipe contamination, how did the gas get there in the first place if it was NEVER hooked to gas?

And if I did use the circuit network suggested then I'd just never get lubricant because heavy oil would always be near 0.
So I don't understand how that would help.

[Loewchen]

If you expect a diagnosis on your setup error based a text description, you are asking for speculation.
If you are instead interested in knowing what you did wrong, post your save file and get an answer in minutes.

[Serenity]

If heavy oil is not flowing, something isn't connected properly. Post at least detailed close up screenshots. Otherwise it's just speculation based on your own speculations

[sunnyskies]

Hello!
I think I recognize this problem, since I ran into something similar in my last factory.

Since you mentioned crude oil -and- water flow, I recall that all of my refineries were set to advanced processing, which makes barely any heavy oil. Reverting refineries or building a couple new ones to the standard oil processing that only uses crude oil should create more heavy oil.

Good luck

[Mr. Tact]

The other thing which has not been mentioned is -- are the refineries running? ie.. is the problem a shortage of oil supply?

[coffee_fiend]

Ok the refineries are running. the bottleneck indicator is green without flashing.
I am using advanced cracking/refining though.
But the amount of chem plants I have should be about right. And they were working great for a few hours at least.
Then suddenly they all but stopped producing.

I can't post a screenshot because I did a 25 refinery setup and it won't fit on a single screen.

25 running refineries. All show green via bottleneck.
18 chem plants cracking medium to gas. All show green via bottleneck
9 chem plants converting heavy to lubricant. For a few hours all were green. Now it varies between 3 and 4 plants working.
30 chem plants making plastic quite nicely. Saturating, or close to, 2 blue belts.
I probably need more plastic production based on the fact that the gas storage tanks are about 25% full.
And the medium overflow is 18% full.
The heavy of course is empty

So the one thing that comes to mind is my math was wrong, but why then did it work great for a few hours?

I can post a save if anyone thinks they look at the right oil production section. Which shouldn't be too hard. It's the only one with 25 refineries.
My setup is horribly spaghetti. The FSM would be proud though.

[Serenity]

9 chem plants making lube consume 6750 heavy/min. 9 * 10 * 60 * 1.25
If I see things correctly 25 advanced oil refineries only produce around 3000 heavy/min. 25 * 10 / 5 * 60

So only half of those working makes sense

Are you trying to go for 1000 purple science per minute here? Because you could do 900 with that much lube (not considering productivity modules)

Consider using productivity modules in the plants and beacons with speed modules. That improves the output numbers greatly while consuming less resources. And with less machines.
Otherwise as said, maybe switch back to regular oil processing. That produces 30 heavy per cycle instead of 10

[coffee_fiend]

Thanks yeah my math was wrong. So everything is working as expect
Lubricant is 10 heavy consumed per second rather than per 3 seconds.

thanks all for taking the time to respond.