Oil Issues

[JoshPerry93]

Anybody got an idea what is going wrong? My Petroleum pressure and other oils are terrible

[twepy]

As far as i can see there is nothing wrong with the setup. There isnt really pressure simulated in the system, the value is simply how much gas or fluid it in that section of pipe. Fluids or gasses for that matter will equalize throughout the whole pipe system and storage tanks.

As a general advise you could switch oil processing to advanced oil processing.

[Mehve]

The liquid storage tanks are basically considered to be a single piece of high-capacity pipe. Since liquids equalize proportionately throughout a block of pipes, this means that if the pipes are 20% full, so is the storage tank. So in your picture, the pipe is 1.6/10 full, or 16%. Thus, I would expect the storage tanks to also be about 16% full as well, with roughly 400 units (16% x 2500) in each of them. If you want to alter this equalization, you need to use small pumps to force liquid in a given direction.

[JoshPerry93]

Thanks for the help. Even that amount though doesnt keep up with 2x Chemical plants: one making sulfer and one making plastic bars.

I know I am not making it here but I had the same set up previous, I moved the location to see if that was the problem. Maybe I need more Oil refineries?

I am also finding that barrelling oil gives a steadier supply than pumps.

[twepy]

The issue is that oil processing cycle is 5 seconds versus 1 second cycles for the recipes of the chemical plant:
In one cycle of 5 seconds your refineries produces: 4 petroleum gas * 4 refineries = 16 petroleum gas.
In that same 5 seconds your chemical plants use: 2 chemical plants * 3 petroleum gas * 5 cycles = 30 petroleum gas

In essence your refineries cant supply the demand if the chemical plants run nonstop. To produce enough petroleum gas you would need 8 regular oil processing refineries or 6 advanced oil processing refineries. There is also the option of cracking (excess) heavy and light oil into petroleum if you have the proper research done.

[kalzekdor]

Check your other outputs (Light/Heavy Oil). A common occurrence with refineries is an imbalance in consumption of the three products. If, for example, your Heavy Oil pipe is backed up all the way back to the refinery, there won't be any room for more Heavy Oil to be produced. If any one of the three outputs gets backed up, production of them all ceases (since they are produced in one single reaction).

[JoshPerry93]

That makes sense. Brilliant guys! I thought was going to have to stop as the game was getting very hard without a supply of plastic bars and batteries!

Onto the next problem.... Ha

[Frightning]

This game really encourages the player to do basic math with ratios and fractions a lot in order to figure out if you need of x or more of y, or if there is some other problem. I find myself frequently doing some nontrivial arithmetic in my head at various times while playing.

[ChurchOrganist]

A common occurrence with refineries is an imbalance in consumption of the three products.

I find keeping the the production/consumption of these one of the big headaches, particularly in the mid game, particularly if oil is in short supply, as it means you cannot use the production and burning of solid fuel to help maintain the balance.

I haven't yet resorted to combinators, but I now regularly use small pumps connected to storage tanks to help keep things in balance.

[siggboy]

If you need sulfur and plastic bars, that means you need petroleum gas.

You never need light oil until you need to make a lot of solid fuel. You never need heavy oil until you need to make lubricant.

If you want to make flamethrower ammo, then you should create a storage of light/heavy for that, but you won't need thousand of these so it's not a big deal. Same for lubricant, create a nice little buffer (1,000 units are plenty for a starter), and then worry about it later when you need lots of it to make blue belts and robots.

You should switch to advanced oil processing, build a fifth refinery, and then build 7x chemical plant to turn light oil into petroleum, and 1x chemical plant to turn heavy oil into light oil.

This will then convert ALL your oil into petroleum gas, as fast as the refineries can handle it.

If you also need heavy oil to make lubricant, you need to switch out the chem plant that does heavy->light into a lubricant plant. You can also do that with a pump and a circuit condition. If that's too difficult then don't worry about it for the moment.

The important thing is the ratio: 5x refinery + 7x chem plant light->PG + 1x chem plant heavy->light.

Then you also need no storage tanks, or maybe only one for PG (I recommend none, consume the PG and don't store it).

[bobucles]

The refinery really needs some kind of flashing warning light to signal whenever an output is clogged.

[Frightning]

The refinery really needs some kind of flashing warning light to signal whenever an output is clogged.

You can easily tell if the output is clogged by looking at the contents of the Oil refinery, if it does clear out all of the Heavy oil, Light oil, and Petroleum and isn't running, then it's output side is backing up to it.

[twepy]

The refinery really needs some kind of flashing warning light to signal whenever an output is clogged.

Unfortunately you cant monitor the refinery it self, but you can monitor the levels in the storage tanks of heavy and light oil and petroleum gas and let a light blink when a threshold is exceeded. In this example the first decider combinator receives three signals (heavy, light and petroleum) if any exceeds 2400 the light starts blinking.

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