Factorio Forums

I came back to playing Factorio after almost a year away, and am pleased to see the new look and upgrades!

My questions are 1) I cant find oil cracking, I researched advanced oil processing and when I planted a refinery, no options for the cracking came up. I could really use the hydos, so did they remove it? Or is there another way to get to it?

And 2) - I have several refineries all processing plastic (3 chem plants of it and 2 refineries supplying them, both with a ton of oil each), and the 1st one is hardly producing it, the other two are producing it just fine. All the chem labs have 4 tanks as well as producing solid fuels from the tanks, so its pumping very normally. Why would the plastic go so slow, when there is plenty of oil and the other oils are pumping normally? My blue science is crawling to a halt because of it, I dont want to keep making more plastic setups if there is a way i can fix it.

Thanks....

UPDATE - I Did find the cracking - it was on the Chem lad - i was looking on the refinery.!! Now only if I could understand the plastic issue!

Oil cracking is done in chemical plants, not refineries (EDIT: I see you found oil cracking on your own while I was typing this up )

As for your other problem, your ratios are incorrect - With advanced oil processing AND cracking all your light and heavy oil into petroleum, you still need FIVE refineries for every THREE plastic or sulfur plants if you want them to run at full speed. This was the neatest ratio I could work out, but obviously it doesn't enable you to make any solid fuel. The refineries are actually very slow, they can only process 2 crude oil per second. Something else that might be a problem is that the refinery will stop refining if any one of its outputs are full, so check you are using up light/heavy oil at a fast enough rate.

Hogweed wrote:And 2) - I have several refineries all processing plastic (3 chem plants of it and 2 refineries supplying them, both with a ton of oil each), and the 1st one is hardly producing it, the other two are producing it just fine. All the chem labs have 4 tanks as well as producing solid fuels from the tanks, so its pumping very normally.

It's unclear to me exactly what you're saying. Partly because you're mixing terms all over the place, refineries don't produce plastic, chem labs do, and plastic isn't made directly from any form of oil, it's made from natural gas and coal. When you say the "chem labs have 4 tanks," are the tanks full of gas, or something else? If you're producing solid fuels, maybe you're producing them from one of the other products, such as light oil, and while you have a surplus of that, maybe you still have a shortage of gas?

As I said, you're not very clear on what exactly is happening. However, it's probably something that's easy enough to diagnose. Any time you run into a production problem, open the factory (or chem lab in this case) to see what it's doing. It should be one of three things:

1) It's going as fast as it can, the progress bar is always moving.
2) There's a shortage of input materials. In the case of plastics, this is coal and gas. Is one of them continually running low?
2 a) sometimes input shortages are due to inserters not moving items into the assembler / chem lab fast enough. Not a problem with gas, obviously.
3) The output is backed up. Sometimes an assembler / chem lab produces stuff faster than you're removing it to put on a belt or into a box.

3) is often a problem with refineries, since there are 3 products. If you don't have any more storage for light oil or heavy oil, oil refining will shut down even if you have crude oil to refine. In that case, you need to use the other products - the usual way is either to convert to solid fuel, or crack the oils to other products. Even so, if you're not using it up fast enough (for solid fuel or cracking), refining might still be limited.

Wow - 5 to 3 on refineries!! Ok - I can do that - I guess I can run 2 or 3 refineries off 1 oil driller. But that is ridiculous amount of the heavy and light oils to deal with. I usually make sold fuel with the extra, but how much do I really need? Wish they had some incinerator you could send a belt too!! I guess I use the robots to feed everything and rarely use coal then... But thank you for the info, I will try 5 refineries and see if the plastic goes faster. Just aint lookin forward to the mess of piping!

Gus_Smedstad wrote: It's unclear to me exactly what you're saying. Partly because you're mixing terms all over the place, refineries don't produce plastic, chem labs do, and plastic isn't made directly from any form of oil, it's made from natural gas and coal. When you say the "chem labs have 4 tanks," are the tanks full of gas, or something else? If you're producing solid fuels, maybe you're producing them from one of the other products, such as light oil, and while you have a surplus of that, maybe you still have a shortage of gas?


1) It's going as fast as it can, the progress bar is always moving.
2) There's a shortage of input materials. In the case of plastics, this is coal and gas. Is one of them continually running low?
2 a) sometimes input shortages are due to inserters not moving items into the assembler / chem lab fast enough. Not a problem with gas, obviously.
3) The output is backed up. Sometimes an assembler / chem lab produces stuff faster than you're removing it to put on a belt or into a box.

3) is often a problem with refineries, since there are 3 products. If you don't have any more storage for light oil or heavy oil, oil refining will shut down even if you have crude oil to refine. In that case, you need to use the other products - the usual way is either to convert to solid fuel, or crack the oils to other products. Even so, if you're not using it up fast enough (for solid fuel or cracking), refining might still be limited.

I thought I was very clear "I have several refineries all processing plastic (3 chem plants of it and 2 refineries supplying them"
I am sure it is not a backup issue, both oils of one refinery are filling tanks, one is cracking both oils, and the 3rd refinery is making sold fuel. I will be converting over to lube soon as well.
It is not the coal, as I dropped a 100 stack in it and no change. It is gas, I have 2 refineries supplying 3 chemlads of plastic, so i guess the ratio is poor, I see that I need to flood the gas into the plastic creating chemlab with a higher ratio of refineries. I am now cracking light oil into 4 storage tanks and will try to feed those tanks into another chemlab making plastic, after I route in the coal.

Thanks for the insights - I will certainly be making use of them, the whole Oil Processing has always been a touch and go to me, esp with all the piping just make it a bit more confusing!

The output of the pumpjacks will vary depending on the yeild of the oil patch, but they have a maximum output of 10 oil/s, so you could potentially run five refineries with a single pumpjack. Also: the 5:3 ratio requires you to crack all of your heavy and light oil into petroleum at the same rate that you produce it, and I haven't worked out how many plants that will take. And then if you want to make solid fuel or lubricant later, you'll need to build more refineries for that. So basically you need a lot more refineries than you expect because they are the slowest part of the system

Wow - thats a bit much to digest, but I see where it is going. I think varying most of the heavy & Light oils will help. But I found a great way to get a ton of plastic very fast.I think I have been working with a simple method that 1 refinery can handle many chemlabs with no slowdowns.

I took the Light oil and cracked it down to the petroleum Gas. I am loading all that gas into a set of 4 tanks, and from these I have several Chemlabs running plastic, and they are moving much faster than the plastic Chemlab with gas coming directly from the Refinery.
So that will be my plan, to try to run the plastic from the storage tanks, I am also going to try that with sulfuric acid for the batteries, as they dont run so fast either. I will do the same with the Heavy/Light oils - convert to gas, then use the tanks to make sulfur, etc.. If I need Lube or solid fuels I can also tap off the lines for the oils.

I think doing this can allow me to run up to 6 Chemlabs quickly from just one refinery! I have not gotten there yet, but I am working towards it to see if it works.
But I am sure as Malcomcook said above "With advanced oil processing AND cracking all your light and heavy oil into petroleum, you still need FIVE refineries for every THREE plastic or sulfur plants if you want them to run at full speed" I think that I can get around that easily, as of right now I am running 2 Chemlabs off the tanks that come from just one chemlab cracking light oil to petro gas. When I hook up the refiery petrogas and the heavy oil to light oil to petro gas, i will have 2 more sets of tanks that should each handle 2 chemlabs of plastic. So 6 Chemlabs of plastic running from from 1 refiney running full speed.... I should eventually try it with 3 chemlabs each...

Would like to hear some feedback on this. I will update this later when i try it out. The Sulfuric may take a bit longer.

I always had some production troubles with the whole oil thing, and i now see that using storage tanks can eliminate a lot of the slowdowns I usually face when running straight from the refinery.

Hope this helps someone!!

Hogweed wrote:and they are moving much faster than the plastic Chemlab with gas coming directly from the Refinery.

Yeah, running anything directly from the refinery without a tank to act as a buffer is almost always bad.

You've mentioned "4 tanks" several times now. Generally, that's not helpful. If you're chronically short of gas, lots of extra storage doesn't help. Though maybe you haven't connected the systems, and each refinery has its own separate storage tank? In that case you'll need one tank per system, but usually it makes much more sense just to have one unified Gas pipeline with a single storage tank, maybe 2 at most.

The best ratio for crude oil to petroleum gas is the following:

• 5 refineries with advanced oil processing
• 1 chemical plants with heavy oil cracking to light oil
• 7 chemical plants with light oil cracking to petroleum gas

This outputs 36 petroleum gas every 4 seconds, if the refineries are fully saturated. With this amount you can feed 2.4 chemical plants which produces plastic bars.

Every time I do these calaculations I end up with a different answer...



EDIT: I'm sticking with my original calculations: when cracking all the heavy and light oil down to petroleum, you should get a total of 9 petroleum from every cycle of the refinery.

Advanced oil processing yeilds:
1 heavy oil
4.5 light oil
5.5 petroleum

heavy oil cracking produces 3 light oil for 4 heavy oil. (3/4) x 1 = 0.75 additional light oil each cycle (on average, since oil ect is processed discretely, not continuously). That gives you a total of 5.25 light oil for each refinery cycle. Light oil cracking produces 2 petroleum for every 3 light oil. (2/3) x 5.25 = 3.5 additional petroleum, total of 9 petroleum per cycle.

Each refinery cycle takes 5 seconds, so five refineries can produce 9 petroleum/s. Chem plants making sulphur or plastic use petroleum at a rate of 3 petroleum/s, so you can fully supply 3 chem plants with 5 refineries. So long as you have a small buffer which you allow to fill up first, you should produce petroleum at the same rate that your chem plants consume it.

This is all just going by the recipes, so maybe there is some practical consideration that I'm overlooking.

cruede oil to petroleum gas

• 5 refineries produces 5 heavy oil, 22.5 light oil and 27.5 petroleum gas every 5 seconds
• per second: 1 heavy oil, 4.5 light oil, 5.5 petroleum gas
• per 4 seconds: 4 heavy oil, 18 light oil, 22 petroleum gas
• heavy oil cracking to light oil uses 4 heavy oil and produces 3 light oil every 4 seconds
  (recipe has 5 seconds, but chemical plant has a crafting speed of 1.25)
• per 4 seconds: 21 light oil, 22 petroleum gas
• light oil cracking to petroleum gas uses 3 light oil and produces 2 petroleum gas every 4 seconds
  (recipe has 5 seconds, but chemical plant has a crafting speed of 1.25)
• 7 chemical plants to process 21 light oil to 14 petroleum in parallel
• per 4 seconds: 36 petroleum gas
• per second: 9 petroleum gas

plastic bar production

• per second: 9 petroleum gas
• per 0.8 second: 7.2 petroleum gas
• platstic bar uses 3 petroleum gas (and 1 coal) to produce 2 plastic bars per 0.8 seconds
  (recipe has 1 seconds, but chemical plant has a crafting speed of 1.25)
• 2 chemical plants will be saturated
• 3 chemical plants are utilized by 80%

My plastic bar calculation in the post above was wrong, I corrected it.

gheift wrote:plastic bar production

• per second: 9 petroleum gas
• per 0.8 second: 7.2 petroleum gas
• platstic bar uses 3 petroleum gas (and 1 coal) to produce 2 plastic bars per 0.8 seconds
  (recipe has 1 seconds, but chemical plant has a crafting speed of 1.25)
• 2 chemical plants will be saturated
• 3 chemical plants are utilized by 80%

My plastic bar calculation in the post above was wrong, I corrected it.

Ah thanks, I assumed the crafting speed of chemical plants was 1.

To be honest, I've always just added plants until I reached equilibrium without doing any calculations. At least in part because I was usually quite short of oil, so investing heavily in extra refineries and chem plants for light oil cracking was pointless.

When I played with the Marathon mod, I found myself limited more by refining capacity than oil, so I ended up with a setup very like that, 3 refineries and something like 5-6 chem plants cracking light oil for gas.

I set up my oil production for plastic, I needed a lot. Here is the setup I am using, I have 4 refineries running like 8 plastic chemlabs. The ones connected to the tanks are running very fast, the 2 connected to the refineries are pretty slow, i will work to get them tanked.



image hosting 20mb

I think you do need a lot of refineries, as I had first run out of gas, and had to make almost all the oils crack to gas to keep up. So far the tanks had filled, now they are slowly starting to empty, if they get half way I will add another refinery, trying to keep ti somewhat balanced.

Appreciate any input about if these ratios work, but I have quite a lot plastic being produced, and will need more for more advanced items.

Gus_Smedstad wrote:To be honest, I've always just added plants until I reached equilibrium without doing any calculations. At least in part because I was usually quite short of oil, so investing heavily in extra refineries and chem plants for light oil cracking was pointless.

When I played with the Marathon mod, I found myself limited more by refining capacity than oil, so I ended up with a setup very like that, 3 refineries and something like 5-6 chem plants cracking light oil for gas.

I find when I crack heavy to light and all the light to gas, I can fill up 4 tanks pretty quick and run 6-8 chemlabs off 4 refineries. I then watch the tanks and add either refineries or chemlabs to try to balance them.

To op: I'd check in this order
Enough crude oil available?
Enough power for the refineries?
Enough "storage" for heavy and light oil (tanks and/or chemlabs for cracking)?
When you use storagetanks for petroleum, is there enough pressure for the plastic chemlabs?
Enough coal for the plastic chemlabs?
Enough inserters to put coal into / plastic out of the chemlab?

Something I usually do:
Hook up the storagetanks with my logistic wires to control pumps.
If there is more heavy than light oil, crack it down to light.
Same for light to petroleum.
And an overflow pump that feeds the solid-fuel plants