Bottleneck: Plastic production

[Cougarific]

Newish player here - I've automated Blue Science production for the first time (Yay me!) but I'm having trouble producing enough Petroleum Gas-> Plastic for my Adv. Circuit production.

Could I just get some advice along these lines:

1). Confirm this? A refinery will stop production if any of the 3 outputs can't output any more (i.e. not enough storage or ongoing production)? e.g. my gas production is lagging because my heavy oil has nowhere to go (not using it for anything other than producing/storing Lubricant at this point). Note: I am cracking Light Oil into Petroleum Gas.
a). Options for combating ^this? Just build more storage tanks for the output? Find a use for Lubricant?

2). I already know that I could use more Oil/Pumpjacks - but again it feels like bringing more oil to the refinery will be pointless unless I can dump some heavy oil (I have many full storage tanks already). Is there any point in bringing in more oil if I can't process it?

3). General advice for getting the most bang for my Petroleum Gas buck?

[Klonan]

I recommend cracking heavy oil to light oil, 1 chemical plant doing this will eat up all the heavy oil from 'Advanced oil processing'

As for getting the most bang per buck... I normally throw in a load of productivity modules to all my oil/fluid processing, it slows it down but you end up with a lot more than you started with, with the pumpjacks though its better to use a speed module as its effectively an unlimited resource.

Balancing the fluids it one of the harder parts of the game, building excess storage tanks only pushes the problem of unbalanced production/consumption further down the line.

[Cougarific]

Heavy->Light Oil cracking: Derp. Didn't know you could do that. Thanks for that and the other suggestions!

[waduk]

Other have tested that the best outcome from oil well ::
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=7052

Ignore this spoiler below if you didn't want to see one of the best modular refineries design, if you want to expand production all you need to do is adding the layer :

Image

Blueprint string

Code: Select all

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blueprintData;end

The above string and image were taken from this blueprint viewer sites :
https://ght.io/factorio/blueprint/

[Cougarific]

Wow I haven't reached blueprint stage yet - that layout made my brain hurt.

But I'm finding that is the defining characteristic of Factorio - it all *looks* super complicated at first, then you break it all down, put it together one bit at a time, and pretty soon Voila! Something that seemed complicated at first glance is actually pretty simple.

[waduk]

Wow I haven't reached blueprint stage yet - that layout made my brain hurt.

But I'm finding that is the defining characteristic of Factorio - it all *looks* super complicated at first, then you break it all down, put it together one bit at a time, and pretty soon Voila! Something that seemed complicated at first glance is actually pretty simple.

Hahaha, yeah that was true. I'm also new to factorio. Sometimes it hurts my brain when it comes to calculate stuff, and figuring out the optimum layout to avoid bottleneck.
Your original problem here is pretty straight forward, and easily solved, but i'm sure you will hit a different kind of bottleneck (max belt throughput, etc) in the future, and you will try to solve that.
This is fun !

[Xterminator]

Usually I crack my heavy oil into light oil, then crack all my light oil into Petro gas, unless I am using it for solid fuel. Also, adding more refineries and pumps will obviously help, just as long as you are cracking the heavy/light oils so they don't get baked up.
Adding additional storages doesn't really solve the problem, but it can at least create a bit more of a buffer until things get backed up, and such.

Hope this helped!