Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Pumpjacks, like mining drills, gain reduced resource drain with quality. But oil wells, unlike ore patches, don't run out.

What?

Like mining drills, quality pumpjacks gain a reduced resource drain. However, where this is very valuable with mining drills - a 66% resource drain means you can extract 50% more ore from a given resource patch before it runs dry - oil wells are infinite (as are sulfuric acid geysers and fluorine vents). Fresh wells do produce oil faster, and technically a higher-quality pumpjack will cause them to deplete more slowly, but once they hit their minimum output of 20% of what they started as, a quality pumpjack provides no benefit at all. (Note that this doesn't apply to lithium vents, which contain a finite amount of lithium brine and deplete like ore patches.)

To compensate, I propose that quality pumpjacks be given a buff to their output rate. The simplest solution would be to just give them a straight quality-based multiplier to their output rate, same as production buildings like assemblers. A more balanced solution, however, might be to make it a buff to the minimum output rate; thus e.g. while a normal pumpjack on a fully depleted oil well will produce 20% of what it initially output, a legendary pumpjack will never drop below 50% of the initial output.

Note that in either case, the reduced resource drain should still exist, at least in the case of lithium brine.

Why?

Because Quality should mean something, and right now, in the case of pumpjacks, it doesn't, really.

While this is true for most resources, it is false for exactly lithium brine in space age.

Still, I see your point. But I really do not want that change to make them worth on lithium brine.

Edit: Oh, you already mentioned lithium brine. I should read before I post.

Then just +1