Factorio Forums

I decided to set up an automatic oil refining system and that's what came of it.
I set the number of refineries that I connected to the comparing combinator. Water and oil are constantly supplied to each plant, and there are 3 pipes at the outlet. I ticked the "install recipe" box in each factory. This combinator, depending on the input data, produces recipes.:
- basic oil refining (more petroleum gas);
- advanced oil refining (more diesel fuel);
- oil refining (more fuel oil);
- it doesn't give anything away.
While the tanks were filling, everything was fine, one recipe replaced another and so on until the desired amount of product was reached. After reaching a certain volume of tanks, the combinator stopped giving out any signals and for some reason the plants themselves switched to the "basic oil refilling" recipe, continuing to work, although I did not need it.
Further, as certain reservoirs were emptied, the combinator began to issue another "oil refining" recipe (base oil) to the network, but the plants did not respond to this signal from the logistics network, continuing to produce only associated petroleum gas. Only the redevelopment of the plant helped.
Is this a problem or should it be?
If this is how it should be, then how do I set up factories so that they use recipes ONLY from the signals of the logistics network?

It's impossible to say what happens for you from your description alone. Even a screenshot isn't sufficient - you need to post a blueprint or a save.
In general it's working as you built it, and if it isn't working as you intended, you made an error.

About your approach: a better way to control the amount of the 3 different output oil types isn't to switch the refineries between basic and advanced oil processing but instead to control oil cracking and convert any surplus light and heavy oil to petroleum gas accordingly. Add a storage tank for each of the 3 oil products and enable heavy-to-light oil cracking if the heavy oil tank gets full and enable light oil-to-petroleum cracking if the light oil tank gets full. Since petroleum gas is usually the oil type you need most (for plastic bars), this is usually exactly what you need and still have enough of all the other types, for example heavy oil to produce lubricant.

That's a really good answer.

It sounds like OP is using a mod so they have more refinery recipes.

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OP: you're talking about the "set recipe" option? And I assume you mean the "circuit network" rather than the "logistics network"?

One feature you may be overlooking is that if you are not supplying a recipe signal, a building will look through the item signals (e.g. "petroleum gas"), and select a recipe for crafting that item.

So, for example, if you wire things up so a refinery can see the the contents of your fluid tanks, then if the refinery sees no recipe signals, it will instead interpret those fluids signals as being requests to select a recipe to make that fluid.

But I agree with the other poster that verbal descriptions tend to be woefully inadequate for debugging -- you really need to show your problems in a way others can inspect it themselves (e.g. screenshotting everything that could possibly be relevant or providing a save).

I don't use the recipe mod.
I missed that an oil gas signal is sent to the plant, which they perceive as a recipe. I reworked it a bit and everything worked out. Thanks for the tip.