Notification when oil refinery is about to become blocked up?

[GAMING_Alligator]

I'm loving this game (or at least seem to be completely addicted to it), but as I need to spread out more to tap far off resource deposits, one of the issues I'm having it triyng to keep track of things that need my attention.

The big one is that there seems to be no warning that the storage tanks I've got attached to an oil refinery's by-products are about to fill up, meaning I can abruptly end up with a plastics shortage or similar because I didn't realize that the were nearly full.

Is there any way to get the game to notify me of this, like it does with bug attacks, or a way to simply incinerate excess by-products (or something)?

If not, how do people keep on top of this sort of thing?

[KatherineOfSky]

You need to research Advanced Oil Processing first to get cracking technology.

I've created a tutorial here to help with setups for automatic cracking using simple combinator conditions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJbqdZTQC7o&index=7&list=PL4o6UvJIdPNpm9szThfI-2y3Bv0c3rPlB

[piccolo255]

Yes, to solve your oil blocking issues follow Katherine's advice :) However, I'd like to also address another point, since it can be useful in other situations as well:

Автор сообщения: marclev

Is there any way to get the game to notify me of this, like it does with bug attacks

You can use the circuits to set up an automatic alarm to warn you of resource shortages (or overproduction, or whatever).

Simply connect a Programmable speaker[wiki.factorio.com] to your buffer storage (in this case, a petroleum gas tank - don't connect all of them, only one) and set it to show a global alert when the count gets too low (say, below 5k petroleum).

For another example, I used a Programmable speaker alert to warn me a few seconds before the rocket is ready, so I can watch the launch :)