In reality it comes primarily from natural gas.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:15 pmUm, where does the PG comes from in reality then?.. 0.oReika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:10 pm #1 is a complete nonstarter - it is now extracting a refined product from the ground; you might as well have "plastic ore" and "sulfuric acid wells" at that point.
Also: https://sciencing.com/how-is-natural-ga ... 78757.htmlAivech wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:17 pmIt is one of many products of refining crude oil.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:15 pmUm, where does the PG comes from in reality then?.. 0.oReika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:10 pm #1 is a complete nonstarter - it is now extracting a refined product from the ground; you might as well have "plastic ore" and "sulfuric acid wells" at that point.
I did. Several times actually. Just not on the oil changes discussion threads.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 9:25 pm I wounder nobody ever proposed to include batteries in the blue flask recipe.
You realize your link supports Reika's argument, right? Since this article shows us that petroleum gas is not extracted as a refined product from the ground, but must be refined through a number of processes.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:24 pmAlso: https://sciencing.com/how-is-natural-ga ... 78757.htmlAivech wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:17 pmIt is one of many products of refining crude oil.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:15 pmUm, where does the PG comes from in reality then?.. 0.oReika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:10 pm #1 is a complete nonstarter - it is now extracting a refined product from the ground; you might as well have "plastic ore" and "sulfuric acid wells" at that point.
Natural gas and petroleum gas are not the same thing. The former is methane, and is found naturally. The latter is ethane (or in the case of Factorio, ethylene) and to my knowledge is not found naturally in any appreciable amount. It has to be extracted from crude either directly or via cracking. It is also the only one of those two from which you would normally make plastic (hence the name polyethylene).Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:24 pmAlso: https://sciencing.com/how-is-natural-ga ... 78757.htmlAivech wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:17 pmIt is one of many products of refining crude oil.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:15 pmUm, where does the PG comes from in reality then?.. 0.oReika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:10 pm #1 is a complete nonstarter - it is now extracting a refined product from the ground; you might as well have "plastic ore" and "sulfuric acid wells" at that point.
I agree with your sentiments overall, but just for clarity: ethane is the second largest constituent of natural gas after methane, and natural gas is therefore by far the largest source of ethane, and in turn, polyethylene plastic.Reika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:32 pm Natural gas and petroleum gas are not the same thing. The former is methane, and is found naturally. The latter is ethane (or in the case of Factorio, ethylene) and to my knowledge is not found naturally in any appreciable amount. It has to be extracted from crude either directly or via cracking. It is also the only one of those two from which you would normally make plastic (hence the name polyethylene).
This is what you get when a guy whose specialty is gas turbines and rocket engines tries to talk petro-oil chemistry.Adamo wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:33 pmI agree with your sentiments overall, but just for clarity: ethane is the second largest constituent of natural gas after methane, and natural gas is therefore by far the largest source of ethane, and in turn, polyethylene plastic.Reika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:32 pm Natural gas and petroleum gas are not the same thing. The former is methane, and is found naturally. The latter is ethane (or in the case of Factorio, ethylene) and to my knowledge is not found naturally in any appreciable amount. It has to be extracted from crude either directly or via cracking. It is also the only one of those two from which you would normally make plastic (hence the name polyethylene).
And, yes, factorio has always treated petroleum gas as if it is like natural gas (being able to extract sulfur from it, and making plastic from it).
How come none of the developers have responded to this post? I think it brings up a ton of good points that haven't really been made yet.
Well, this is like the 3rd (or 4th) time that I post this, but anyway...Reika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:32 pmNatural gas and petroleum gas are not the same thing. The former is methane, and is found naturally. The latter is ethane (or in the case of Factorio, ethylene) and to my knowledge is not found naturally in any appreciable amount. It has to be extracted from crude either directly or via cracking. It is also the only one of those two from which you would normally make plastic (hence the name polyethylene).Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:24 pmAlso: https://sciencing.com/how-is-natural-ga ... 78757.htmlAivech wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:17 pmIt is one of many products of refining crude oil.Yandersen wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:15 pmUm, where does the PG comes from in reality then?.. 0.oReika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:10 pm #1 is a complete nonstarter - it is now extracting a refined product from the ground; you might as well have "plastic ore" and "sulfuric acid wells" at that point.
Makes me wonder if they should just separate PG from oil refining and just add a new resource natural gas that is refined to ethane or similar....Adamo wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:33 pmI agree with your sentiments overall, but just for clarity: ethane is the second largest constituent of natural gas after methane, and natural gas is therefore by far the largest source of ethane, and in turn, polyethylene plastic.Reika wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:32 pm Natural gas and petroleum gas are not the same thing. The former is methane, and is found naturally. The latter is ethane (or in the case of Factorio, ethylene) and to my knowledge is not found naturally in any appreciable amount. It has to be extracted from crude either directly or via cracking. It is also the only one of those two from which you would normally make plastic (hence the name polyethylene).
And, yes, factorio has always treated petroleum gas as if it is like natural gas (being able to extract sulfur from it, and making plastic from it).
We can't expect devs to answer every post in such a long thread on a sunday. Also, as enjoyable to read it may be, this post focus on pointing one gameplay weakness - oil isn't rewarding soon enough - without proposing any solution to it.
To be fair, that post proposed that leaving oil as it is is the appropriate thing to do. Because it's best to leave it in the fray with all the other things players are learning during the green plateau.DanGio wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 11:11 pmWe can't expect devs to answer every post in such a long thread on a sunday. Also, as enjoyable to read it may be, this post focus on pointing one gameplay weakness - oil isn't rewarding soon enough - without proposing any solution to it.
From a dev perspective, I think this post is very hard to respond to.
While I am caught up and distraction free for the moment, though, I did want to seriously just reiterate my position on this in full with my current understanding of the issue at large.
Exactly. Pointing an issue and proposing to leave it as it is as a solution. Or rather, focus on something else. This is a distraction from the main point.Adamo wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 11:19 pmTo be fair, that post proposed that leaving oil as it is is the appropriate thing to do. Because it's best to leave it in the fray with all the other things players are learning during the green plateau.DanGio wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 11:11 pmWe can't expect devs to answer every post in such a long thread on a sunday. Also, as enjoyable to read it may be, this post focus on pointing one gameplay weakness - oil isn't rewarding soon enough - without proposing any solution to it.
From a dev perspective, I think this post is very hard to respond to.
FuryoftheStars wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 11:45 pm ...
While I think it has been pointed out that heavy oil would actually be the most efficient method of creating solid fuel in reality, I understand if you don't want to make this change.
...
Ah, thanks Adamo! Sorry, was going off from the discussions in the other thread.Adamo wrote: Mon Jul 29, 2019 12:06 amFuryoftheStars wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 11:45 pm ...
While I think it has been pointed out that heavy oil would actually be the most efficient method of creating solid fuel in reality, I understand if you don't want to make this change.
...
For the record, I do not believe this is correct. Light oil is separated out as more valuable than crude and the heavy left behind precisely because it provides a higher percentage of gasoline and diesel products. But, heavy oil would certainly have the most sulfur. If anything, this suggests that each fluid has a product for which it is the most efficient as a precursor, which seems pretty reasonable to me!
still not a fan of changing the basic oil processing to the new simple version, and don't think i will ever be, but i understand, the first time i built it, i was scratching my head for hours. but more so it was because of the misplaced pipe that mixed the fluids somewhere, for that fix i am extremely grateful.V453000 wrote: Sat Jul 27, 2019 8:27 pm “Rocket fuel is 10% more expensive with the same energy value.”
“Move Rocket fuel to a chemical plant.”
Rocket fuel was already losing energy value before, so it just gets a bit worse, with productivity modules still being able to turn it into a gain. The gain however becomes rather small and I have been considering raising the energy value of RF, or decreasing the solid fuel cost to 9.
I did consider to move RF to a chemical plant but that would mean 1 less productivity module which would mean further nerf, and we don’t have many assembling machines with a fluid input, and variety is nice.
“Add a tutorial.”
This is always an option and certainly vastly superior to having the player go to wiki/youtube/... for help, but if it can be solved in the game then I’d say it’s much better. Explaining trains, robots or inventory transfers in a simple tooltip or the entity gui or making a build up for it in the game is rather difficult, so those do have minitutorials. However do not take this as “there will never be an oil minitutorial”. I do not remember which exact tutorials are still planned. The campaign will be trying to distribute the whole oil problem a bit slower and will put technologies in ever smaller chunks, but you will see that later.
“The gui should explain it better.”
When we were the testing the NPE/tutorial/introduction, we added the “Status” in tooltips and the yellow/red icon backgrounds to indicate why the entity is not working. If I remember correctly the coming entity GUI redesign will integrate mainly the status to make it much easier to see. Good point regardless of which version of oil processing we would have.
“Pushing robots back is not fun.”
This was pretty much my first response when I first heard about the whole idea, but now I’d say it’s really not that huge difference between late logistic and early blue science, especially with the basic refinery being quicker to set up. I will be observing this very closely what exact effects will it have. We were considering to add burner powered construction robots a few years ago, but I can’t currently see how and when would those appear.
“Basic oil processing should only output heavy oil and unlock both cracking recipes.”
This would mean that if the player is not going for early robots, they would just have to do 2 more cracking steps for all of the petroleum gas. That is 2 extra steps adding to the tedium and vastly decreasing the puzzle of advanced oil processing - a typical new player is really not going to set up a circuit network, and the AOP solution would not be different in anything, just more efficient per crude oil.
“Put sulfuric acid, or sulfur and water in chemical science pack recipe.”
I really dislike any science pack to have a fluid input, just looking at the crafting menu and seeing red background is alarming.
Especially if you read this far, thank you very much. Hopefully you have found some answers, and even more hopefully you understand our aim is not to ruin the whole game, and that making a change does not mean it can never be changed, altered or reverted.
Thank you very much for all of your replies. All of them.
V
I notice you do realize that the issue with oil is resource sinks. However, I think you're over estimating the ability of solid fuel to be a sink. Until you get to end game, even science packs are not a sufficient resource sink to make it a tool for balancing consumption.V453000 wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2019 6:00 pm So, I tried implementing the Heavy + Petroleum gas BOP.
Option 1: Solid fuel in Chemical science pack, Sulfur made from PG
- "don't make me produce SF inefficiently" people will hate. I don't find it to be a huge deal though, and it would be completely clear that AOP unlocks more efficient Solid Fuel - it could even be written in the technology description.
- AOP still mandatory for rocket fuel
- the idea of increasing the amount of solid fuel for the science pack is not stupid at all, the player could put all Heavy into SF if they do not use Lubricant, or add from PG if they are, or if they want to burn some
- easy change, no need for math as petroleum gas has a sink pretty much always (sulfur and/or plastic)
Option 2: Sulfur in Chemical science pack, Sulfur made from Heavy
- AOP still mandatory for rocket fuel
- Solid fuel only used by itself when the player would want to burn it or to boost vehicle speed
- the amount of obtainable sulfur would be limited by amount of consumed PG, which would be mainly for plastic. From quickly browsing through a few saves from different stages of the game I'm reading between 1,5x up to the theoretical 8,5x (science production only) more Petroleum gas being used by plastic than sulfur, which is a big range but having BOP make 1:1 heavy and gas would probably be a safe option, as the 8,5x would just use more cracking, likely AOP. Coal liquefaction is always there to increase the heavy:gas ratio.
With AOP and Coal liquefaction the amount of obtainable sulfur would also be limited by the amount of Light oil consumed, but that could be translated into Petroleum Gas.
Still, needing more Heavy for Sulfur than Gas for Plastic would probably be a very rare case to occur, and the player has the chance to adjust the ratio further by switching solid fuel production from gas on, in case PG backs up.
Chemical science pack alone would need 4 times more gas for plastic than heavy for sulfur (if the science pack needed 1 sulfur), unless the science pack 4x Sulfur which I would not have a problem with. If the player produced only up to Chemical science, BOP with a ratio of 1:1 would work forever. If the player needs lubricant/batteries, or more plastic for building purposes (robots, modular armor, modules, ...), they would need to somehow handle the excess on one side or the other.
I didn't do enough math yet on how much/ratio should AOP do. Coal liquefaction should definitely make a lot of heavy oil, same or similar as it does now.