Petroleum Gas conversions to Oil Products ☸

[shrimposh]

is this the right place, if not please move the thread

I'm not completely sure if this is supposed to be in the "Ideas and Suggestion" subforum or "Balancing", just because in the description of the latter it says "Place to discuss (...) recipes (...)", I'll create this thread here because it seems more like a suggestion.
Also I made some searches using some keywords and was kinda surprised that apparently nobody has proposed this yet.

The suggestion:
I propose a recipe to convert Petroleum Gas to Light Oil and/or Petroleum Gas to Heavy Oil. For example in proportions 4:3 or 3:2 or 2:1.

I'll try to list the reasoning/thought process behind this suggestion:

• Currently there are 2 recipes for conversion between Oil Refinery products, which are Heavy Oil to Light Oil (4:3) and Light Oil to Petroleum Gas (3:2).
• The proposed third recipe would close the cycle and allow conversion of any product to any other product; the fact of having waste (because the proportion of conversion is worse than 1:1 in any direction) means that these 3 conversion reactions need to (or could) be optimized for any certain desired output to feed the rest of the industry.

Therefore:

• The suggestion is simple;
• It increases the richness of possibility of optimization, which so far (for me) has been one of the most fun aspects of this game, and I would go as far as stating that I feel almost all systems in this game allow for extremely customizable optimization, except the oil industry.
• It would reflect more the nature of oil refining and petrochemical industries, which is to produce a desired product composition through the use of all technologically viable transformations.
• Gas to liquids is actually a thing (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids ), although not yet always used in a commercial scale, it is being heavily researched. I say this because it would make sense that in the Factorio universe it would be a mature technology.

Of course this can be added as a mod. I just think or feel that, as far as I have experienced the game, it is intuitive that this one chemical process be added to the base game.

Also, I thank the developers from the bottom of my heart. I never thought before that I would play a game that would bring me more fun than Dwarf Fortress, until I played Factorio.

[DaveMcW]

The main problem is that petroleum gas products are in much higher demand than light/heavy oil products. So the recipe would never be used.

[Balthazar]

The main problem is that petroleum gas products are in much higher demand than light/heavy oil products. So the recipe would never be used.

This, but more importantly, the ONLY thing you can make by this conversion is lubricant, and technically flame thrower fuel, but you are NEVER going to need that more than what you'll get before conversion. Fuel can already be made from gas, so why convert it at all? Customization is nice and i'd like to see more directions you can develop your factories in as well since it's always gotta be the same way atm.

Gas to liquids is actually a thing

I guess you're just mentioning this for completeness sake, but its something i keep seeing brought up and it's starting to annoy me. Realism is NOT good game design. Right now you can:

- Carry 4km of railroad in your pocket
- Survive forever without food
- Run forever without getting tired
- Stay awake forever
- Recover from near death in seconds

None of which is realistic, but obviously the game would be much worse if you only had room for 1-4 items, had to gather and cook food instead of making your factory that would eventually just get automated and be a huge waste of development time for a tiny addition that ultimately just wastes an inventory slot and requires you to click a button every ten minutes. Getting fatigued would make kiting a lot harder and the car more useful, but it also makes traveling even more tedious than it currently is, and if you had to spend 6 months in bed after fighting a single biter colony you'd never get anywhere. Realism is worthless, please stop using it as an argument.

[Robbedem]

This would be usefull of more uses for light and heavy oil are added to the game. For now you wouldn't need it.

[shrimposh]

Gas to liquids is actually a thing

I guess you're just mentioning this for completeness sake(...)

I'm a firm believer of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... fDisbelief in any form of entertainment
I considered it relevant to mention mostly for flavor, but also because for a lot of people a gas-to-liquids kind of process is counterintuitive simply because most of the usual processes that we see on a day-to-day basis revolve around cracking heavier oil fractions to lighter oil fractions, not the other way around.

Anyway, I agree that Heavy Oil doesn't have a high demand ingame now, tho. This suggestion makes more sense in case someday there is an expansion or tweak of the current uses of oil (which I suppose will happen, but of course maybe not).

[-root]

If you're struggling getting enough heavy or light oil, you can always use a pump to rip x amount out of the system and store it for use in whatever you want. Not sure the suggestion works because petroleum gas is in such high demand with everything but light and heavy is only used in very few things.

[bonob]

I didn't try it and I don't know if it's compatible with the latest 0.10, but there is an Oil condensating mod.

[ssilk]

There is currently a mod existing for this.
Questionable game-value.