Friday Facts #305 - The Oil Changes

[Adamo]

Modders tend to do so too often, and the result satisfies only them alone in the end. Remember that you creating mod for a large set of people

I can't speak for all modders, but some of us do actually create the mods for ourselves, then decide to share it with the large set of people.

I think that's probably common, and certainly has been for me... but so far only the people who play on my servers even have exposure to most of my mods. I guess I'm saying that I'm going to try to keep in mind his idea when it comes to making a wide appeal. There's a good balance somewhere.

[Yandersen]

Modders tend to do so too often, and the result satisfies only them alone in the end. Remember that you creating mod for a large set of people

I can't speak for all modders, but some of us do actually create the mods for ourselves, then decide to share it with the large set of people.

Oh, it explains why the monkeys have to dig in thousands of them hardly even trying any along the boring long way of scrolling... ^.^

EDIT: LONG LIVE "Helicopters" - the best mod ever!

Are you sure you put the LO in the right place? I did test that it works, but it's possible that I missed something. The fuel oil has to go in on the opposite side from the steam output. The water comes in from either side, like a normal boiler.

Tried with PG first - OK, but LO... Could I be that dumb to misplace the pipe?!..

EDIT: the pipe was just empty at the moment. Duh... :/ Sorry, all liquids do work fine. Silly me.

Solid fuels, no. Must be one or the other.

For some reason intuition pinged my mind with locomotives' multiple fuel boxes... No idea if it is relative and helpfull in any way, but abusing the system to find a workaround in an unexpected way may be a way to go? Maybe? Somehow?.. IDK.

[BlueTemplar]

I can't find a place that shows a fluid's fuel value.

Fuel values for fluids have been a bit hacked in. Same with pollution multipliers for fluids and recipes.

You can see a fluid's fuel value if you mouse-over a storage tank or a pipe that has the fluid in it and then look at the info panel on the right. But the recipe for the fluid in the crafting tab doesn't show it. So you have to have some of that fluid sloshing around in the world before you can find out what its fuel value is.

There is also no way of seeing a fluid's pollution multiplier anywhere in the game except the pollution statistics tab. Same for recipe-specific pollution multipliers.

Modders using any of these values are forced to add all of this info manually to the localised description.

[BlueTemplar]

[...]

3) Again the same with boilers. Is it possible to rework the gas boilers so it can consume all liquid fuels including even crude oils and the solid-type fuels like coal, SF, RF as well? If so, just replace the vanilla boilers with those unified multipurpose things.

Solid fuels, no. Must be one or the other.

There's also this "hack" :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BurnBarrels


(I know, I've posted it before, but not everyone is going to read the whole 2/3 threads...)

[Deadlock989]

I can't find a place that shows a fluid's fuel value.

Fuel values for fluids have been a bit hacked in. Same with pollution multipliers for fluids and recipes.

You can see a fluid's fuel value if you mouse-over a storage tank or a pipe that has the fluid in it and then look at the info panel on the right. But the recipe for the fluid in the crafting tab doesn't show it. So you have to have some of that fluid sloshing around in the world before you can find out what its fuel value is.

There is also no way of seeing a fluid's pollution multiplier anywhere in the game except the pollution statistics tab. Same for recipe-specific pollution multipliers.

Modders using any of these values are forced to add all of this info manually to the localised description.

Some of this information is now out of date.

[FuryoftheStars]

For some reason intuition pinged my mind with locomotives' multiple fuel boxes... No idea if it is relative and helpfull in any way, but abusing the system to find a workaround in an unexpected way may be a way to go? Maybe? Somehow?.. IDK.

Only by getting really hacky. There's actually a mod called Diesel Locomotive that allows a loco to run off fluids (created by evildogbot100, now maintained by me), but it has some hacky methods of achieving this. While in theory I guess you could get it to run off from both solid and liquid, it would put the "fake" fluid fuel it creates in a tricky spot where if by any means you managed to get the fuel out, you could then stick it into other entities that burn solids.

Otherwise there's the method that BlueTemplar posted and make barrels into fuel items.

Edit: Derp... should've linked to the mod portal rather than the forum thread.

[Yandersen]

[...]

3) Again the same with boilers. Is it possible to rework the gas boilers so it can consume all liquid fuels including even crude oils and the solid-type fuels like coal, SF, RF as well? If so, just replace the vanilla boilers with those unified multipurpose things.

Solid fuels, no. Must be one or the other.

There's also this "hack" :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BurnBarrels


(I know, I've posted it before, but not everyone is going to read the whole 2/3 threads...)

Damn! I just imagined how the refinery and all related things will look like if the refinery would input empty barrels and output filled ones of different kins? O hell, it's so interesting... ^.^ Truly fresh direction of thinking for FFF 305! XD

[Reika]

manual building&deconstruction of tanks (which is essentially a pollution-free flare stack, isn't it?)

Not with NauvisDay.



Also, this discussion has gone fairly far off topic.

[Avezo]

Tbh with changes to oil being still an open debate, PLEASEEEEE use this last chance to introduce fluid fuels for trains without having to use barrels like mentioned above.

It not only just makes sense, it also partially solves problems of getting locked down with too much fluid/oil/gas/etc of one type.

[Yandersen]

manual building&deconstruction of tanks (which is essentially a pollution-free flare stack, isn't it?)

Not with NauvisDay.

Ha! Nice. Never tried though. Let me guess: to get rid of it, you blow the spill with a rocket launcher, right?

Also, this discussion has gone fairly far off topic.

Because circling around the same deadend solution for weeks is a pointless waste of time. The V copes quite good at it so far, pretty sure he can come up with the same results without us anyway. Every new iteration we just explain him why it is another deadend and he tweaks some numbers so it will not look that bad. Just that. A road with no destination. The initial problem will never be actually solved that way. So why can't we just have some fun and spend good time until V will get tired of this and finally burden us with final verdict?

Tbh with changes to oil being still an open debate, PLEASEEEEE use this last chance to introduce fluid fuels for trains without having to use barrels like mentioned above.

It not only just makes sense, it also partially solves problems of getting locked down with too much fluid/oil/gas/etc of one type.

C'mon, it was said before, obviously ignored. Get use to it. V is on his thing. Note that boilers accepting liquid fuels were proposed too. But no, we need to find sinks for oil products in craftable items only. I guess it makes more sense for mr V.

[Reika]

Ha! Nice. Never tried though. Let me guess: to get rid of it, you blow the spill with a rocket launcher, right?

No, you cannot remove it. You just have to wait until it evaporates, which takes a few minutes, depending on amount and liquid type. But you can build over it, as long as you are ok with the fact that some liquids - mostly acids and oxidizers - deal damage to whatever is sitting in it.

[FuryoftheStars]

Tbh with changes to oil being still an open debate, PLEASEEEEE use this last chance to introduce fluid fuels for trains without having to use barrels like mentioned above.

It not only just makes sense, it also partially solves problems of getting locked down with too much fluid/oil/gas/etc of one type.

You mean like this? Yes, it would be great if it didn't need to be hacked in anymore.
Diesel Locomotive

[BlueTemplar]

I can't find a place that shows a fluid's fuel value.

Fuel values for fluids have been a bit hacked in. Same with pollution multipliers for fluids and recipes.

You can see a fluid's fuel value if you mouse-over a storage tank or a pipe that has the fluid in it and then look at the info panel on the right. But the recipe for the fluid in the crafting tab doesn't show it. So you have to have some of that fluid sloshing around in the world before you can find out what its fuel value is.

There is also no way of seeing a fluid's pollution multiplier anywhere in the game except the pollution statistics tab. Same for recipe-specific pollution multipliers.

Modders using any of these values are forced to add all of this info manually to the localised description.

Some of this information is now out of date.

My bad, hard to keep up with Factorio's fast pace of development sometimes... XD

[crambaza]

I can't help but think the FFF-305 proposal seems to have most benefit and least severe disadvantages from all the things I've read in the last 9 days.
The biggest downsides are "new player might have to rebuild" which I think is highly questionnable; a new player might only have a few refineries (very likely) so it is not much of a problem to adjust, or can just build a separate new setup elsewhere. This is mainly a problem if you want to rush robots, you would be doing the two refineries in a rather quick succession. However only an experienced player would rush robots and set up the first refinery to be AOP-compatible.
It also seems unrealistic and robots are later, both of which are debatable issues.
AOP would be completely mandatory and the challenge of multiple outputs introduced exactly at the same time as a solution to it, which I find to be a big plus.
BOP refinery feels like a furnace but you do have other things to do and learn at that point, and you still get the second step being more interesting and complicated.

BOP producing gas + heavy or light has issues and isn't really helping as it's just removing 1 output. It's not nothing but the improvement is marginal for other big downsides. PG + Light means the only reason you need AOP is Lubricant - that's a really weak non-high-tech motivator. PG + Heavy has the issue that you're making Solid Fuel inefficiently, or would need to make use of heavy somehow. Not having cracking and multiple outputs is also problematic because that oil processing is not long-term self-sustainable, and thus rushing AOP is necessary.

The idea of Heavy only and adding cracking is nice, quite functional and quite sensible, but a double-step cracking just to get the gas seems to be wtf tedious as you need to put vast majority of heavy into gas that way.
Furthermore, for everybody who waves the "dumbing down flag", heavy only->crack->crack->PG is a completely functional setup able to output anything on-demand. If one thing has backed up, it will completely automatically do the rest. The need for AOP is completely optional ("finishing the game" would be dumbed down in the minimum possible effort), and would only end up being more voluntary complexity for (presumably much more) efficiency per crude oil spent. The optionality of AOP does not necessarily have to be an issue and if the efficiency difference is significant enough, it could work. It wouldn't matter whether there is solid fuel or sulfur in the science pack for this, the system would always automatically work. I don't completely hate this, but the mandatory double-cracking if you only want petroleum gas sounds like a big pain.

Light only again makes AOP mandatory only because of seemingly low-tech lubricant, and require single-step cracking at the start.

Not doing any changes and adding cracking turns the WTF levels of oil even further and keeps it deadlocking without something like circuit network. AOP would only be a number upgrade, questionnable if AOP should even exist at that point.

Not doing any changes at all of course still has the old problems, like not being able to have self-sufficient long-term BOP and unnecessary tedium/confusion.

Flare stacks are absolutely out of the question for the ultimate dumbing down reasons, just take FFF-305 version and image a flare stack next to the refinery / the one integrated in the refinery to be burning the heavy and light oil.

The idea of BOP being Gas and Heavy seems like a great idea, with AOP adding in light.

I have been jumping all over this thread trying to read most things, so some of this may have been mentioned before, sorry if it's all repeats.

I like the idea of producing both, and then using the Gas for sulfur and plastic, and the Heavy for solid fuel for the chemical science. This recipe can be tweaked to make sure there is little to no backup in either stream at this level. Then for the people that want to rush construction robots, they will not have enough solid fuel at this time to eat up all the plastic on the face of it, but we are unusually also diving deep into red circuits, which eats up more plastic anyway. It's almost self balancing.

So the pros are that there are 2 not 3 outputs. They are even on the opposite side of the Refinery, which makes the middle almost a "null" area with Light Oil fills easily. With the right chem science recipe, back ups for unused output are less likely. Construction robots are still early for those that want them.

Some cons are that there are still 2 outputs required instead of 1, and it is still possible to back up an output without knowing.

I do think the cons can be mitigated with the right tweaking of the outputs. I really like this idea, even more than Heavy Output only.

I look forward to someone running the numbers to see if this actually works, or if it only works in my head.

[Avezo]

Tbh with changes to oil being still an open debate, PLEASEEEEE use this last chance to introduce fluid fuels for trains without having to use barrels like mentioned above.

It not only just makes sense, it also partially solves problems of getting locked down with too much fluid/oil/gas/etc of one type.

You mean like this? Yes, it would be great if it didn't need to be hacked in anymore.
Diesel Locomotive

Locomotives even have a spot at the top to put oil pumps in!

[xnmo]

I have always had confidence in the Factorio dev team as they have a history of steady and consistent improvements to the game, but these last 2 FFFs have been something else. Please, whatever changes you make, do not go through with this FFF balance change. Even if this post won't do any good in changing minds at Wube I really feel the need to throw my 2 cents into this discussion.

Basic oil setups are already perfectly playable. I started a new 17.x game after not playing Factorio for several years and as many people have correctly observed, setting up the basic oil recipe is NOT the main issue. I only needed a grand total of 2 storage tanks for light oil, and a single tank for every other product (lube, heavy oil, petroleum, sulfuric acid), and this capacity served me perfectly fine before getting to advanced oil processing. The current blue science recipe serves as enough of an incentive to setup solid fuel production to dump your otherwise useless oils into, and by extension give you something extra to mix into your boiler fuel line.

But regardless of all this, because some people are incapable of building storage tanks or clicking on a building and seeing a big yellow square on the recipe output, you now want to make it so basic oil only gives you petrogas.

What does this change accomplish?
-Gimps early construction bots
-COMPLETELY RUINS early solid fuel production for people who might actually want to use oil to power their factory
-Guarantees that new players will have to completely redo their oil setup almost as soon as they finally setup blue science-as opposed to just having to find a way to fit water pipes between their crude pipes
-Guarantees basic oil processing will by and large be the preferred option over the advanced, more "high-tech" process in megabases. lolwut?
-Last but IMO not least, it flies in the face of any sort of real world logic. Before reading through this thread I didn't know sulfur is more present in crude/heavier oils than in petrogas, but I certainly did know at the very least that oil processing is a big and complicated process involving a whole bunch of byproducts. The refinery graphic reflects this, and does not reflect a 1-to-1 in/out process. This change would mean that for me to suspend my disbelief I have to pretend the refinery is just burning away all those byproducts-but yet at the same time I am for some reason incapable of choosing to use any of these byproducts as lubricant or burning them as fuel for my factory!

On top of all this, you want to make rocket fuel a more expensive recipe (being both more tedious to setup and also logically nonsensical, since you're basically just requiring light oil to be used twice) without an associative rebalance of its fuel value. Not to mention the chemical science change that gets rid of any and all incentive for someone to consider setting up solid fuel production before rocket fuel.

It terms of making changes to early oil that would actually IMPROVE the game, the more minimally invasive solutions are by far the most preferable. Such as:
-GUI improvements that make clogged refinery outputs more apparent
-Adding a simple oil tutorial
-Making cracking a separate tech that only requires red+green science
-Making blue science take more solid fuel and/or less advanced circuits to reduce demand on petrol

I'd support changing sulfur to use heavy oil, as it is both more reflective of reality and would ease the burden put on petroleum gas production, making the balancing act of 3 oil products before advanced processing is even more manageable than it is currently. Even getting rid of light oil before advanced processing would be far preferable to the complete revamp of the tech tree and game balance that petrol-only basic oil processing necessitates. If nothing else, just give the player both these initial recipies (current basic processing + a more wasteful petroleum-only output recipe) so that those who know how to manage their fluids could still get to bots before setting up a robust blue science production. That would be bad and clunky but at least it wouldn't ruin the game.

[Jap2.0]

I've tried to write out my opinions on this several times, and it's just not happened. Other people have covered what I'd like to say better than I could at this point, so I'd just like to stop by and recommend that this be part of the changeset for 0.18.0, not 17.x - both because it's an increasingly large change (and sure, it's an experimental version, but you also said "why does it matter exactly which version we call stable?" so that point's partially moot), and more importantly, because I think that as time goes on the discussions I'm seeing are growing more and more productive. Adding another few months-year to think about it won't hurt it at all. (Additionally, it sounds like changes to a few GUIs that haven't been done yet might help - I've heard things about the status being a more central part of the gui, which may help, tutorials should get done at some point, iirc the notification system's getting redone at some point which may or may not open up possibilities, etc. Also on the point of tutorials: you're saying that them being the solution makes them forced, but not everyone has the problem in the first place, and therefore it's not the forced solution. Just sayin'.)

[mcdjfp]

I didn't mean to come back to this thread, but a thought hit me as I was playing. I had just ripped out my starting smelting lines (upgraded to steel furnaces) to replace them with a beacon based electric smelting setup. I realized that if I didn't have the construction bots, I would have just left it there (accepting the lack of production bonuses) and built somewhere else later on if I needed extra production.

I suggest that the solution to the midgame problems, is to move bots forward, earlier into the game.

In addition to oil, players have to deal with defenses, more complex production chains, scaling up production, and building outposts. Construction bots help with all of these tasks. They make building easier. Need to double your smelting. Make a copy of your current smelting line, and let the bots build it. Outposts are quicker to construct. Rail, especially intersections (with signals) and stations go down quicker. Instead of having to run back and forth from one near breach to another the construction bots with repair packs can handle the job while you can continue to build. And of course, when you discover your build is one square out of place, there is no better solution than a team of construction bots. It really doesn't take too many to start making a difference

Even logistics bots help, as they can bring items to you instead of having to make repeated trips back to other parts of the factory as you run out of first belts, then inserters, then something else.

Combined bots (both construction and logistic) greatly reduce the tedium of the game. Yes they are a fun toy, but letting players have them as they hit the struggles of a midgame base may do a better job keeping them in the game then dangling them as a prize in some far off future.

Players who don't want to design their own builds can already just copy in blueprints and build it by hand. Having construction bots won't change this, but it might keep them in the game, maybe even long enough to find something they enjoy.

As for turret creep, could construction bots start out fragile so sending them into the middle of all but the smallest (1-2 spawners) base would be a suicide mission with the bots destroyed before they could place anything? Even without bots, I can slowly creep in with turrets a couple of squares at a time. Later versions (maybe like speed and capacity upgrades) could boost their strength later on to limit losses while trying to repair your own walls/turrets.

In addition they are completely optional even now. If a player wanted an additional challenge, they could simply not use them, just like you don't have to copy blueprints from the internet (or even use your own blueprints from your last map). Yes they might reduce the puzzle aspect for players who abuse internet blueprints, but maybe the "easy mode" would keep them around long enough to start experimenting on their own (and make experimenting less frustrating as well).

The only real problem I see with this solution is teaching new players how to use bots, and encouraging them to try the bots without disrupting the game for those that don't want to use them (for whatever reason). Would it be any harder/disruptive than teaching them the issues with multi-output fluids?

Factorio is a game about automation, should players build everything by hand, or should they build things that then build for them?

[eis271828]

The only real problem I see with this solution is teaching new players how to use bots, and encouraging them to try the bots without disrupting the game for those that don't want to use them (for whatever reason). Would it be any harder/disruptive than teaching them the issues with multi-output fluids?

I purposefully avoided bots my first time through. One, I wanted to learn things gradually so I didn't get overwhelmed. This means I didn't build trains, use bots, any circuit network stuff, or anything else, really. Two, there's an achievement for not using logistics bots, so I figured I'd go ahead and get that now before I came to rely on them. Easy. In fact, I didn't use circuits for oil balancing until my third or fourth map. Bots were a whole complicated system that I wouldn't want to be assumed are part of a new player's initial journey.

More generally, as someone who balanced small-scale oil setups without circuits for the first time in 0.16 (still cowering over on stable), the old oil system wasn't terribly confusing to me - I'm pretty sure I just added more tanks a couple times - but I also welcome changes that would make it more intuitive. I might have stuck with my initial map longer had I been organically taught some better solutions and scaled things larger as a result.

[MrBadDragon]

Having played a game with the supplied mod through to Chemical Science, I have to say this is a fantastic update.

Capture.PNG (595.75 KiB) Viewed 5522 times

This is a simple Refining setup which has kept me fully stocked with Sulfur and Plastics - no mess, no fuss. Simply elegant.

In fact I can see a scenario where I will only need a small refinery created to make lube and solid fuel at a later stage, with the petrolium being piped off to my strategic reserve.