Factorio Forums

I dont understand what was the idea behind making oil fields the way they are.

why not make them finite resources like iron and copper? just cuirious.

Factorio is a simulation, it tries to mirror the real world in a slightly simplified form. Oil fields in the real world behave as shown in Factorio: yield constantly lowers while oil is being extracted. They never actually get empty like a coal deposit, there is always some oil left in the stone.

However in the real world oil production is terminated when the yield goes below some threshold, because it becomes unprofitable to continue. So it appears as oil fields in the real world run empty. But they are not actually empty, just very slow to extract.

This may seem paradox, because there is definitely a finite amount of oil. See it this way: It always takes 10 years to extract half of the remaining oil in an oil field.
So after 10 years there's 50% remaining. After 20 years it's 25%. After 30 years it's 12.5%. And so on. It never gets down to zero, just half after every 10 years.