Factorio Forums

When refining, you right now generally need to have storage for your heavy and light oil, otherwise your refineries will not refine more petroleum when the others fill up.

Some people have been using the bug/feature of steam engines that they will void all liquids, to get rid of excess light/heavy oil. Other people have been picking up full storage tanks, and placing them down empty again.

My suggestion is to make an official liquid voider item. Perhaps controllable by signals, so you can make it conditional on the heavy oil tanks being full.

There's a mod for this. I believe it is called Flare Stack, and the point of it is to consume extra items just doing nothing

Usually though I use the cracking plants to turn heavy oil into light oil, and light oil into gas. The gas is consumed rapidly to make acid and plastic. I regulate these using small pumps and a circuit connection to the tank such that if the tank level rises above 300 units, the corresponding cracking unit is turned on to convert it to a more useful form. Heavy oil becomes light oil, light oil becomes gas- and gas is consumed in great quantities making plastic and sulfur.

Also I typically have an additional circuit on the light oil tank such that if the light oil tank reaches 1000 units, the excess is turned into fuel blocks. These can take the place of coal for boilers, or you can use them in your trains and vehicles where they give a significant boost to effective range.

With vanilla store it and research advanced oil processing, change the refinery recipes and build a wire condition activated cracking setup. There is no reason for such in item in vanilla really since you can use every output somehow, even if you only turn them into solid fuel.

Don't think that this is a bug with steam engines.
So what speaks against to use them to void.

There is also a mod called VoidPipe which has the size of a pipe to void liquids but it only saves space compared to steam engines.
If you heat the oil you get electric power...

Greetings steinio

What about flare stacks?

thuejk wrote:Some people have been using the bug/feature of steam engines that they will void all liquids, to get rid of excess light/heavy oil. Other people have been picking up full storage tanks, and placing them down empty again.

We have already two possibilities to get rid of fluids:
- Place a tank, wait till filled and remove it.
- Use the steam engine.

Plus some mods.

And no: It's not a bug. The steam engine takes any liquid and returns the difference between 15 and 100°C as energy efficiency. So you can heat light oil to 100° and push it through steam engine. Ridiculous: Yes. Bug: No.

aubergine18 wrote:What about flare stacks?

That would be an amazing solution!

I get the idea of wanting to void things like old armour, small power poles, burner miners, etc, but fuel? Okay maybe if you're using mods and have a useless oil, but then you can mod one in.

For a normal factory you can either turn it in to solid fuel, which burns through it very quickly and creates a useful fuel, or you can crack it. Or both. Only time I can think of you wouldn't want to do this is for speed runs, and typically 1-2 storage tanks is more than enough to deal with the excess.

Flare function in Vanilla:
- It would be a good solution to keep your pipes clean of unwanted liquid (accidental mixups, wrong train unloaded,... )
- It could be part of oil processing, before you get the more elegant solutions of liquid handling and advanced refining