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Before 0.15, petroleum gas was pretty much the bulk of what you wanted, and you were always cracking your heavy and light oils upwards. 0.15 adjusts the usage considerably and some players find themselves using much larger amounts of heavy or light oil, but there's no way to crack downward. There's coal liquefaction which yields a lot of heavy and light oil, but that requires coal and still isn't perfect for someone who wants pretty much just heavy oil.

My suggestion does not include any new ways to spend the oil, only new ways to get it.

Suggestion: more recipes for oil refinery

Basic Oil Processing is unchanged, it yields 30/30/40 for a total of 100.

Instead of Advanced Oil Processing, there are three types of processing which yield only one type of oil:
Heavy Oil Processing yields 90 heavy oil.
Light Oil Processing yields 80 light oil.
Petroleum Gas Processing yields 70 petroleum gas.
(These might also take more time in the refinery to make up for the time you don't spend cracking.)

Compare this to the currently-existing processing:
If you use Basic Oil Processing and convert all components to petroleum gas, you get 75 petroleum gas.
If you use Advanced Oil Processing and convert all components to petroleum gas, you get 90 petroleum gas.

My suggestion reduces the amount of petroleum gas you can get by a bit. You can still get 75 by cracking from Basic Oil Processing, or you can save factory space and go straight for 70. This means that researching advanced oil processing no longer increases the raw value of your product, instead it gives you more control over the end result. This also means there is no rush to research advanced oil processing and no feeling of loss from not having it.

I don't know about recipes for the refinery which just produce a single type. Seems like it's simplifying things a bit too much.

Adding recipes for condensing lighter fractions to heavier ones keeps the complexity about the same while still addressing the problem.

If you want to try it for yourself, I made a simple mod to do that (https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Roxor128 ... ndensation). Light fraction + coal in, next heavier fraction out. Both unlocked along with the cracking recipes when you research Advanced Oil Processing.

Excess Petroleum can still be turned into Solid Fuel (and by proxy, rocket fuel). The ratio for petroleum to solid fuel is pretty low, so you'd burn off a lot of petroleum quickly by turning it into fuel. If you then have an excess of fuel, just shove the lot of it into some boilers for electricity generation.

But I've not ran into any surplus, at least not after I got plastic and acid production going... what are you using all that heavy oil for? Lubricant for electric engines and belts?

Aeternus wrote:what are you using all that heavy oil for? Lubricant for electric engines and belts?

I'm not, but somebody was.

I once had a base that was needing more light oil than I was getting, and that was before 0.15. I was using the Harder Energy mod and I was turning light oil into solid fuel. I was burning through such large amounts of solid fuel I actually started to turn petroleum gas into solid fuel at one point.