How do i find Oil?

[Autismus Maximus]

I have no idea where to put the oil pump

[SLG-Dennis]

Hey,
open the map and on the right side choose the layer for oil to see where you can find oil on a heatmap.
The more oil that is available at a specific place, the faster you can create the oil products with the pumpjack.

[talo]

what layer is for oil dennis?

[ShizNator]

If I remember Oil has no layers it's an area where you would put your jack on the gound layer.

And connect it to what it needs to run and give it barrel inventory and it will produce oil when on.

And you find them the way Dennis specified.

[XistenZ]

I believe you can find oil almost anywhere, the "more oily" parts reduces the time to produce a barrel of it

[castitatis]

yes, open map, on the right side navigate to the oilfield option

Look around the map for orange<yellow<white areas
You'll want to stick your pump jacks in the white area
The bigger, the better, and it can be a wide margin.
I've seen white areas go as wide as 1m40s per petroleum, all the way to negative numbers(at which point you produce barrels as fast as the pump jack animation)

Then you just need to run water to the oil refinery
(pump jacks don't need water, for now at least)

[Duke Tyrag]

this post is obsolete. there is no oilfield option in the map

[Other]

Originally posted by Duke Tyrag:

this post is obsolete. there is no oilfield option in the map

It is still there, although it might have moved. In the tabs on the right side of the map, select

World Layers
> Environment Data
> World
> Oilfield

The first three are openable tabs, while the last one is a radio button about halfway down the list in the World tab.

The general point is that you can stick your pump jacks anywhere, and you will eventually get oil, but the production time does vary depending on how concentrated the oil is at that location. I tend to put my pump jacks right next to my oil refinery so I don't need to mess with transporting oil barrels one way and empty barrels back; if it is too slow there, I'll just add more pump jacks and split my production among them. One combustion generator can power as many as 24 pump jacks (12 000 W for the generator, 500 W for each running pump jack), or a little less if you are also running some lights and crafting tables. I normally stop around 5 pump jacks, since around 10 pump jacks, you start to need a second oil refinery to process the oil fast enough.

[$tump]

I heard I might find oil here. Ahhh shh... 2 people already. I'll claim somewhere else.

[SLG-Dennis]

Originally posted by Duke Tyrag:

this post is obsolete. there is no oilfield option in the map

That is incorrect, it is just hidden by default now as long as oil drilling has not been researched on the server. You can turn that off in Balance.eco.

[Ranix]

that is not a good idea as it greatly harms discoverability of the feature for no benefit

[Ranix]

I want to go one farther and say this is a strange decision for SLG

I can see where this came from. Someone was thinking, "you wouldn't know where oil is and be able to choose your base location based on that until you had the technology to scan for it" or similar

but instead of planning this out and considering the gameplay impact and discoverability impact, it looks like it was just implemented with no thought

this is out-of-character for SLG. Lately it seems more things like this have been slipping through. I don't want to bring them up specifically here as it's unrelated to the thread, but I'm seeing a general trend of hasty implementation.

The SLG of the past would consider a feature like this more thoroughly before implementing it. Maybe you just missed this one, but you should go back and properly consider this.

I think you should stop hiding the oil heatmap before oil drilling is researched.

It is too confusing and the primary goal, to prevent players from knowing where oil is, has no practical gameplay effect

[castitatis]

On multiplayer servers, it absolutely does. Before, it wasn't unusual for people to, on day 1, settle directly on oil fields, planning to go that route, or heck, sometimes even to block access to it for others.
That's why it was blocked from viewing by default. Never forget that the number 1 way of playing the game is with others on multiplayer servers, generally with 20-30 other players, often even more.

I can tell you that that feature was discussed in-depth by a LOT of people and hiding it was the final decision, after months of debate between players AND devs.

[Ranix]

Then why was it implemented so hastily that it hides the entire feature from users? Grey the map out and put red text that says "research oil drilling to unlock this view" or something. This took great effort and discussion and the implementation was less than half-assed?

[Autismus Maximus]

Originally posted by castitatis:

On multiplayer servers, it absolutely does. Before, it wasn't unusual for people to, on day 1, settle directly on oil fields, planning to go that route, or heck, sometimes even to block access to it for others.
That's why it was blocked from viewing by default. Never forget that the number 1 way of playing the game is with others on multiplayer servers, generally with 20-30 other players, often even more.

I can tell you that that feature was discussed in-depth by a LOT of people and hiding it was the final decision, after months of debate between players AND devs.

That only makes the whole thing more fun and realistic. It`s the same experience of settling in an indigenous graveyard that aint worth crap, and suddenly you find out you are sitting atop an oil field LMAO

[SLG-Dennis]

Originally posted by Ranix:

that is not a good idea as it greatly harms discoverability of the feature for no benefit

We think it is, on multiplayer servers it has been common that people settle with a come-first mentality within the first view minutes on the best oil fields, despite oil drilling being far away and no realistic means to actually detect oil technically being present. This has caused a gameplay state that is not desirable and prefers people that had the time to join the server at the first second. It also removes any sort of incentive to interact with others and potentially buy their property. You will find similar functionality in other games, like Civilization as well, by the way.

If you are not happy with it, however, you can easily disable it in Balance.eco. :)
We however have purposefully decided on that after taking lots of feedback in regard to it into account and there is no reason to reconsider at this point.

Originally posted by Ranix:

Then why was it implemented so hastily that it hides the entire feature from users? Grey the map out and put red text that says "research oil drilling to unlock this view" or something. This took great effort and discussion and the implementation was less than half-assed?

We do plan to do that in conjunction with a feature update that will generally hide the world map and world features until the respective parts were discovered.

The impact on multiplayer games this had however was much more severe than any potential confusion that will quickly be adapted to could ever cause, as such we have decided to implement this functionality immediately, especially as popular servers had been hiding the oil layer with mods for a good while already - and as such the confusion was already there. This change is also already present since the first release of Update 11 and hasn't caused any visible notable issues so far.