Factorio Forums

Currently, there is no way to remove oil wells in the game.

I thought it would be a good idea to add the ability to set fire to an oil well to fully drain it.
Oil well fires are somewhat common in real life: video.
To put it out, you would just place a pumpjack ontop of it or something.

Pretty sure draining oilfield by burning it would take longer than actually draining it IRL. You can only burn whatever oil comes to the surface naturally after all.

Still, putting an oil patch on fire is a nice idea. It would produce tons of pollution and attract biters, which would be actually useful in certain scenarios.

Lav wrote:
Still, putting an oil patch on fire is a nice idea. It would produce tons of pollution and attract biters, which would be actually useful in certain scenarios.

Not useful for anything in the base game though.

Why would someone want to kill an oil patch? If it's something in modded gameplay, why not mod it?

Also add fire to the coal fields.

Cribbit wrote:Why would someone want to kill an oil patch? If it's something in modded gameplay, why not mod it?

I kill always all ores and other resources under my endgame base and lay clean concrete floors. It is just aesthetics. I do not see any point in waiting hours until everything is mined or burned (if this suggestion is implemented) in situation which there are infinite map full of resources.

Here you can find commands to remove unwanted entities. The name of oil patch is "crude-oil" and other names can be found in prototype files in game folder.
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=35625

Personally, I mine everything out and try to build my base on open ground. I have on occasion found oil wells in the way of my intended design. I would really love to be able to destroy depleted oil patches legitimately one way or another.
Optionally of course, infinite oil wells are good things to keep around, just, sometimes I'd want them gone.

Cribbit wrote: Not useful for anything in the base game though.

Why would someone want to kill an oil patch?

Some people like to have tidy and nice looking bases, and if they are in the way you can do nothing about it right now. Especially because they stick trough concrete that makes it even worse but even if they wouldnt stick trough concrete it would still be nice to have a way to remove them for aesthetics.

Another solution is make all oil patches visually very tiny, so it can't be seen without big zooming.

Oil wells catching on fire could be something interesting to deal with if you're careless with the flamethrower and start a bushfire that also ends up starting the wells burning. As if you hadn't shot yourself in the foot badly enough with the bushfire drawing the hoardes, the oil fires are going to keep going much longer...