what should I improve with this simple coal liquifaction setup?

[cinnamon]

09-02-2025, 13-14-12.png (631.87 KiB) Viewed 197 times

[Blattsee]

I believe all the ratios of the buildings and the recipes are correct:
Simple coal liquifaction produces 10/s heavy oil, heavy oil cracking turns 20/s heavy oil to 15/s light oil (so you correctly connect 2 refineries per chemical plant), and light oil cracking converts 15/s light oil to 10/s petroleum gas. In other words, according to the picture you could currently produce 20/s petroleum gas.

Your main problem is that you forgot to connect the output of one of the chemical plants with the "light oil cracking to petroleum gas" recipe (the one towards the right with a yellow circle), so you can only produce 10/s petroleum gas.

Other potential improvements:
a) Adding productivity, speed or efficiency modules could be useful depending if you are lacking input materials, have insufficient crafting speed or power supply. (note: increased speed might require upgrading the inserters and belts)
b) By leaving more space between all buildings (or at least between the refinieries and the chemical plants) can allow you to later add beacons to further increase the speed/decrease the power consumption.
c) Using higher quality buildings can also help.
d) Since this is a rather small setup, you can connect all fluids of the same type without reaching the pipeline extent limit, and add storage tanks.
This is not only useful to better monitor the amount of fluids currently available, but also allows you to store extra fluids if they are currently not used.

(I think things like curcuit conditions are not needed for such a simple setup, so i advise against it for this situation)

Of course most of these improvements you might be able to skip once you have researched and use the normal coal liquifaction recipe.
But on the other hand, most of these improvements you might also be able to apply to that recipe (or probably any recipe for that matter)

I hope this helps you improve the setup!

[Shulmeister]

Previously given advices were all goods, but i woud like to extend the list with "tilability", reorganizing the buildings to add the missing connexion and space for beacons can also allow to make it so the setup is easily "copy pasted" or duplicated and that helps a lot.

[jdrexler75]

Simple coal liquifaction is only a short-term setup, most people replace it with the regular coal liquifaction quickly, so I wouldn't worry about optimizing it too much. Or, perhaps instead, change the layout for easier conversion to regular coal liquifaction.