Factorio Forums

Anyone have a neat design for oil processing? i cant keep my cracking / basic refineries from becoming convoluted pipe mazes lol

improveable but thats a decent design without a-maze-ing pipes

This is what I'm using at the moment, which works pretty good. Light oil is made into Petroleum, heavy oil is made into Lubricant, and excess heavy oil is made into Solid Fuel. I still have to check the pipes every now and then and make some changes (press F4, tick the bottom one, Fluids, and press F5 to see the oil level in the pipes/ just hoover over a pipe) because there's no logic circuits for fluids yet.

How far into the game are you guys? im at 18 hours and don't have anything that impressive lol the learning curve to this game is monstrous

This is 46 hours in, but it's my third really big base, so I knew how i wanted to organize things from the start, lots of space Also, I'm on a map with very little water, so there's nothing to disturb my neat little factory

You can try to cut another row from it but this is pretty compact:

I have the same problem as you OP. I have really good intentions to lay my oil processing out nice & neatly & it usually starts well.

However, once I start having to make plastics/lubricant/processing my excess oils into other stuff, it usually ends up a messy maze of madness!
I'll upload some screenshots later.

http://i.imgur.com/yxZUwQy.jpg

I assure you this is complete overkill on the number of oil processing plants.. At least until I Go out looking for more oil wells.

But anyway, that sort of pattern with oil processing plants outputting into the centre three pipes for light, heavy and petroleum. The input crude oil and water runs along behind the oil processing plants. The central light, heavy and petroleum pipes lead either to production or storage.

- Solardarity

I believe this is the most compact design:


Since it uses only 2 pipelines for oil and water in the middle (2 tiles wide) as well as only 3 tiles on each side for products.

Total width is 18 tiles, I believe if you want even more (insanity!) it would be possible to place next one 2 tiles in resulting in 16 tile wide repeating pattern.

yea, i've been using the same design as garm, but I only have 3 refineries but then again I find that I never need more than that. and i've been trying to make it as efficient as possible. with out efficient produced made with oil is, you dont really need much at all. same goes for cracking, the only thing I have too much of is light oil. and thats with cracking it and making soild fuel with it.

so if your going for an efficient run and trying to get to the end game as quick as possible, I believe you dont need more than 2-3 refineries and 1 production of each product.

crack only light oil into petroleum and turn all heavy into lubricant. with oil processing 2, you wont be needing much else.

but if your going for just mass production and looking cool, then just ignore everything I just said :p

also remember that you only can refine oil, if there is room for the 3 different products, if any 1 of your storage tanks are full, or theres no where for any 1 of the products to go, then the refinery will stop working until you make room. thats usually the limiting factor in most cases.

I am still trying to find the optimal rate of cracking, solid fuel and lubricant. I haven't used many super fast belts yets, so lube just piles up in a tank, but I find that one plant cracking heavy from one refinery causes the light to fill up storage with only one plant cracking it to gas. Anyone done the calculations or experiments to figure out the optimal ratios?

starxplor wrote:I am still trying to find the optimal rate of cracking, solid fuel and lubricant. I haven't used many super fast belts yets, so lube just piles up in a tank, but I find that one plant cracking heavy from one refinery causes the light to fill up storage with only one plant cracking it to gas. Anyone done the calculations or experiments to figure out the optimal ratios?

I have just one tank for lubricant and one for sulphuric acid. For Light oil, heavy oil and petroleum in late game I have 10-30 tanks each and then small adjustments in cracking ratio every 1-2 hours are sufficient. I build some spare chemical plants in correct connections for that so that I only have to start or stop the recipe. There never will be the perfect ratio, because in different stages of the game you will have different demands.

I think the general secret for an easy setup is simply space. This is from my last factory, I liked the general setup. One could build it a lot more compact for sure, but i like designs which are clear and easy to understand (and change). And i didn't need the space
Oil cracking is north of the tanks you see on top of the screenie btw:



(btw: is there a better way to post images than this? Second half gets cut at my screen if I don't zoom out my web browser...)

Reduce size of image to 600px width?
There are also plugins for phpbb, which handle that better.

Haven't seen small pumps mentioned here so I'll share this strategy: When it comes to managing cracking rates, I tend to use many storage tanks with electric pumps as one way valves and... can't think of the term but perhaps "pressure biases?" (Gist of it is if you have two tanks connected by both a pipe and a pump, one of the tanks is going to be a lot fuller and the other will be completely empty first. Naturally, more tanks and pumps can amplify the situation. Sort of a poor man's logic gate. Helps in ensuring your production prefers one product over another.)

The pressure bias helps me keep a little a little heavy oil left over (I don't go through much lubricant) and I use one way valves for ensuring that I only crack light oil when my two most pro-baised methane tanks aren't full.

Oh, as long as I'm talking about the pressure bias, I really should show an example in action. F5 to check fluid levels comes in handy here.

Note that while the difference in pressure with just one pump is usually rather low, a few hundred units of fluid at most, as the number of pumps increase so does the resulting difference in pressure. Even to the point where, as can be seen here, the first storage tank is nearly full while the last tank, and more importantly the pipes leading from it, is completely empty. (And note that if I were to remove that last tank it would actually cause the one before it to fill up more.)

Speaking of bias, I have noticed that fluids seem to prefer some paths rather than others.
In the times I have seen it, these are some of the differences:
Prefering to exit west compared to north.
Prefering to exit into a pipe to ground vs standard pipe.
Prefering to exit into a pipe vs a machine input.

I have not tested all of these, I just happen to have them in my current world. In none of these cases is there a pump anyone in the line.