Fluids are killing me

[samy01]

This may not be a question.
But it's been an amazing ride all the way until i reach the Oil and advanced oils section of the game play and i lost all my apatite to play.
40 hours and i love each one of them but i can't understand how to make oil run with no problem without using these circuits.

And when i manage to make it run no problem it stops because i didn't set the conditions right.
Am i the only one who hate this section of the game?

Should i just copy a blueprint to remove a rather unpleasant part of the game?

[DaveMcW]

Solid fuel is the answer. Turn every fluid you don't want into solid fuel. You will need all that solid fuel to launch a rocket.

[astroshak]

Cracking oil is not that difficult. Just consider what each crude product is used for, prioritize that, and then crack the excess to the next crude product.

Heave Oil has one real use : Lubricant. Have all of your refineries output the Heavy Oil into one Storage Tank, put a pump on that tank, and send it to Lube. Put another pump on the tank, wire it to the tank setting it to operate when Heavy Oil > 20,000, and go to cracking.

Light Oil has two real uses : Rocket Fuel and Solid Fuel. Have the refineries put their Light Oil into a Storage Tank. Have the Heavy Oil cracking chem plants put the Light Oil into the same tank. Then do the same thing as you did with the HEavy Oil, make sure that your Light Oil specific productions are met before sending the Light Oil to cracking.

Its really not that hard.

[samy01]

I have a problem now that Petroleum gas runs out all the time and i get tanks full of light oil.

I have every now and then to go all the way to the Oil setup and empty a Tank just to make space for the refineries to push more Petroleum.

[Loewchen]

I have a problem now that Petroleum gas runs out all the time and i get tanks full of light oil.

That's what cracking is for.

[Impatient]

To be more precise: Advanced oil processing (AOP) is killing you.

The hidden problem you are struggeling with is, that the recipes around AOP mathematically form a set of linear equations. But don't worry! I just mention that term in case you ever want to dive deeper into it, which is not required. Vanilla factorio is balanced in the way, that the products of AOP can be transformed into another product of AOP which is required more, via cracking (as Loewchen mentioned). Gas is required more than light oil and light oil is required more than heavy oil.

To solve your headache you just need to make sure, that your factory is capable of transforming all of one product into the next more required product. Meaning it shouldbe able to crack all heavy oil coming from AOP into light oil and all light oil from AOP+heavy oil cracking into gas. Given the AOP capacity and cracking capacities of your factory are large enough, your factory will run smoothly after your storage tanks for gas and light oil filled up. (Your factory needs to consume gas and light oil in usual vanilla factorio amounts and ratios for that to work. Which is what you want, I assume. So don't stop your factory and wait for your storages for gas, LO and HO to fill. Just keep your factory going. After being rocky in the beginning, it will smooth out eventually.)

After having this initial working solution, a player usually wants to build more efficiently and then realises that exactly calculating the required number of refineries and chem plants for a given amount of required products is "impossible" or can jsut be achieved via trial and error. It is possible though. It just needs a certain mathematical method to solve it. Luckily there are a lot of calculators around which do that for the player. Also players facilitate circuitry for a finer grained and more efficient control over AOP and cracking.

Easy to use calculators are:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/factoryplanner
and
https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... ricant:r:1

[5thHorseman]

I do a fairly bad job of explaining it all in one of my videos, but I do get 3 things exactly right:

• What the ratios are (roughly 8 refineries, 2 heavy cracking, and 7 light cracking is an imperfect ratio but is very good for a first stab)
• How you can tell what the ratios are from the information in the game.
• That it's a huge pain to figure out.

I start talking numbers 7:20 in at this handy link: https://youtu.be/yJPuJjnSos0?t=440

[Hannu]

This may not be a question.
But it's been an amazing ride all the way until i reach the Oil and advanced oils section of the game play and i lost all my apatite to play.
40 hours and i love each one of them but i can't understand how to make oil run with no problem without using these circuits.

Why you can not use circuits? Circuit control of vanilla refinery is super simple and works flawlessly. You put heavy oil to a tank. Take what you need without condition and pump excess to cracking plants if level is >75 %.
Then you put light oil to tank (from refineries and cracking plants). Use what you need without conditions and pump excess to cracking if level > 75 %. You need very little storage. One tank per product is enough for 20 refineries. Many youtubers make strange conditions which take lubricant or petroleum gas into account or make huge storages with ten tanks per product but it is absolutely futile. This system works from beginning to absolute megabase level. At very high throughput you have to use parallel pipes etc and then it is better to make parallel units.

If you do not want or calculate exact numbers of cracking plants or use other's calculations, just put enough. If some product jams the system put more crackers. Too many crackers do not cause any harm.

Am i the only one who hate this section of the game?

You are not the only one. I read from somewhere that most players stop at oil refining. In my opinion it is best part in vanilla game. It is the only thing there is several output products and I need circuits and thinking. Actually I prefer mods which make such things far more complex. Angel's oil refining is my favorite.

Should i just copy a blueprint to remove a rather unpleasant part of the game?

Why not if you do not really like it but think that Factorio is otherwise interesting and entertaining game. Video games are entertainment for most players and not real world achievements. In my opinion, if you really want to compete against other humans and achieve things our world give much better options in real life. Both productive for yourself and generally good for all people. But if course competitive gaming is OK too if someone feels so.

My "sin" is to use commands to clear biter nests. It is too tedious to conquer tens of square kilometers with "honest" methods (even with spidertron) but I want that defense gives production and logistical needs at late game. So I do not want to play without biters. They are just annoying when I need huge area at late midgame for my "realistic like" railworld.

[samy01]

The thing about oil is that it seems very out of place for this game as if it was designed with a very different mindset for an entirely different game.

in other system in this game do we have to jump these hoops in order to get the product and it can still get errors.
Actually the good thing about factorio is that you can solve different problems with different methods but not fluids which must be solved with very precises method or else your entire setup fails.

I made a setup earlier that i did copy and though i copied it very very closely "may be missing a refinery or 2 at max" and the whole system shut down you know why?
I needed to add extra 3 pumps because the light out didn't reach the entire cracking setup only the first chem plant.

I love the game and all aspects of it but this is not done right in my noob opinion.

[Hannu]

The thing about oil is that it seems very out of place for this game as if it was designed with a very different mindset for an entirely different game.

What do you mean? Liquids and oil refining with 3 products have been very long time part of the game.

in other system in this game do we have to jump these hoops in order to get the product and it can still get errors.
Actually the good thing about factorio is that you can solve different problems with different methods but not fluids which must be solved with very precises method or else your entire setup fails.

There is options with oil refining too. In addition to circuit control you can produce solid fuel from excess products. Probably other options too.

[jodokus31]

I love the game and all aspects of it but this is not done right in my noob opinion.

It's done perfectly ok. It's just the next level: Multiple outputs (or by-products), which seems to screw over so many people.
Honestly, this is the point, where things get interesting for many of us. If you have a look at Angels mods or pyanodon, this is the main aspect and it gets very, very complicated.
But it's ok, if you don't like that part, you can just grab a blueprint from internet or install a mod.

[Serenity]

I needed to add extra 3 pumps because the light out didn't reach the entire cracking setup only the first chem plant.

Fluids can be a bit screwy sometimes, but it's not that bad. You usually only run into throughput issues on very large late game setups. Otherwise you only need pumps for flow control and (un)loading trains. You can build decently sized beaconed setups (meaning they are very fast and consume a lot) without extra pumps.

It helps to use underground pipes everywhere you can. They only count as a single pipe which improves flow. They also make connecting everything up a lot easier and allow you to walk almost everywhere

[Illiou]

As others have pointed out, a simple oil setup can be done by just cracking any excess output, i.e. heavy oil -> light oil -> petroleum gas, which works because petroleum gas is usually what you need most of (compared to the output you get).

I needed to add extra 3 pumps because the light out didn't reach the entire cracking setup only the first chem plant.

Though when it comes to the algorithm which determines how the fluid spreads through the pipes, that one is definitely very... dodgy, let's say. They worked on improving it once but it apparently caused a lot of trouble and headache and so it was put into backlog, where it likely resides until today.

[samy01]

It seems i need to practice more with this system.

[MassiveDynamic]

Just think of tanks as large pipes instead of large storage vessels.
Fluid is distributed evenly through all connected pipes (including tanks). So if you have 50/100 units in a pipe you will have 12500/25000 in a connected tank ... over time.
Use pumps to push fluids from one pipe network to the next, so that the pipes (pipe network) before the pump will be emptied into the pipes after the pump.

Experiment with it using water since water is free, you can use the flush button to discard the water during experimentation.

[Laie]

It seems i need to practice more with this system.

Wise words.

I have no sense or feeling for what is going on in my refinery. The good news is that I don't really need to know. Circuit network shenanigans ensure that I always have enough light and heavy oil left over to make solid/rocket fuel and lubricant, everything else is turned into petroleum gas, and when the factory as a whole outgrows the capacity of the refinery, this becomes quite visible as a lack of plastic.

At that point, I just add more buildings to the refinery and that's that.

Hold on. Perhaps I should explain....

This here hot mess is the core part of my refinery. It's essentially the first refinery I ever made, with the blueprint copied from game to game. I think a key part of the design is that it is extensible: there's repeating patterns for the refinery buildings, light and heavy oil splitters, so adding more of these from blueprint is easy. This comes at the price that all of the petroleum gas coming out of the refinery has to go through a single pipe. Some day, that might become a bottleneck.

I circled the circuit network stuff that toggles light/heavy oil cracking. I set it up with hysteresis: once switched on, it will run for a while until the off condition is met. That makes for a distinct pattern in the production stats, which has been quite useful on the (few) occasions when I wanted to know what's going on.



See? That tells me that my Heavy Oil Cracking is well-utilized, while Light Oil Cracking has noticeable downtimes. This will influence how many of which building I am going to add when the time comes to grow the refinery yet again.

About that bottleneck, and scale in general: I'm currently consuming 5k iron plates and 6k copper plates / minute, and 14k petroleum gas to go with it. That single pipe will become a bottleneck when everything else has grown about sixfold: not gonna happen, or certainly not anytime soon.

[astroshak]

Advanced Oil Processing produces, per refinery, 5 Heavy Oil/sec, 9 Light Oil/sec, and 11 Petroleum Gas/sec. If you have 10 refineries doing AOP, guess what? That’s 50 HO/sec, 90 LO/sec, 110 PG/sec.

It takes 40 HO/2sec to produce 30 LO/2sec. In other words, it takes 20 HO/sec to make 15 LO/sec. It takes 30 LO/2sec to make 20 PG/2sec; so similarly to the HO->LO cracking, it takes 15 LO/sec to make 10 PG/sec.

If you have 20 AOP refineries making 100 HO/sec, 180 LO/sec, and 220 PG/sec, how many cracking facilities do you need? Assume that you are going to take all the HO and make lube with it, you will eventually have enough Lube that all 100 HO/sec will be cracked. 100/sec / 20/sec = 5 chem plants cracking HO->LO.
Assume also that you are going to be using all the LO to make Solid Fuel and Rocket Fuel, but that like Lube, eventually you will have enough that all the LO you produce needs to be cracked to PG. 5 chem plants cracking HO->LO is worth 15 LO/sec each, or 75 LO/sec. That plus the 180 LO/sec from the AOP refineries gets 255 LO/sec. 255/sec / 15/sec = 17 chem plants cracking LO->PG.

Those 17 LO->PG cracking chem plants make 170 PG/sec, combined with the 220 PG/sec from the refineries for 390 PG/sec in total. That’s a decent amount.

[starlinvf]

The thing about oil is that it seems very out of place for this game as if it was designed with a very different mindset for an entirely different game.

in other system in this game do we have to jump these hoops in order to get the product and it can still get errors.
Actually the good thing about factorio is that you can solve different problems with different methods but not fluids which must be solved with very precises method or else your entire setup fails.

Not really. The only major conceptual difference is that you use pipes instead of belts; which makes them only slightly unwieldy for a badly spaced factory. Outside of that the processes are identical. Source material in, product out. Stalling works exactly the same with belts, as does the input starvation problem. The only reason you think its different is due to AOP having 3 outputs to handle instead of one.

And if you think this is a problem now? Wait until you get to Yellow science packs, and the copper consumption ratios to keep one product line from starving half the factory.

I made a setup earlier that i did copy and though i copied it very very closely "may be missing a refinery or 2 at max" and the whole system shut down you know why?
I needed to add extra 3 pumps because the light out didn't reach the entire cracking setup only the first chem plant.

Screen shot? I have a theory, but won't call it out until can at least see it.