Factorio Forums

It took a bit of finagling, but I managed to build a design that demonstrates how you can put an essentially unlimited number of oil refineries all right next to each other running advanced oil processing. The oil is coming from behind but the water is routed up through the middle gap. The three pumps at the bottom are where each of the three products come out.

Oil Refineries

you can move the horizontal oil and water pipes one tile closer to the refineries.

sparr wrote:you can move the horizontal oil and water pipes one tile closer to the refineries.

I don't see how, unless I space each refinery one tile apart.

Take out the entire line directly above the refineries, and shift everything down one tile that is above it. All you have on that line is vertical pipes and power lines.

although I prefer not to just to space my refineries one apart, but three apart because that's where you put the beacons later.

silverkitty23 wrote:although I prefer not to just to space my refineries one apart, but three apart because that's where you put the beacons later.

Nah, you put the beacons between the light/heavy oil pipes and the petroleum gas pipe. Then put light oil cracking on the other side.

DaveMcW wrote:Nah, you put the beacons between the light/heavy oil pipes and the petroleum gas pipe.

are you sure?

Ranakastrasz wrote:Take out the entire line directly above the refineries, and shift everything down one tile that is above it. All you have on that line is vertical pipes and power lines.

Oh I thought he was referring to the lines below the refineries.

I've been using a custom design based on this for quite some time. I nix the storage and spaces between refineries but the rest is pretty standard right down to the pipe layout.

Shokubai wrote:I've been using a custom design based on this for quite some time. I nix the storage and spaces between refineries but the rest is pretty standard right down to the pipe layout.

Wow, neat! That's a really cool design!

I want to research all the ratios and figure out a perfect input/output setup in terms of usage so that nothing bottlenecks except crude oil.

thereaverofdarkness wrote:

Shokubai wrote:I want to research all the ratios and figure out a perfect input/output setup in terms of usage so that nothing bottlenecks except crude oil.

I'm not sure how you intend to do that, it would require 100% usage of any output.

Also why bother, Oil is the only easy to balance thing in the game, because you simply put in pumps and circuit network checks to control everything.

Heavy Oil, we setup what we need and then have circuit controlled conversion to light oil. If there is more than 100 heavy oil in the tank, it activates the electric pump.

Light Oil, create solid fuel and again use circuit to convert the left over to petroleum.

Only tank that gets filled is petroleum and your rate of usage of petroleum controls how much work the refineries do.

You misquoted there but it's not that hard really. There are some established ratios out there (5/7/1 (Refine, LtCrack,HvyCrack) is my go to initial build)and it isn't hard to bleed heavy and light oil with Solid Fuel.

thereaverofdarkness wrote:

Shokubai wrote:I've been using a custom design based on this for quite some time. I nix the storage and spaces between refineries but the rest is pretty standard right down to the pipe layout.

Wow, neat! That's a really cool design!

I want to research all the ratios and figure out a perfect input/output setup in terms of usage so that nothing bottlenecks except crude oil.

It's not hard to do with Advanced Oil Processing. You can use some Combinators to setup a smart cracking system to regulate when to crack heavy to light and when to crack light to petrol. I use that sort of setup all the time.

thereaverofdarkness wrote:I want to research all the ratios and figure out a perfect input/output setup in terms of usage so that nothing bottlenecks except crude oil.

Listen to Frightening and Miravlix above. Simply use the Circuit Network to perform the necessary checks on tanks and control the pumps with it to create the necessary priorities.

Because many people already put a lot of time and effort into researching Oil stuff and a bottleneck-free setup just depending on "perfect ratios" isn't possible, at least not without a constant and continious drain on all the oil products, which rarely happens except maybe for Boiler/Steam Engine Power plants running 24/7 on Solid Fuel... and even these power plants will probably eventually enter low energy usage scenarios after which the ratios for cracking etc won't apply anymore the same way they do while the power plant is under full load.

MeduSalem wrote:Because many people already put a lot of time and effort into researching Oil stuff and a bottleneck-free setup just depending on "perfect ratios" isn't possible, at least not without a constant and continious drain on all the oil products,

They could run long enough to go until the oil depletes. All the products could be shipped out into a massive storage center.

I don't want to use the circuit network because it is baffling to work with. I'm only just beginning to understand it in the most basic way and I'm already a Factorio modder. I'd rather come up with something useful to people who don't know how to use the circuit network.

thereaverofdarkness wrote:They could run long enough to go until the oil depletes. All the products could be shipped out into a massive storage center.

... and how do you know which amounts of a certain oil product you will need for production in advance? It is way out of our possibilities to make that kind of exact estimation.

So since you won't know how much Heavy/Light Oil or Petroleum Gas you will need for all your production lines you would have to store the three Refinery outputs into seperate tanks... and you are going to need an awful lot (a few hundred or thousand at least) of them or otherwise you will stall again. On top of that it would be even harder to make estimations on how much you want to crack.

It is not even remotely worth the space just to the avoid circuit network.

thereaverofdarkness wrote:I don't want to use the circuit network because it is baffling to work with. I'm only just beginning to understand it in the most basic way and I'm already a Factorio modder. I'd rather come up with something useful to people who don't know how to use the circuit network.

I understand that, but if you really want to have a stall-resistant setup without circuit network then forget about the ratios, because they won't help at all since you can't know in advance how much you will really need of everything. So a form of "on-demand-based"/"overflow-based" cracking is absolutely necessary to maintain efficiency.

[edit]

That said... I almost forgot that there is an alternative setup Whillowhim and I developed and refined last year... A stall-resistant setup without circuit network abusing pipe/pump-mechanics:

Stall Resistant Oil Processing: viewtopic.php?p=79540#p79540
The 5 pumps suck the Heavy Oil into the tanks as it passes by and only if the heavy oil tanks are full the heavy oil is able to flow past the pumps to the heavy-to-light oil cracking

Same happens for Light Oil... the 5 pumps suck the Light Oil into the tanks as it passes by and only if Light Oil Tanks are full the light oil is able to flow past the 5 pumps to the Light-to-petroleum gas cracking.

The pumps work unconditionally (so no circuit network required). You can use more than 5 pumps to ensure the according oil product gets trapped in the tanks and that only the overflow gets cracked, but I found that 5 pumps are enough to get the trap to work reliable. Less than 5 pumps and some of the fluid might unintentionally slip beyond the trap.

The picture in the post is just a proof of concept. You would actually need a lot more chem plants for Light to Petroleum cracking if you don't plan on using Light Oil for Solid Fuel production. Also the setup could easily be expanded both in size of tanks as well as amount of refineries and cracking and you wouldn't have to touch circuit network stuff to make it possible.

thereaverofdarkness wrote:

MeduSalem wrote:Because many people already put a lot of time and effort into researching Oil stuff and a bottleneck-free setup just depending on "perfect ratios" isn't possible, at least not without a constant and continious drain on all the oil products,

They could run long enough to go until the oil depletes. All the products could be shipped out into a massive storage center.

I don't want to use the circuit network because it is baffling to work with. I'm only just beginning to understand it in the most basic way and I'm already a Factorio modder. I'd rather come up with something useful to people who don't know how to use the circuit network.

It looks complicated, and you certainly CAN do complicated stuff with it, but regulating Oil product handling with combinators is one of the easiest practical uses for combinators in the entire game. It's a good first problem for learning combinator 101 too.