Crude Oil Storage

[Bullet-Tooth Tony]

Hello, I already knows that there are tons of post about it, read a lots of them but still need a clarification.

Since i'm a beginner, I'll show you my current situation, I have:
- an outpost where I extract crude oil with pumpjacks;
- a train between outpost and main base.

in my main base i've the refinery.

There is any reason to stock just crude oil in barrel? beside maybe end game transport

or I can just put into barrels the byproduct of crude oil?

thanks

[Kistenstapler]

There is no need for barrels for a new player.

[Fel]

There are very few reasons to use barrels with liquids.
The first is when you have a base layout that makes it impractical at best to run pipes (even underground pipes) so you need logistics robots to transport he liquids.
The second is when you are going to need a very small amount of a liquid for something specific (setting up a very temporary set of flamethrower turrets near nests to create a spot you can fall back to when overwhelmed for example).
The third is when you need extremely specific ratios between several parts of your base (if you have a very limited amount of oil and need to make absolutely certain that you distribute it in the most efficient way to get the most finished products out of it).


A barrel costs 1 steel plates and stores 50 liquid, if you really want to store your liquid it costs significantly less resources to use storage tanks that use 20 iron plates and 5 steel plates to store 25k.
You might think that space-wise it might be worth storing it in barrels in a steel chest (you can store 24k worth of liquid in a single tile) but you need the barrelling and unbarrelling infrastructure as well and that ends up taking a whole lot of space as well if you need a decent throughput.
Without modules an assembling machine 3 can only process 312.5 units of liquid per second.


TL;DR: Don't worry about barrels, just use the liquid with pipes, storage tanks and tank wagons.
It's easier to setup, easier to handle and significantly less troublesome when needing to expand in scope.

[Hod]

Barrels are almost useless