Factorio Forums

I'm asking for a pretty "useless" new building: An oil burner.

Input: crude oil, heavy oil, light oil or butane gas (optionally wood or coal, anything flammable would do)
Output: nothing
Effect: Use up excess burnables, look pretty (, pollute a lot)

The reason I ask for this is that when you get oil processing you need to split the crude oil and use up all 3 parts of it or the refinery stops. And there is nothing to do with light oil for example. Little use for heavy oil too. But major use for the gas. So what to do with the excess parts you don't need? Maybe you have no steel for a large tank farm or simply no space. Burning off the excess would be simple to do.

There's a mod for that: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/GotLag/Flare%20Stack

Could always pipe it into flamethrower turrets and fling it at biters.

Or turn it into solid fuel blocks, then use these to power your vehicles. Maybe burn off the extra in a steam engine once you have a huge stockpile for making rocket fuel.

Hopefully the next update includes fluid handling revisions to make it much easier to distribute unwanted oil product to the flamethrower turrets.


Also the best thing you should be doing with unwanted oil product is cracking it down to gas, and then using the gas to mass produce plastic and sulfuric acid.

A steam engine will consume any liquid, even unheated.

No need to change anything but more documentation.

Wow, lots of good ideas.

Except for the flame thrower / solid fuel one. Obviously at the stage where you don't want the excess oil you don't have those or they wouldn't be excess.

Radioactive Pretzels wrote:A steam engine will consume any liquid, even unheated.

Whawawaaaaat??!?! I never even thought of attempting to feed anything but water to a steam engine. The thought never crossed my mind.

The way i handle the oil system is using the break down factory's which get toggled by a combinator if there is a shortage.

For example the breakdown factory from benzine to gas get's toggled when gas is below 500 in the nearby tank.
If benzine is lower then 500 the breakdown factory's get toggled that use the thick oil to make benzine.

everything is always at decent levels, unless there is a shortage of crude oil itself.

Pretty much a waste to burn it.

Mendel wrote:

Radioactive Pretzels wrote:A steam engine will consume any liquid, even unheated.

Whawawaaaaat??!?! I never even thought of attempting to feed anything but water to a steam engine. The thought never crossed my mind.

You think that's crazy? Notice that a boiler also takes any liquid. You can drive a steam engine with heated oil (that even produces energy, right?).

But hey, maybe cracking heated crude oil works better than cold oil. Pipe the oil through a boiler before entering the refinery. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have any effect in the refinery.

Arcania85 wrote:The way i handle the oil system is using the break down factory's which get toggled by a combinator if there is a shortage.

For example the breakdown factory from benzine to gas get's toggled when gas is below 500 in the nearby tank.
If benzine is lower then 500 the breakdown factory's get toggled that use the thick oil to make benzine.

everything is always at decent levels, unless there is a shortage of crude oil itself.

Pretty much a waste to burn it.

Hmm, once I had the tech I went the other way. I switched on the conversion if the source was above 500. What I saw was that the pump would flick on for short times every other seconds or so. Didn't have the will to add in a hysteresis circuit so it switches on at 500 and off at 400.

Did you see the same behaviour using the result instead of the source as trigger?

Im not sure if i made a hysteresis on it, ill have to check it after work.

I did make a second command that also started the conversion from benzine to gas if there was more then 2000 benzine stocked.
But thats just to keep the oil factories running untill all the different storage types where filled in time of great production, typicly when I've just added a new oil field before the yield dwindeld

I would like to see something for destroying unused oil. Like you only use the red oil, so you need to get rid of the other two. You would just connect them to special entity, that just burns them and create pollution. Like that you will use only type of oil you will need.

Just pipe it into a steam engine to void it.
If you add a burner you get electricity as a bonus.

Wait can you burn the liquid you are passing though a burner?

I've never had a scenario where I needed more heavy oil than petroleum except playing Bob's Mods (which has a gas voider). The only things that really use it are transport belts and electric engine products.

Turn excess light oil and petroleum into solid fuel, you need 10,000 for the rocket anyway and if you manage that and are STILL using way more heavy oil I'd question how you're playing the game.

Nich wrote:Wait can you burn the liquid you are passing though a burner?

Nope. Burners heat liquids up. Steam engines turn hot liquids into electricity. All of them, not just water.

At least unless they fixed it.

I personally store unneeded liquids in tanks before advanced oil processing, after that it becomes a non-issue.

Drury wrote:

Nich wrote:Wait can you burn the liquid you are passing though a burner?

Nope. Burners heat liquids up. Steam engines turn hot liquids into electricity. All of them, not just water.

At least unless they fixed it.

I personally store unneeded liquids in tanks before advanced oil processing, after that it becomes a non-issue.

This is the way to go. Either store light and heavy oil in tanks, or turn into solid fuel. Once you have advanced refining, set up chemical plants as cracking units to break it all down to petrol with a little light and heavy kept in reserve for flamethrowers and lubricant.


If you really do want to void liquids, there's a mod for that:

Flare Stacks.

Please consider adding the ability to flare unused petrol products. Of course it would create excess pollution but would allow players to better balance the oil refining element.

If you cannot balance liquid production by conversion, make solid fuel. It is extremely easy and better than pollution.

No offence here, just my humble opinion.