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so, after playing for a rediculas amount of time I've come to absolutely hate light oil... it isn't needed in enough things that work forward, I understand its place and that it does have some use (TURN IT INTO SOLID FUEL AND BURN IT) but once I get to the point where I have 2000 of each robot I simply don't use enough of it to stop it from blocking up petroleum and heavy oil production, it almost always leads back to light oil as I tend to do a mental breakdown of the issue
Why are their no batteries?
because their is no sulfuric acid, Why is there no sulfuric acid?
because their is no petroleum, Why is there no petroleum?
BECAUSE LIGHT OIL IS A BUTTFACE

I absolutely ADORE the game and everything it has to offer. except light oil.
thank you so much for your wonderful game, now... back to slaughtering mass amounts of biters

Just dump it all into solid fuel, you'll need tons of it for rocket fuel.

I also find light oil really finicky. Since I'm too lazy to set up a combinator contraption, I always end up with too much or too little light oil.

Crack it into a gas.
Now, thanks to combinators, we can atomate the whole process of balancing the oil production.

You can pump it straight to steam engines. As long as there's consumer connected to those engines, the liquid will be consumed. You may even put boilers there, but that would decrease the rate of consumption as engines would work below maximal available performance.

hitzu wrote:Crack it into a gas.
Now, thanks to combinators, we can atomate the whole process of balancing the oil production.

but... i'm lazy... if you ever get the chance to look at my factory its never "OH thats fancy and looks nice" you look at it and think "well... i suppose it works... kinda"

All it takes is a small pump & enough wires to hook up the tanks to the combinator & the combinator to the pump. It's hundreds of times harder to make blue science than to put a control for cracking in.

slightly off topic ...

vampiricdust wrote:All it takes is a small pump & enough wires to hook up the tanks to the combinator & the combinator to the pump. It's hundreds of times harder to make blue science than to put a control for cracking in.

I do not get the method. As I recall, the rafineries produce all 3 sorts of oil simultanly. How can I get, even with combinators, stop the production of 1 type of oil? Can someone explain this to me? Maybe with an save, where such a thing is set up? I am too dumb to use combinators

Phillip_Lynx wrote:slightly off topic ...

vampiricdust wrote:All it takes is a small pump & enough wires to hook up the tanks to the combinator & the combinator to the pump. It's hundreds of times harder to make blue science than to put a control for cracking in.

I do not get the method. As I recall, the rafineries produce all 3 sorts of oil simultanly. How can I get, even with combinators, stop the production of 1 type of oil? Can someone explain this to me? Maybe with an save, where such a thing is set up? I am too dumb to use combinators

https://youtu.be/2Vpejj292X4?t=1112
You use chemical plants to crack the oil into the others. I just did a combinator tutorial about them and I happen to show how I do one of my factory's oil control.

Phillip_Lynx wrote:slightly off topic ...

vampiricdust wrote:All it takes is a small pump & enough wires to hook up the tanks to the combinator & the combinator to the pump. It's hundreds of times harder to make blue science than to put a control for cracking in.

I do not get the method. As I recall, the rafineries produce all 3 sorts of oil simultanly. How can I get, even with combinators, stop the production of 1 type of oil? Can someone explain this to me? Maybe with an save, where such a thing is set up? I am too dumb to use combinators

chemical plant set to crack light into petroleum feed in water and light oil pull out petroleum.

You can hook a wire from the light oil tank to a pump feeding the plant and only let the pump be active if light-oil > 1000

This is how it works for me:

Crude oil is splitted into three types. What you really, really need in the end is petroleum gas and a very small bit of heavy oil.

This works without making solid fuel to get rid of it. With productivity modules it is also the most efficient way, to convert first everything into petroleum gas. See https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =18&t=7057

#1 Making lubricant:
Place two fuel tanks. Put the heavy oil into the first and take that from this first tank to produce lubricant (short pipes! Or use a small pump, so that the preference is clear!). Connect with the second tank. Take the heavy oil from the second tank to produce light oil. This guarantees, that you always have enough lubricant without complex logic.

#2 Making light oil from heavy oil:
For three or better two refineries we need 1 chemical plant.

#3 Making petroleum gas from light oil:
For one refinery we need 1, better 2 or maybe 3 chemical plants! (depends on how much you already have stored)
This makes sure, that the light oil can be all converted. If you don't catch up, the whole refinery-process will stock.
So you need more chemical plants, than refineries to catch up with the production to convert everything to petroleum gas!

And there is also the possibility to "fire" the light oil into steam engines: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... eam_engine
"Using other liquids?".

This could be automated: If light-oil tank is full, open a small pump and put it into a steam engine. Maybe you can heat it before, then it will also produce energy.

@ssilk - with 0.12 you need *a lot* of rocket fuel, which means a lot of solid fuel. Since solid fuel is most efficiently made from light oil, you end up needing a lot of light oil.

It is true that before 0.12 you only really needed petroleum (and tiny amounts of heavy oil for lubricant), but this has changed now, and I sometimes find myself having to get rid of petroleum to make room for light oil!

Ah. Yes. I haven't played 0.12 so much yet.
I thought it is more efficient to use petroleum gas to produce solid fuel. I think I need to rethink the strategy for my current game.

... The less I understand the problem here ...

And the setup for the lubricant still works like so.

I've been using pumps to control cracking stations for heavy->light and light->gas. It doesn't even need combinators, since I can test the level of storage tanks in the pumps directly.

I've also got a pump-controlled plant turning gas into solid fuel for the times when gas was backed up. That only happened when I was making rocket fuel.

The other thing that can put a big demand on solid fuel is if you have a lot of steam engines for reserve power and you don't have a circuit prioritizing power out of accumulators.

Petroleum Gas to Solid Fuel gives you 1 SF per 2 Petroleum Gas.
Light Oil to Solid Fuel gives you 1 SF per 1 Light Oil
Heavy Oil to Solid Fuel gives you 1 SF per 2 Heavy Oil

HO -> LO cracking gives 3 LO per 4 HO
LO -> PG cracking gives 2 PG per 3 LO

So, if you start with 1 unit for each, you would get -
HO:
Straight Solid fuel: 0.5
LO => SF: 0.75
LO => PG => SF: 0.25

LO:
SF: 1
PG => SF: 0.33

PG:
SF: 0.5

So if you need Solid Fuel you should convert Heavy to Light, but _avoid_ converting light to Petroleum.

Edit: math, hard.

sillyfly wrote:Petroleum Gas to Solid Fuel gives you 1 SF per 2 Petroleum Gas.
Light Oil to Solid Fuel gives you 1 SF per 1 Light Oil
Heavy Oil to Solid Fuel gives you 1 SF per 2 Heavy Oil

HO -> LO cracking gives 3 LO per 4 HO
LO -> PG cracking gives 2 PG per 3 LO

So, if you start with 1 unit for each, you would get -
HO:
Straight Solid fuel: 0.5
LO => SF: 0.75
LO => PG => SF: 0.375

LO:
SF: 1
PG => SF: 0.33

PG:
SF: 0.5

So if you need Solid Fuel you should convert Heavy to Light, but _avoid_ converting light to Petroleum.

There is still nothing stopping you from converting your excess petroleum to solid fuel

Yes, but it is better to store it as Light Oil if you will need it to be Solid Fuel later.
I was just answering ssilk:

ssilk wrote:I thought it is more efficient to use petroleum gas to produce solid fuel.

SuperObeseNinja wrote:

hitzu wrote:Crack it into a gas.
Now, thanks to combinators, we can atomate the whole process of balancing the oil production.

but... i'm lazy... if you ever get the chance to look at my factory its never "OH thats fancy and looks nice" you look at it and think "well... i suppose it works... kinda"

Well if you are lazy then there's nobody that can really help you and I don't see why the behavior should be changed because of that.

Just place enough chemplants cracking the lightoil into petroleum gas and be done with it. Since you don't need it anyways like you said you don't even need to fiddle around with circuit logic stuff to implement conditional cracking. The old fashioned way of cracking everything should solve your problem, if you get around and quit being lazy that is.



And about the combinators for conditional cracking... what the hell. Why would one ever need such a contraption. Just hook up the tank sensor directly to the pumps and set the pumps to work only if a certain threshold of liquid is reached, so they work like an overflow valve. No need for complex contraptions. Don't know why people all of a sudden try to do everything in the most complex way possible (and thereby being prone to errors) just because combinators are a thing.



That's what one of my current setups looks like:
On the left I've basically tanks that are connected with the outputs of a certain liquid and serve to store each liquid in a central spot.

1) The Heavy Oil only gets cracked into light oil if there's at least >1900 heavy oil in the heavy oil tanks. The pump that pumps the heavy oil to the lubricant plant works always (unconditionally).

2) The Light Oil only gets cracked into petroleum if there's at least >1900 light oil in the light oil tanks. The pump that pumps the light oil to the solid fuel plant works basically always (unconditionally), since I'm only using steam engines and I need the solid fuel.

3) The Petroleum Gas only gets pumped to the solid fuel plant if there's >1900 petroleum gas in the petroleum gas tanks. The pump that pumps the Petroleum Gas to all the other industries that need Petroleum gas basically works always (unconditionally).

If something still stalls, then it's easily to put some more chemplants there and add some additional cracking without changing anything on the pump conditions.

(I know I haven't enough plants cracking light oil into petroleum gas, but as you can see the patch of coal is in the way and I try to mine that first. Also since I'm using up most of the light oil anyways as solid fuel there's not really much to be cracked currently, which is basically displayed with the lights at the light oil tanks as being "empty". Yeah, the lights represent how much is in the tanks.)

The above shown setup is perfectly balanced to serve a 240 MW steam powerplant almost without wasting a single drop of oil (altough it would need 4 additional light-to-petroleum cracking plants to get rid of the light oil in case the power plant isn't fully used).

MeduSalem wrote:No need for complex contraptions. Don't know why people all of a sudden try to do everything in the most complex way possible (and thereby being prone to errors) just because combinators are a thing.

It's the mindset. Factorio is about building ridiculously large, complicated factories. Of course anyone who enjoyst Factorio is going to at least think about doing stuff in the most complex way possible. You know this first hand - otherwise why would you be building a 6-track station just for smelting ore? Why tinker with how you might build an 8-way intersection even though you don't need one?

In some ways, oil processing is one of the most fiddly bits of Factorio, because the entire process grinds to a halt if you hit your storage limit for any of the three products. It's the only materials handling line where producing a surplus is a problem, a problem that can halt other production lines.

There's no real risk in cracking heavy oil, because demand for lubricant is quite low. The demand for solid fuel can spike, though, both because of rocket fuel, and if you're using it for steam power. Electricity is an open-ended demand. So you might want that light oil later.

There's a case to be made for making cracking of light oil to gas conditional on both a surplus of light oil and a shortage of gas. Usually gas is very much in demand, but I've had my refining shut down because I had too much. I haven't done this, but I can understand why you might.

Gus_Smedstad wrote:It's the mindset. Factorio is about building ridiculously large, complicated factories. Of course anyone who enjoyst Factorio is going to at least think about doing stuff in the most complex way possible. You know this first hand - otherwise why would you be building a 6-track station just for smelting ore? Why tinker with how you might build an 8-way intersection even though you don't need one?

In some ways, oil processing is one of the most fiddly bits of Factorio, because the entire process grinds to a halt if you hit your storage limit for any of the three products. It's the only materials handling line where producing a surplus is a problem, a problem that can halt other production lines.

There's no real risk in cracking heavy oil, because demand for lubricant is quite low. The demand for solid fuel can spike, though, both because of rocket fuel, and if you're using it for steam power. Electricity is an open-ended demand. So you might want that light oil later.

There's a case to be made for making cracking of light oil to gas conditional on both a surplus of light oil and a shortage of gas. Usually gas is very much in demand, but I've had my refining shut down because I had too much. I haven't done this, but I can understand why you might.

Okay that's true, so I'll give you that point, it highly depends on the mindset. I guess that making it overly complex is something one can do if one is already a decent expert at the game and while discussing it in expert threads which go above and beyond the necessary stuff, but I think it's not something I'd recommend one should do when trying to explain it to a newcomer trying to figure out the easiest way to implement a stall-resistant oil industry. That's what I actually meant with stuff being presented overly complex recently. The difference between absolutely necessary to make it work and pure shenanigans. xD

And somehow I haven't experienced gas shortage yet... I always seem to have too much of it, but maybe that's because I'm not trying to build 1-minute-rocketdefense and similar stuff.

Phillip_Lynx wrote:I do not get the method. As I recall, the rafineries produce all 3 sorts of oil simultanly. How can I get, even with combinators, stop the production of 1 type of oil? Can someone explain this to me? Maybe with an save, where such a thing is set up? I am too dumb to use combinators

You even don't need combinators. Just connect all you tanks with gas, light oil and heavy oil using colored wires with two pumps that transfer light and heavy oil into cracking refineries. Set light oil pump the condition to work if there is more light oil than gas and same for heavy oil. So the cracking process will work only if you have lack of gas.