Factorio Forums

Hi there,

I play with settings that give very large oil field (30+ per field) and I was wondering if there are better ways or mods to exploid such fields rather than annoyingly setting up all the pumps, then pipes, beacons and power supply by hand...

I know it's part of the game experience and all, but I'm trying something on this map and got annoyed by this.

Ideas?

Nope! Not to my mind. All fields are different so you gotto do it by hand the hard way.

Given the oil yield you get from such fields, I find that part fun.


And trying to get the max number of beacons even more fun.

Maybe you could spawn a square shaped periodical oil fields with a console command and use bots to set pumping equipment.

If you do not do an extreme megabase and use the speed modules and beacons to speed up the oil production, you should not need an insane number of oil wells. I like large random oil fields and have installed more than 900 pumpjacks by hand in my current game.

Well, that's why I'm asking ^^
I don't code, but is it possible to write a mod for this? I guess that should go into mod suggestion...

There was an old mod called "alien oil" that allowed you to move oil wells, not sure if it's been updated for the latest factorio

I don't find this to be too much of an issue as you need to manually set up all the pipes anyway. Sometimes the hardest part is finding all the patches, especially if they were under a lot of trees you've just cut down.

Bots aren't an answer for two reasons, first of all how do you create the blueprint? You can't lay them in a grid to take the blueprint in the first place. Secondly even if you could do that, an oil patch is 1x1 and the pumpjack is 3x3, so you'd need to wave it around anyway.

True it would be nice if we had an option, perhaps an Upgrade Planner could detect oil fields and automatically upgrade them to pumpjacks.

optiTOP wrote:Well, that's why I'm asking ^^
I don't code, but is it possible to write a mod for this? I guess that should go into mod suggestion...

If it's too annoying and you're willing to mod the problem away, are you OK with just outright cheating with a console command? You can set the richness of a single oil patch to some really high number (wave mouse over oil patch, and I think " /c game.player.selected.amount=100000000 "), and then you can just stick a single pumpjack on it and it should just deliver whatever the max throughput of the pipe worth of crude oil is.

Once I start trying to build my megabase and I'm on iron deposit #4 and copper deposit #3 and the first outposts are drying up already, I tend to just say "screw it" and console hack in giant deposits that will never run out and neverending oil patches (because at some point, constantly expanding those resources because your old ones are running low is more of a hassle and less of a challenge).

Deadly-Bagel wrote:Sometimes the hardest part is finding all the patches, especially if they were under a lot of trees you've just cut down.

Main reason why I research the flame thrower quite early. Nothing clears forests like a bit of fire.

cheating by lula commands is taking out the real fun out of the game.

Daid wrote:

Deadly-Bagel wrote:Sometimes the hardest part is finding all the patches, especially if they were under a lot of trees you've just cut down.

Main reason why I research the flame thrower quite early. Nothing clears forests like a bit of fire.

Do flamethrowers burn grass tufts as well? Trees are annoying, but I REALLY hate when they are hiding under grass...

I think Concrete might kill it. If not, try coating the ground with assemblers.

No really, various doodads get removed when you place assemblers, and presumably other buildings.


Honestly, I love trying to exploit large oil fields. for small ones, you can generally get the oil out easily without reducing potential beacon coverage. For the massive 10-20 splotches, you place them down, then place the beacons, then try to attach all the pipes to a singe outgoing line.

Make a blueprint with a pumpjack pumping directly into a barreling assembler, with a requester+provider chest. Just sprinkle this all over. Now you don't have to deal with pipes at all, instead your robots can carry the oil to the train station! And no(*) downsides!

(*) Except that it doesn't work if fields are too close, probably cannot fit many beacons, wastes a lot of energy on assemblers and roboport, and gets really annoying when you rotate the blueprint so the assembler is in a corner where you cannot output oil.