Stuck at providing oil

[Quax]

Folks I need some advice on this. Currently I'm stuck at providing oil. In order to enlarge my base, and build up the next factories, I started with building factories for electronic and advanced circuits. I have a fine supply of electronic circuits meanwhile, however my advanced circuits factory alsways lacks plastic bars. This is due to a permanent lack of oil that I can produce petroleum gas from. I already have four oil fields fueling my refinery, however this is way to less oil. I have two more oilfields in reasonable distance to my base. After that, there are no more reasonable sized oilfields around.

So how do you guys come around this. Am I doing something wrong? Or is oil supposed to be that short in terms of availability? Currently I'm just running to provide base ressources like oil, copper, iron and coal 90% of the time. Every time I try to set up the next step in my factory (e.g. buildung a speed module factory), I'm thrown back by one of the three base ressources beeing exhausted again.

[astroshak]

Do you have a lot of Coal on your map?

You may find it easier to use Advanced Oil Processing, and cracking, to turn all of your Crude into Petroleum for your Plastic production, and turning Coal into Heavy Oil for lube, Light Oil for Solid Fuel, and Petroleum for your sulfur needs.

Alternatively, use Speed Modules and Beacons at the Pumpjacks, and Production Modules with Speed Beacons at the Refineries and Chem Plants.

[Serenity]

Standard map settings tend to pretty generous with oil sometimes. You may have gotten unlucky. I set oil to very low so that I don't get gigantic fields close by

Keep in mind that oil wells deplete over time, but never to zero. They always produce a certain minimum, but quite slowly later on. You may be at that stage. The meta has always been to put speed modules into the pumpjacks at that point. That's less needed than in earlier versions (they used to deplete far faster), but still valid. Even SM1 helps and they are very cheap. Even with a trickle of oil you can make some

Oil is also one of the best things to use productivity modules in. Without using beacons the best is 1 speed module 3 and the rest productivity module 3. But lower modules work too as a stopgap. PMs lower the speed, so you want a SM to compensate for that. Just a SM1 can compensate for PM3s

Otherwise, yeah, coal liquefaction is certainly your best bet for plastics production. You can get the plastic flowing again and use that to produce modules

[mmmPI]

What may change the experience from one game to another with the same ressources on the map, is if you burn a lot of solid fuel for power or not.
If you do burn a lot of solid fuel, you will feel like oil is a bit more rare than iron and copper, if you don't then you feel like you have a bit too much oil.

Using solar/accumulators, and/or nuclear, may help you preserving oil and coal for plastic rather than fuel.

It also depends on how far are you willing to get the ressources. Iron and Copper deplete totally over time, not oil, so if you make 50 outpost of each ressources, which is a lot, and consume them all, at some point you will have to make new iron and copper outpost, but less oil ( since 50 depleted oil patch still produce a decent amount compared to 1 new iron patch ).

Also if you consume a lot of steel and copper in ammunition, you will feel the need of adding outpost for those more frequently than oil which will look abundant.

Also if you build very slowly you will have more oil than iron and copper, since oil just need time to magically appear.

Managing those different aspect altogether can add up to the already mentionned advices.

Like not using too much solid fuel to power the expensive furnaces, but make accumulators and solar pannel before with a medium sized furnace array so to not consume too much coal either. Ofc this can seems like a waste of time, but it's also a tradeoff as to when you need to expand far away for more oil and it gives time to your existing pumpjack to create more.

[Adamo]

Folks I need some advice on this. Currently I'm stuck at providing oil. In order to enlarge my base, and build up the next factories, I started with building factories for electronic and advanced circuits. I have a fine supply of electronic circuits meanwhile, however my advanced circuits factory alsways lacks plastic bars. This is due to a permanent lack of oil that I can produce petroleum gas from. I already have four oil fields fueling my refinery, however this is way to less oil. I have two more oilfields in reasonable distance to my base. After that, there are no more reasonable sized oilfields around.

So how do you guys come around this. Am I doing something wrong? Or is oil supposed to be that short in terms of availability? Currently I'm just running to provide base ressources like oil, copper, iron and coal 90% of the time. Every time I try to set up the next step in my factory (e.g. buildung a speed module factory), I'm thrown back by one of the three base ressources beeing exhausted again.

Once you start making modules, expect to run out of resources a lot faster. It takes a lot of power and a shit ton of resources to produce modules at even the maximum speed of one mk3 module assembler. Same goes once you're doing research beyond blue science. These stages are a "step up" in resource demand from the earlier stage of the game, so it's normal to suddenly feel like you're out of resources. Make sure you're making lots of laser turrets (which should now be cheap relative to the modules and stuff you're making), and put up those defenses, and go get that oil. You will need more. Use trains: they're faster and easier.

Just to be sure: you're absolutely sure you are pulling in the oil and using all of it as it comes in from your fields, right? You don't have another oil product that's backed up somewhere? Screenshots are helpful.

[Quax]

Once you start making modules, expect to run out of resources a lot faster. It takes a lot of power and a shit ton of resources to produce modules at even the maximum speed of one mk3 module assembler. Same goes once you're doing research beyond blue science. These stages are a "step up" in resource demand from the earlier stage of the game, so it's normal to suddenly feel like you're out of resources. Make sure you're making lots of laser turrets (which should now be cheap relative to the modules and stuff you're making), and put up those defenses, and go get that oil. You will need more. Use trains: they're faster and easier.

Just to be sure: you're absolutely sure you are pulling in the oil and using all of it as it comes in from your fields, right? You don't have another oil product that's backed up somewhere? Screenshots are helpful.

Well, I have two different refineries. One from the early game that I needed to produce science. And a second one that I set up to mainly produce petroleum gas for my plastic >> circuit production.

What I observe is that despite running so much oil fields, the oil tanks of the second refinery are nearly empty all the time. But I however might have run into an additional problem, as I observed my pipe loading station not working efficient, as you can see from the screenshot.



So I might have to work out that, too. But - bottom line - currently I'm just busy with searching for new copper, iron, .. resources ... can't do anything other at the moment.

[Adamo]

Well, I have two different refineries. One from the early game that I needed to produce science. And a second one that I set up to mainly produce petroleum gas for my plastic >> circuit production.

What I observe is that despite running so much oil fields, the oil tanks of the second refinery are nearly empty all the time. But I however might have run into an additional problem, as I observed my pipe loading station not working efficient, as you can see from the screenshot.

A couple tips that might help. First off, get rid of all those storage tanks. Just use one pump out of each wagon, possibly into one storage tank, and then pump from that storage tank out into your factory. 24k in the storage tank and in the wagon itself is plenty of storage until you have a megabase. All that extra storage will slow you down.

When you say you have two refineries, do you mean you have two refinery buildings total? That's not enough. Make several copies of each refinery you have processing oil, and connect their outputs so they all pipe out into the system together.

So, essentially, more refinery buildings, less storage. Put one storage tank at the fluid wagon oil pickup station with one pump going from the storage tank into the receiving wagon. Then one pump at the oil dropoff end for each wagon going into one storage tank. Then from there pump out of the storage tank directly into the line that goes to your refineries, and make sure you have enough refineries to process oil fast enough. At the stage where you're starting to make modules, but don't have beacons on your refineries, this could easily be 5-10 refineries doing the same recipe. Just put them in a line and run their pipes together using underground piping to route it all.

Until you know for sure you need more, just use one fluid wagon to bring in oil. This ensures your fluid wagon is filling and reporting for drop off as quickly as possible.

[Adamo]

Here is an example of an early-game refinery dropoff that will work great. Once you're using more oil to make modules, you could just make more copies of the refineries with the piping as it is along the same line to increase oil product availability.

oil_receiving.png (6.09 MiB) Viewed 4202 times

simple_early_game_refinery_dropoff.png (3.34 MiB) Viewed 4202 times

[Serenity]

What do you want with 6 pumps? The oil tanker has three connection points max! Note how it consists of three tanks acting as one. Even then just one or two pumps are fine. Pumps have an insane pumping speed. I think they plan to slow that down (which I approve of), but now just 2 pumps suck a wagon empty in a few seconds. Just one pump is fine really at the beginning.

You can also make it more effective by going directly from pump -> tank. It's the pipes that slow things down:
https://gfycat.com/linedhospitablegroundhog


You can use Factorio calculator to find out how many refineries you roughly need:
https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... c-acid:f:1
As you see it's quite a lot. That's another reason to get into modules. With beacons they allow you to produce much much more with less machines. But even without beacons they are worthwhile as SM3 is already a speed increase even with PMs

Otherwise the rough ratio for advanced oil processing is 10 refineries, 1 heavy oil cracker, 7 light oil crackers. Ideally circuit controlled though. Like only crack heavy oil if you have enough lube and some heavy oil. And only crack light oil when you have some of it (not much use, but you need some for flamethrower ammo, so you can keep a few thousand in a tank). One such setup lasts for a while

[JimBarracus]

example for a good fluid station design
two pumps per wagon are enough and you can fit a tank for each pump
having a tank for each pump increases the throughput a lot.

about your oil problem:
either get more oil fields oil use coal liquification.

[Zavian]

Also you can use speed modules in the pumpjacks to boost crude oil production. (And speed beacons as well if you need them).

[Quax]

Great, thanks all .. I'm gonna post a few screenies from my refinery later. But so far I understood that i did almost everything wrong in terms of fluid transport

[Termak]

Its just fine to have 1 pump per wagon, aslong theres tank directly behind pump. Its bit over 2sec with 1 pump and half that with 2 pumps, most people are just fine with 2sec stops