Oil processing setup and ratios

[Drevin]

I'm a beginner on my first serious factory playthrough, and I've just bumped into the advanced oil processing. I found out that the near optimal setup from refining to cracking is 8:2:7. But I'm now also finding out that I can use heavy oil to produce lubricant. Can someone tell me if/how this messes with the above ratio? Does it matter? For 8 refineries is 2 lubricant plants enough? Or, better yet, for 10 refineries, since actually I already built 10 refineries before arriving to the advanced processing part of the game. I assume the extra 2 refineries would just go idle from time to time and it's better to have them on, rather that destroy them? Would the extra 2 mess up with a very delicate balance?

Also, there's another thing I'm trying to wrap my brain around. Setting conditions for the pipes and the best way to place them, along with some storage tanks. Is overkill having too many tanks placed down to act as buffers? Should I place tanks before and after a chemical process? Where should I place the pumps? Basically, how much do I overdo it if I go with something like Refineries -> Pump -> Tank -> Pump -> Cracking -> Pump -> Tank -> Pump -> Other cracking, and so on. Where should I place tanks and pipes and in which order?

I guess I could find out by myself through trial and error, but I'd rather focus on the layout of the oil processing setup if I would already know how many chemical plants to use and where to place pumps and tanks in the processing line. Otherwise I might over do it just to be safe, or under do it and realize the mistake a very long time in the future when I am building stuff I don't even realize now they exist.

Thank you.

[Katitoff]

https://factoriocheatsheet.com/

[knighttemplar1960]

The short answer is no. You need lubricant for all the top level logistic items. You can get to the point where you have enough blue belts, underground and splitters but you'll occasionally have to replace a robot or 2 and you'll need flying robot frames (which use electric engines that use lubricant) for yellow science packs. If you are going to continue to play after you launch the first rocket for that factory you'll still need a steady supply of lubricant.

[Fel]

For the question around a pump, they mostly have 5 uses in this game.

It can increase the throughput of pipes (not used as often since it's generally easier to use other ways to increase the throughput).

It serves as a 1-way valve (the liquids can't go back unless there is a loop in the pipes), can be useful when trying to force a tank to fill or when trying to empty pipes/tanks.

It can forcefully fill the pipes when pumping out of a tank (without the pump it just fills them to the same ratio that the tank is at).

It can serve as a switch to decide where a liquid can go (especially when combined with simple circuit network like connecting the tank to the pump with a red/green wire and setting the condition for the pump).

It can fill/empty a tank wagon.


So usually when it comes to the oil, you use them after tanks, often with simple circuit network when you need to split it between different places.

[AlexMBrennan]

It's impossible to say unless you tell us precisely what you want to produce - if you want to mass produce robots then you will need more chemical plants making lubricant, and less chemical plants cracking heavy oil, and so on.

Would the extra 2 mess up with a very delicate balance?

You will need to add circuit wire controls if you want oil production to work properly - if you are trying to make a lot of lubricant then you don't want to be cracking your limited heavy oil to light.

[Odonata]

The only thing heavy oil is really used for anymore IS lubricant, with that in mind i just convert it all to lube and if i somehow end up with too much heavy oil then it gets sent to cracking. I don't put heavy oil on the bus anymore.

[astrosha]

Each Advanced Oil Processing refinery produces 25 Heavy Oil every 5 seconds, or 5 HO/sec. All the HO gets output to a Storage Tank.

Lube takes 10 HO/sec to produce. So, for every two Refineries making AOP, I have one Chem Plant making Lube. They are fed from the HO Storage Tank, with an always on Pump.

Light Oil takes 40 HO/2 seconds, or 20 HO/sec. So, one Chem Plant cracking HO into LO for every four Refineries working on AOP. These are fed by the HO Storage Tank, with the Pump set to operate when HO > 20,000.

I'll do something similar for the LO, as well; AOP makes 9 LO/sec/refinery, and cracking makes 15 LO/sec per chem plant. I'll use the LO for Solid Fuel and Rocket Fuel directly, and crack it to Petroleum Gas when the LO Storage Tank is greater than 20,000 LO in it.

This setup prioritizes the specific uses of HO and LO before cracking them down a tier towards PG.

[Lunacy]

I just have 2 or so lubes before and on the same pipe going into cracking, that way you'll always have no heavy oil and lube will be filled.
Balancing light and petro is the main issue.

[Drevin]

Alright. Thank you all.

[NormTheGreat]

Having a tough time keeping the three outputs from a cracking plant going over time. They seem to work for a while then the pressure disappears but it's not because wells are going dry. I think ti Have the wrong mix or configuration of Plant > line > tank > pump > line.

Is there a rule of thumb something like "if you're pumping HO, LO, PG over a long distance, you need a pump before every bend in the line and otherwise every X pipe segments. And then similar with tanks?

The way I've tried to approach it is to either have a tank near the beginning of the line or near the end, sometimes with more than one feed, then then place a pump after the tank and branch to all the chemical plants etc downstream from that last pump.

I then tried a tank at the beginning and end of the lines with a couple pumps along the line between but doesn't seem to work long-term only for maybe 10 minutes before the pressure drops again. But then every time I reconfig the tanks and pumps a bit everything is back online. So I think I'm probably missing a pumps to line ratio or something where I just don't have enough of them. Also any rule about order of operations when you're trying to flush a line and bring it back? Do you even need to flush a line or only when changing fluid types?

[Songbird]

As long as you are fine prioritizing lubricant and light oil products (solid/rocket/nuclear fuel, technically flame turret ammo as well although this is just a drop or two here and there and is insignificant) over plastic/sulfur production, all you need to do is have enough chem plants to crack 100% of your heavy and light oil production production down to the next tier down (including enough to turn the cracked heavy oil into petroleum gas). Then just make sure all products go through a storage tank buffer and set your pumps to or from the cracking plants to only turn on when your tanks have some amount of fluid (technically this can even be a fairly small amount, like less than one tank, since it will ultimately just work to ensure the flow rate is enough to meet demand, but to account for usage spikes on lubricant you may want to set a higher buffer). This is the only oil logic you will ever need unless you want to prioritize plastic; nothing will ever back up unless you aren't using enough petroleum gas, and if this happens, there would have been no way to avoid it (your circuit logic didn't make it happen).

If you want to prioritize petroleum gas use, you can set your cracking to be based on how much of the product you have rather than how much of the input, but this has the pitfall that you'll often end up getting none of the other products otherwise unless you use a more complicated setup.

[tom]

use circuit signals to on/off pumps and keep an eye on bottlenecks

don't worry too much on ratios if you aren't going BIG

[NormTheGreat]

Thanks for ideas. Mix in use is one plastic plant, one sulfur plant, one sulfuric acid plan and one lubricant plant (for high speed conveyors etc)t. Added a couple more pumps after posting and removed two riggs from the original config.

So now 4 riggs feed the standard HO, LO, PG plant, which in turn feeds the cracking plant, and two remaining riggs go direct to a plant for PG, which ties in to output from cracking plant. Bit of a cluster but so far seemed to work better than what I set up before.

Still learning best way to generate certain kinds of resources for research that doesn't stop because one of input over-burdens the system and goes dry.

[Hedning]

引用自 FlusterCluck：

Is there a rule of thumb something like "if you're pumping HO, LO, PG over a long distance, you need a pump before every bend in the line and otherwise every X pipe segments. And then similar with tanks?

The rule of thumb is that before you use modules and beacons to speed up your refineries you do not have to worry about pressure. You only need pumps to direct where you want the flow to go. Eg have a pump going to light oil cracking and turn it on only when you need the light oil to be cracked.

[RiO]

引用自 Poppy：

The only thing heavy oil is really used for anymore IS lubricant.

Not quite.
If you analyze the coal liquefaction recipe you'll figure out that it has a near ideal ratio of consumption of heavy oil to produce solid fuel, to fuel boilers that produce steam.

That leaves you with only petroleum gas and light oil to balance.
The light oil you can then crack fully to gas, which will leave you with only the gas.
The gas and a few more lines of coal can then be used to set up plastic production.

BOOM: fully self-contained deadlock-free coal-to-plastic conversion.

[Hedning]

引用自 RiO：

引用自 Poppy：

The only thing heavy oil is really used for anymore IS lubricant.

Not quite.
If you analyze the coal liquefaction recipe you'll figure out that it has a near ideal ratio of consumption of heavy oil to produce solid fuel, to fuel boilers that produce steam.

That leaves you with only petroleum gas and light oil to balance.
The light oil you can then crack fully to gas, which will leave you with only the gas.
The gas and a few more lines of coal can then be used to set up plastic production.

BOOM: fully self-contained deadlock-free coal-to-plastic conversion.

The main purpose of heavy oil is for lubricant. What he said was true.

If you actually analyze the coal liquefaction recipe you will find that it does not net consume heavy oil.

Making solid fuel from heavy is possible with the normal recipe too, but in both cases light oil is more efficient.

Regular oil processing is also deadlock free, you just need the cracking capacity. You need cracking both for coal liquefaction and for regular oil processing, there's no difference.