Friday Facts #305 - The Oil Changes

[Adamo]

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

Capture.PNG

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.

When I see this picture, I can't help but ask: why do we need refineries in this setup?

[IronCartographer]

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.

This has come up before in recent FFF discussions:

You are allowed to use logistic bots for supplying and trashing items to/from the player. You are simply not allowed to use requesters, active providers, and logistic buffer chests.

This achievement really needs some way of communicating its intentions more clearly, somehow.

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

Capture.PNG

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.

When I see this picture, I can't help but ask: why do we need refineries in this setup?

Have to agree; it looks grim to me. Almost like it's teaching players to destroy (waste) unused (potential) oil fractions without having to do so explicitly.

[Tricorius]

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.

When I see this picture, I can't help but ask: why do we need refineries in this setup?

Also, there are still six fluid tanks and water inputs for the fluid to solid recipes. You have all the basic “complexity” of a “proper” multi-fluid setup. The tanks are just not in separate blocks.

So the only thing that is different is that you avoid the complexities of mixing fluids. Which, is definitely a challenge; but significantly better than it used to be.

I’m still on the fence with this thing. I *can* see the simplification, but I still feel that it is a false sense of security; and just delays when the complexity hits. And the cost is fewer tools to operate your factory (I love pushing overflow oil out into my fuel-burning facilities via priority splitters when oil gets over my preferred thresholds—I even send it out to my trains when I have enough overflow).

And I’ll never be a fan of construction robots being moved even farther behind tech. I already contort myself to get hobbled versions of them because they are just that good for speeding up tedium in a factory).

[Adamo]

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.

When I see this picture, I can't help but ask: why do we need refineries in this setup?

Also, there are still six fluid tanks and water inputs for the fluid to solid recipes. You have all the basic “complexity” of a “proper” multi-fluid setup. The tanks are just not in separate blocks.

So the only thing that is different is that you avoid the complexities of mixing fluids. Which, is definitely a challenge; but significantly better than it used to be.

I’m still on the fence with this thing. I *can* see the simplification, but I still feel that it is a false sense of security; and just delays when the complexity hits. And the cost is fewer tools to operate your factory (I love pushing overflow oil out into my fuel-burning facilities via priority splitters when oil gets over my preferred thresholds—I even send it out to my trains when I have enough overflow).

And I’ll never be a fan of construction robots being moved even farther behind tech. I already contort myself to get hobbled versions of them because they are just that good for speeding up tedium in a factory).

But the tanks are pointless, anyway. I wasn't going to say it because it's not important, but my real first thought was: why do you have all that pointless PG storage?

[eis271828]

This has come up before in recent FFF discussions:

You are allowed to use logistic bots for supplying and trashing items to/from the player. You are simply not allowed to use requesters, active providers, and logistic buffer chests.

This achievement really needs some way of communicating its intentions more clearly, somehow.

Even had I understood the permissive nature of it, I almost certainly would have opted to ignore bots the first time through. My main point is that the game balance decisions targeting new players probably shouldn't assume bots are going to be used to solve tedious tasks like (re)moving sections of bases.

[Tricorius]

Also, there are still six fluid tanks and water inputs for the fluid to solid recipes. You have all the basic “complexity” of a “proper” multi-fluid setup. The tanks are just not in separate blocks.

But the tanks are pointless, anyway. I wasn't going to say it because it's not important, but my real first thought was: why do you have all that pointless PG storage?

I only mentioned the tanks because I see very little real difference between the complexity and space to set up six tanks of petroleum vs three sets of two and the piping to setup petroleum, light, and heavy.

I understand that quantitatively it is less.

Also, the poster mentioned keeping that setup and building a small additional setup with advanced oil. Which I think is counter to the wishes guidance of the developers. But maybe I’m wrong.

I still feel the best progression is:

- use what you need (get plastic and sulfur, primarily)
- store the rest (tanks)
- burn (via solid fuel) if you don’t want to store it
- crack into proper ratios (when advanced is unlocked)

I feel like the current system gives the best tools and flexibility to do all of this and doesn’t arbitrarily “gate” various useful techs. (Even if we had flare stacks I’d rather convert it to solid and burn that instead.)

(The good news is that I’ve been playing around with various overhaul mods lately, and I’m starting to like them. So maybe I don’t really have a horse in this race anymore.)

[vampiricdust]

Solid fuel can and will constitute a sufficient resource sink if tuned correctly on the chemical science pack. First off, remember that this balance by solid fuel is only necessary until advanced processing is researched, because cracking will take over at that point. Therefore, only a rather narrow band of the tech tree needs to be considered: that between basic oil and advanced oil.

Unlocking tech and using the tech are two different game points though.

By this time in the tech tree, players are often unlocking things far faster than implementing them. Especially since blue science is a big step in complexity and takes awhile to setup. When I was a new player, I would almost always run out of just red/green options before I got blue going. So it's not really a narrow window as the tech tree makes it appear.

However, I do agree with you that it can be a good sink. However, that really depends on how many science labs the players are using. If they only have 1 to 5 labs, the consumption may not be enough to drain the other oils, which was the point I was trying to make. It's not a guaranteed consumer and you can only consume it as fast as you build it to.

Upping the fuel costs on science may be the best option as it doesn't require rebalancing the tech tree to account for the lack of lube.

[irbork]

Current changes present in the oilchanges mod are good. The only problem of not being able to get enough efficient solid fuel can be easily remedied by adding solid fuel to rafinery output for basic oil processing. The good value is about 5 units every cycle. This would allow to power your steam power plant and you can easily adjust to burn it all by setting some machines on speed modules or putting radar arrays that consist of several blocks. The bigger solid fuel backlog the more block would get turn on via power switch.

[cybersteel8]

Please pardon me if this is already mentioned, but I stopped reading this thread at page 5 because I realised there's 24 pages of conversation and I think I have an idea on how this could be implemented in a simpler and intuitive way. Please consider this design:

The goal here is to not throw light and heavy oil at the player during BOP, right? So the first thing we need to do is remove any requirement for Light and Heavy oil to make blue science. Sulfur instead of Solid Fuel makes sense. The player would have to set up a sulfur and plastic factory to get blue science up and running, and that only needs petroleum. That's pretty easy. Moving robots after blue science also makes sense, since Lubricant is required to make them. Player's got enough to deal with, and researching a tech they can't even use doesn't make sense.

As for the Oil Refinery, I see no reason why the two output ports of the refinery must not show the light and heavy output icons even though AOP hasn't been researched yet. In other words, even though the BOP product is only petroleum, show the icons on the other two refinery ports anyway. Do the same for the water input - force the player to know that this is not the end of oil processing, and this refinery is capable of more. I expect the player to get very curious about these liquids and examine the tech tree to get an explanation. It forewarns the player and avoids them from building their oil system in such a way that it will require a full rebuild.

But let's also consider this - what's wrong with a full rebuild if only late-game stuff requires the other two oils anyway? A current example of this is processing units - they require 20 electronic units, plus the advanced circuits. Do you think a new player prepared for this level of circuit production? Hell no, they're rebuilding the entire thing. And their smelting factories to scale as well. Scaling up, rebuilding factories, learning from past mistakes is what makes Factorio such a dynamic and enjoyable game. It's a natural part of the game to know that to progress further, what you currently have built will not suffice. Why do we want to avoid this for oil?

Finally, I noticed plenty of conversation about the multi-output behaviour and I don't think this requires any revision. The oil refinery provides the same information as an assembler when it comes to an output being blocked, or an ingredient not provided - the machine stops, there is a highlight on the problem ingredient in the UI, and the right panel has a status printed right there. I suppose, in the upcoming tutorial work, these UI elements should be emphasized to the player as an important way to identify problems with the factory. The tools are there, the player just needs to use them, and it is the tutorial's job to point out this GUI functionality.

Oh, and Wube, please add the names of the fluids that cannot mix in the error message. Instead of "cannot mix fluids", make it "cannot mix light oil and heavy oil" or "cannot mix crude oil and water" so it is more descriptive to the actual problem.

This is just my opinion after much thought. I know I typed a wall of text, but I do think it's quite simple and the details, such as whether BOP should be viable late-game for any petroleum-only production based on its output numbers, is up to design and opinion (personally, that would be great. It would enable crude oil to be delivered to factories that only need the PG and simplify that whole process, but others might think that to be too easy). I'd love to hear your thoughts after considering this from my point of view.

[Reika]

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

Capture.PNG

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.

It is extremely simple. And that is the problem.

[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.

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.

Glad you figured out the pipe thing. I uploaded a new version of the mod that allows you to disable both the wellhead and the methane mechanics, independently.

Regarding the fuel usage: the issue is that the boiler can only have one "energy_source", and this has to be set to EITHER use fuel items or fluid as an energy source, but not both. So I think to do this one would have to program a control script that looks at the fluid_box or the inventory and converts items to an invisible fluid or fluid to an invisible fuel item. I don't like to take this approach when possible -- although I do have a few control script mods out there! What would be cool is if the prototype was change to allow more than one energy source.

Incidentally, I have the code to fix the helicopter gauge to work with all fuels instead of just the most powerful. I gave it to the person maintaining the mod but not sure it ever got added. We ultimately forked our own version (and part of that code actually exists in the Adamo Clicker mod, where it is of course properly credited to the original author).

[Quidrex]

Sorry for the cross-post from Reddit, but I feel it has gone under in the flood there.

After thinking quite a while about the oil processing issue I'd argue that a single heavy oil output would be the preferable option in my opinion.

Most of the time when you have tiers in Factorio they allow for better designs - whatever that means - with some drawbacks - whatever that means. Examples:

• Belts: They get more space-efficient but consume a lot more resources
• Assembling Machines: They get more space-efficient which helps with beacons but consume more power
• Electric Furnaces: They can use modules but are less fuel-efficient than Steel Furnaces
• etc.

In all these examples you always have to choose the right tier for the job. It's madness to upgrade your whole main bus to Express Belts when only one line is too crowded but on the other hand higher tiers are almost never essential - the exception being fluids in Assembly Machines. This was missing from the previous and the officially proposed oil situation: Nearly everyone I know, me included, always rushed Advanced Oil to set up the cracking and balancing as early as possible.

While using Petroleum as a single output from BOP not only feels weird as it feels like the most refined product (see cracking) it does only teach you fluid handling and nothing more. It shifts not only byproduct handling to AOP but also cracking which in my opinion is a core concept in fluid handling.

On the other hand both Light Oil and Heavy Oil feel more like intermediates or less refined products. Cases can be made for both and I think both are more fitting than Petroleum and shift the need for cracking to BOP.

Why I think Heavy Oil is the best single output from BOP is because it makes BOP even useful late game and for experienced player: What do you do right now when you need lots of Lubricant? You "void" Light Oil or Petroleum as Solid Fuel or build a huge array of Storage Tanks. Both of this does not feel right to me as Factorio is a game about optimization. Now think about the optimization possibilities with Heavy Oil: You could build two rows of Refineries, one on BOP and one on AOP and switch between them using the circuit network depending on Storage Tank contents. Of course AOP should produce more product than BOP+cracking but as with most other tiered technologies in Factorio you now get a choice and can use the right tool for the right task.

I think the proposed change of using Light Oil in Rocket Fuel and raising the amount of Heavy Oil produced in AOP is more of a patch than a solution of the core problem which I tried to address above.

TL;DR: Make heavy oil the sole output of BOP to incentivize balancing between BOP and AOP late game without having the hurdle of handling byproducts early game with BOP.

[huancz]

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.

This has come up before in recent FFF discussions:

You are allowed to use logistic bots for supplying and trashing items to/from the player. You are simply not allowed to use requesters, active providers, and logistic buffer chests.

This achievement really needs some way of communicating its intentions more clearly, somehow.

[...]

As one of the people who previously mentioned the achievement as a reason for underutilizing bots in my first game: there is miscommunication, but it's in this thread. I think I wrote "cannot use active logistic network" without expanding it more, hoping it would be clear what that means. I can't look right now but the description in-game says something very close to "win the game without building any buffer or active provider chests". It can't be more clear than this.

When I first encountered logic robots I took some time to read about them on wiki, I even tried the active chests. THEN I decided I won't be missing much and reverted to earlier save to still get the achievement. I did use them for inventory management eventually, but with poor roboport coverage (and no mall).

[BlueTemplar]

[...]
Oh, and Wube, please add the names of the fluids that cannot mix in the error message. Instead of "cannot mix fluids", make it "cannot mix light oil and heavy oil" or "cannot mix crude oil and water" so it is more descriptive to the actual problem.
[...]

This.
And you could even add the fluid icons to the text now !
I suspect it might solve most of the issues with conversion from Basic to Advanced Oil Processing ?

[FluffDaSheep]

Ok, I'll join the chorus: I don't like the oil changes. I get that it should be simpler, but these changes make no thematic/chemical sense.

So after going through the comments, I suggest:

• Basic Oil Processing outputs heavy oil and petro gas. This makes sense thematically as it is what the most basic distillation tower would do.
• Sulfur recipe uses heavy oil instead of petro gas. Again, makes sense thematically as heavy oil is where most Sulfur is trapped in real oil.
• Chem pack uses Sulfur instead of Solid Fuel. As in the FFF.

This way the basic refinery makes 2 products, both are used by the chem pack, it's just a matter of having BOP output the correct ratio. It's a step up in complexity, but much less than it is now. Also, no extra wall before robots.

You can still do all the other stuff the FFF talks about to make Light Oil useful, and maybe add Petro Gas to the Sulfuric Acid recipe to ensure it's still the prime requisite for megabases.

[JimBarracus]

100 crude in 45 out, or at least that's what it says on the post.

then from the same 100 crude plus water in the advanced recipe, you get 25 heavy oil, 45 light oil and 55 PG.

Honestly, it looks like when you get advanced, it makes basic completely pointless.
I would suggest upping the number to about... 75ish, so that the amount of PG you get from basic is somewhere between what you get directly from Advanced, and what you'd get from advanced if you cracked everything down (I believe 25 heavy becomes 12.5 PG, and 45 light gives you 30, so full cracking gives you somewhere around 97.5PG)

Actually, that's my only suggested change for vanilla right now, buff the basic processing to give more PG.

I think thats the point
basic oil has to have disadvantages, sure you'll get the only desired product to make plastic but with a big loss/unused raw material
at a first glance you see that advanced oil has more output than basic oil even without considering to crack HO and LO. The price is the hassle of handling all oil products.

Once your first and maybe only oil source has depleted you might consider upgrading to advanced oil to make more out of that tiny stream of oil you are left with.

[bobingabout]

100 crude in 45 out, or at least that's what it says on the post.

then from the same 100 crude plus water in the advanced recipe, you get 25 heavy oil, 45 light oil and 55 PG.

Honestly, it looks like when you get advanced, it makes basic completely pointless.
I would suggest upping the number to about... 75ish, so that the amount of PG you get from basic is somewhere between what you get directly from Advanced, and what you'd get from advanced if you cracked everything down (I believe 25 heavy becomes 12.5 PG, and 45 light gives you 30, so full cracking gives you somewhere around 97.5PG)

Actually, that's my only suggested change for vanilla right now, buff the basic processing to give more PG.

I think thats the point
basic oil has to have disadvantages, sure you'll get the only desired product to make plastic but with a big loss/unused raw material
at a first glance you see that advanced oil has more output than basic oil even without considering to crack HO and LO. The price is the hassle of handling all oil products.

Once your first and maybe only oil source has depleted you might consider upgrading to advanced oil to make more out of that tiny stream of oil you are left with.

also annoyingly with the changes... the only reason for HO to exist is to make lubricant, as it is no longer an ingredient in flamethrower fuel, and neither is LO, so LO has absolutely no purpose at all anymore... except for it's new use in rocket fuel, and possibly the slightly increased efficiency when making solid fuel, which with the changes, solid fuel is mostly just an ingredient for rocket fuel, meaning light oil's only purpose is rocket fuel.

Which leaves me with a big question actually... what is even the point in having heavy oil AND light oil? both are useful for exactly one thing each, and both become available at the same time. Why not just combine them into a single refined oil?

I've heard of 1 possible reason not to... "What would the 3rd output of the oil refinery be for?" How about crude oil in coal liquefaction recipe?
Also with the same argument... if on the oil refinery, a specific pipe is used for a specific fluid, and there's only 2 input pipes on the oil refinery, one for crude and one for water... which pipe does the current liquefaction ingredient heavy oil go into?

[RocketManChronicles]

Ok, I'll join the chorus: I don't like the oil changes. I get that it should be simpler, but these changes make no thematic/chemical sense.

So after going through the comments, I suggest:

• Basic Oil Processing outputs heavy oil and petro gas. This makes sense thematically as it is what the most basic distillation tower would do.
• Sulfur recipe uses heavy oil instead of petro gas. Again, makes sense thematically as heavy oil is where most Sulfur is trapped in real oil.
• Chem pack uses Sulfur instead of Solid Fuel. As in the FFF.

This way the basic refinery makes 2 products, both are used by the chem pack, it's just a matter of having BOP output the correct ratio. It's a step up in complexity, but much less than it is now. Also, no extra wall before robots.

You can still do all the other stuff the FFF talks about to make Light Oil useful, and maybe add Petro Gas to the Sulfuric Acid recipe to ensure it's still the prime requisite for megabases.

I whole-heartedly back this up. BOP produces Heavy Oil and Petroleum Gas. Change Sulfur to be made from Heavy Oil. This gives Heavy Oil another recipe to be used in other than Lubricant alone (now that it is no longer used in Flamethrower Ammo - still cannot fathom the thought process behind this change either).

Which leaves me with a big question actually... what is even the point in having heavy oil AND light oil? both are useful for exactly one thing each, and both become available at the same time. Why not just combine them into a single refined oil?

And I agree with Bob here; what is even the point of having Heavy Oil and Light Oil now?? They each are used in only one recipe, Lubricant for Heavy Oil and Rocket Fuel for Light Oil. Why even have them? Just make everything from Petroleum Gas now, because handling those two additional fluids for one item each is just silly. In fact, why have Petroleum Gas at all?? Let's just have everything made from Crude Oil directly, since managing fluids beyond this point is TOO DIFFICULT.

Seriously, Devs.... This BOP change has me now questioning why the puzzles this game once provided for an engaging gameplay are now being so simplified? This is way too easy now. I played with the mod with the changes, there is no puzzle, just single changeover steps to convert Crude Oil to Plastic and Sulfur. There is no fluid management anymore, just pump it, pipe it. Challenge? Not at all, one pumpjack, one refinery, all the Petroleum Gas needed for blue Science. Just dumb. Actually, the whole process was just annoying to get Chemical Science going, not engaging or thought-provoking, just convert Crude Oil into Petroleum Gas, pipe it to Plastic and Sulfur.

Vanilla is now becoming Bland, no taste for what it was.... good thought-provoking puzzles.

[gGeorg]

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...)

This is briliant option. All those sqeeking there is no usage for the liguids you dont need.
Also the idea of 3 slot locomotion fuel used inside boilers.
I would add another, existing technique. Same as item slot in wagon can be reserved, allow fuel slot in boiler&locomotive be reserved for certain type of fuel. This reservation has two effects. First it makes priority slot for solid fuel, (or wood) so when ever you need to burn something just throw it in. Second, it can auto-refil a car with pre-selected, reserved fuel, when summon from inventory

When I think about it, the diesel lcomotive should work best with diesel >> light oil.

[Adamo]

Also with the same argument... if on the oil refinery, a specific pipe is used for a specific fluid, and there's only 2 input pipes on the oil refinery, one for crude and one for water... which pipe does the current liquefaction ingredient heavy oil go into?

It's set per recipe, so the recipe for liquification would have the inputs set as well. But I agree with your sentiments overall.