Factorio Forums

First of all: there is enough oil there, this topic is about another issue.

I'm playing the default settings in freeplay mode. The oil sources, even those 300% ones are harvested way to fast. There is no point to build for example a station there to haul the oil barrels, because it is in about 1 hour useless. The occurrence of oil spots should be reduced, the average yield per unit reduced a bit, but the deposit drastically increased. When I build a base with a station to harvest a big source of iron or copper, it is enough for maybe 20 hours of gameplay. In case of oil it kind of takes one out of the experience having a base with rigs throw-away in 1 hour.

Make the occurrence much lesser, reduce the yield but increase the deposit drastically.

Example:

Reduce to 1/10 of current amount of oil spots.
Compensate it to get back to 100% by increasing the deposit by 10x

Since yield depend on deposit currently (or there is actually no "deposit")
to make the yield not to high (e. G. 300% would be about 30,0/sek) reduce it by 1/2.

Example:

Yield is always 0,005% of the CURRENT deposit per second
Deposit: 500.000 Oil
Yield: 25 crude oil / second
So yield would go down with deposit going down.
At deposit of 400.000 it would be 20 oil / sec already

Note that as an exchange the amount of spots is down to 1/10

I completely agree with you that the oil fields need a bit of balance. I play with my resource frequency on very low, and I never needed to build an oil outpost so far. While there where always more than enough oil fields in my starting area, they depleted very fast - not a problem though because i had so many of them around.

Less oil fields with a bit higher yield (or longer lasting yield) should work great. If I had enough oil to last for a bit, but needed to expand to a new spot to get more after, that would be a good thing.

I for this type of variance, but there should also variance into the other direction. In other words: I'm for this, but also the current behavior is useful.

I'v tried to archive something similar with the current settings but it does not come even close to that. What i'v also noticed, when you set the occurrence to very rare the oil is still very common. But increasing the count of spots (not occurrence rarity) by just one above normal freaks out and I have like 7-10 oil spots on one location, while on normal it was like 1-5, in average rather 2.

I second that ysor123. I just registered in this forum to get this from my chest

I play with all standard settings and I must say, while all other ressources let me be able to build up a train/mining operation for quite a nice time, oil is driving me nuts.

Lately i dont do anything else than searching for nice oil spots and building very long railroads to it...

Please balance that.

Oil depletes super quickly, A single refinery burns through (to 0.1/s) an average oil spot in 20 minutes maybe.
Id totally say its needs to take 5-10 times longer

It would be nice if we could research fracking technology to use some byproducts of oil production to extract some more stuff out from the fields

hoho wrote:It would be nice if we could research fracking technology to use some byproducts of oil production to extract some more stuff out from the fields

And get pollution through the roof ! (not as a sarcasm or political commentary, but as a mechanism)