Factorio Forums

Hello all!

Just started today and am learning alot! I am stuck trying to get my refinery to create liquids and store them. I have my pumpjack moving oil into the refinery, then i have 3 storage tanks connected to the outputs - one each for petroleum, light oil, and heavy oil. When I start the refining process with the recipe it runs for about 3 cycles (10 seconds or so) and stops and nothing is produced or stored in the tanks. Any idea what im doing wrong?

Jon
Las Vegas, NV

Make sure the storage tanks and pipes for each product don't touch each other. Press Alt to see it better.

yea, I did make sure of that- they are completely separated...

do I need to insert a pump in the line to move the fluid?

i think what i needed was a refinery that would use the fluids...I started creating plastic and that was a start. Now I need to make sulfuric acid...One of the components is water. Do i just use a offshore pump and run an input directly into the refinery, or can I use storage tank for the water?

vegasjon wrote:i think what i needed was a refinery that would use the fluids...I started creating plastic and that was a start. Now I need to make sulfuric acid...One of the components is water. Do i just use a offshore pump and run an input directly into the refinery, or can I use storage tank for the water?

Yes, for water just use an offshore pump. You can use a storage tank to store water, but this is not needed. One offshore pump is enough to supply all buildings that require water in a mid-sized oil processing area.

vegasjon wrote:do I need to insert a pump in the line to move the fluid?

No. You only need pumps if you want to pipe long distances (the max throughput of pipes decreases with distance) or if you want to control liquid flow using the circuit network.

Ok thanks!

If your tanks are hooked up correctly it should produce all three products until one of the tanks is full, even if you aren't using any of them at all. If adding a plastic plant made it do something then it sounds like the petroleum tank (at least) wasn't actually connected.

Also note that tanks have multiple connection points and putting tanks next to each other has them connect to each other if any of the points line up. You might have light oil in your gas tank and then gas backs up at the refinery or something.

Use ALT and send screenshots.