Suggestion for managing oil refinery

[battl3hamm3r]

I have an issue where my oil refineries produce way way too much refined oil vs hydrogen, and it makes my storage get to max capacity really quickly and thus, the refineries stops making both items (refined oil & hydrogen)

Ive started using the oil to make sulphuric acid, but i still produce way to much oil... any suggestions ?

As you know, constant production of hydrogen is important for the red cubes

[Bobucles]

The refined oil will be useful, promise. Until then, stockpile it. Today's oil surplus is tomorrow's shortage. It shouldn't take more than a stack of fluid towers or so to get through the highs and lows of the tech tree.

There are 2 oil techs that are sort of the opposite. Xray cracking turns oil into hydrogen, and the other one turns it back into graphite. Use Xray cracking early on for a bit of a hydrogen boost, but don't go too heavily into it. The oil is ultimately more valuable in the long run.

[Coops]

You will run out of oil since besides sulfuric acid, it is also need for organic crystal .

Or you could burn it for power. until you get better sources.

[battl3hamm3r]

ok thanks, I'll keep stockpilling it until i advance in research

[Bobucles]

Or you could burn it for power. until you get better sources.

Definitely don't recommend this. Oil isn't exactly rare, but it's not something to recklessly waste. It only gets more rare on homeworld as the deposits get drained.
A strong use of oil power is to build a dyson sail swarm. One of the ingredients needs a few drops of sulfur, which is a tiny amount of oil. Sail swarms do suffer many stacked efficiency losses, but they can still give a decent output.

[Andy]

Refined oil has three stages for me:
1) Overabundance because I need hydrogen for red science and don't have much use yet for refined oil. I build a bunch of storage for the oil.
2) Shortage because I need refined oil for plastic and sulfuric acid. The oil I stored comes into play.
3) Balance because I am bringing in sulfuric acid, organic crystals, graphene, and nanotubes from other planets. About all I need refined oil for is plastic, and I don't need as much plastic as I did before. By this time I'm bringing in hydrogen from gas giants, so I use my blueprint that turns crude oil and coal into refined oil without any leftover hydrogen.

[Shiroe]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

It only gets more rare on homeworld as the deposits get drained.

A bit of clarification on this: unlike ore veins, oil does never completely run out, but after IIRC running at full speed for 10 hours, it drops down to (again IIRC) 0.1/sec/well.

[[TBG] Mai]

What I tend to do with refined oil is stockpiling it while doing red matrices research, and slowly convert it to sulfuric acid, since I use a more balanced setup for red+yellow.
Once enough yellow has been researched, I use that acid to craft some Logistic stations before switching to other setups.

[Bobucles]

but after IIRC running at full speed for 10 hours,

Oil wells operate on an exponential decay half-life. The half life is every 12 hours of continuous operation, until it hits the bare minimum of 0.1/sec. Idle extractors are harmless.

IIRC, ore vein research makes extractors work faster so it does more decay ticks, then the ore efficiency makes each tick less damaging. It kinda cancels out in term of decay time.

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

but after IIRC running at full speed for 10 hours,

Oil wells operate on an exponential decay half-life. The half life is every 12 hours of continuous operation, until it hits the bare minimum of 0.1/sec. Idle extractors are harmless.

IIRC, ore vein research makes extractors work faster so it does more decay ticks, then the ore efficiency makes each tick less damaging. It kinda cancels out in term of decay time.

I did the maths a while back, at 1x resources where Oil seeps halve every 12 hours they drain faster for each level of VU up to level 6 (peaking at 110% of the usual speed) and then start to drain slower, falling below 100% of base at level 15.

By VU level 30 they halve every 19 hours, by level 50 it's every 44 hours and by 75 it's every 146 hours. I usually stop around VU 100 at which point it halves every 530 hours and other resources drain at 0.21% the base rate. You can keep going until resource drain stops completely, but at that point you've effectively multiplied all resources in the cluster by 500, If you take it further to say VU 150 then seeps halve every 8,050 hours and resources are effectively multiplied by about 10,000

[ThreadCarefully]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

Or you could burn it for power. until you get better sources.

Definitely don't recommend this. Oil isn't exactly rare, but it's not something to recklessly waste. It only gets more rare on homeworld as the deposits get drained.
A strong use of oil power is to build a dyson sail swarm. One of the ingredients needs a few drops of sulfur, which is a tiny amount of oil. Sail swarms do suffer many stacked efficiency losses, but they can still give a decent output.

For sulfur, you have the sulfur oceans. Tap into them - and you have the endless source of it.

For refined oil, mid-/late-game wise, I go pretty much completely into reformed refining. (Because I hate dealing with the oil & the added logistics.) Refined oil + coal + hydrogen -> +1 refined oil. Slow, but you can slap many of the bricks. In my late game I had IIRC half dozen of bricks of 72 refineries, that fully satisfied the demand. In late game it's only needed for plastic. During the early game, even 36 refineries are enough to cover the demand.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by ThreadCarefully:

For refined oil, mid-/late-game wise, I go pretty much completely into reformed refining. (Because I hate dealing with the oil & the added logistics.) Refined oil + coal + hydrogen -> +1 refined oil. Slow, but you can slap many of the bricks. In my late game I had IIRC half dozen of bricks of 72 refineries, that fully satisfied the demand. In late game it's only needed for plastic. During the early game, even 36 refineries are enough to cover the demand.

My late, late, game is about 3x as many refineries (24 stacks of 50) just for science, plus a few more miscellaneous refineries to support the production of assemblers and/or missiles.

Though at that scale I don't bother with reforming refine. The science build will happily consume all byproduct hydrogen production (and then some) so it's simpler to just stick with X-ray cracking.


Plus, using the simple way of reforming refine (one x-ray cracking refinery feeding each reforming refine refinery) would require a 1/3rd more refineries to hit the same output level, as each refinery pair would only be cranking out 3 refined oil per cycle instead of 4 -- though they would be using 50% less crude oil. But by that point resource depletion has ceased to be a concern)

[Kauldric]

Realize that at end game you only need refined oil for plastic.

Everything else you can get without refineries and way more efficiently.

So don’t worry about it that much. Stockpile but you probably won’t use it

Or crack it away to maximize hydrogen

Or burn the excess

[Bobucles]

Proliferator is excellent with many things, but it is extra excellent on oil production.
Blue spraying the crude oil means whatever the soil seep is doing, it's now giving 25% more output. Nice.
edit: my bad, the xray cracking and reformed can only go fast.

[ThreadCarefully]

Originally posted by josmith7:

But by that point resource depletion has ceased to be a concern)

Yes, technically you are correct, but I still hate oil. (Was quite surprised that the first message that oil sip was depleted was well after 40-50h.)

By the way, icymi, Francis John on his last DSP playthrough "cracked" the game. VU upgrades upgrade VU much faster than the research depletes the veins. Thus also oil is practically endless. QED.

P.S. But I still hate oil.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by ThreadCarefully:

By the way, icymi, Francis John on his last DSP playthrough "cracked" the game. VU upgrades upgrade VU much faster than the research depletes the veins. Thus also oil is practically endless. QED.

P.S. But I still hate oil.

I thought that was common knowledge - (even back before oil had a half-life in DSP)

Though there's actually a point (up to IIRC VU level 15) where the speed boost from VU is more than the resource savings and so initially VU depletes the veins faster. But that's quickly passed