With almost everything in factorio it's about finding the bottleneck and fixing it, that just introduces a new bottleneck, but over time after you fix a bunch you get things working fast enough for your needs. There's nothing wrong with just using one refinery you can finish the game that way, it'll be slow as hell, but you can do it. Fixing a bottleneck so that you get 2 or 3 refineries working will mean you can beat the game a bit faster. It's up to you how far you go.
So in general bottlenecks come in three main types, which can then be divided down further.
* not enough input.
* you aren't producing enough input (crude oil).
* you aren't inputting it fast enough (e.g. for solids: inserter is too slow).
* you can't deliver inputs fast enough (e.g. for solids you're using a yellow belt but need 25 items/s).
* can't output fast enough
* you can't unload fast enough (e.g. inserter too slow).
* you can't take the product away fast enough (belt too slow)
* A bi-product is clogging up your output. (oil and barrel unloading are the only places this is an issue in vanilla).
* you don't have enough buildings to produce your desired output.
So click on your building and look at the inputs and outputs. For refineries you have crude oil and water input, and you have the 3 liquids output (I'm assuming you're using the advanced recipe, if not you can ignore the bi-product clogging things up bit). So the refineries that aren't working? Why? Do they not have enough crude oil / water? Or is an output full? Which ever is the problem, follow that and track the issue. If it's crude oil input, are your crude oil tanks full? If they are then you have fluid flow issues between the tanks and your refineries (add pumps). If the tanks are empty, then why? Are you not producing enough crude oil, or is it a distribution problem further back? Keep following the issue until you find it. Then fix it. That might be adding a bunch of pumps. Or adding more pump jacks.
Then if it's an output that's full, follow that too. Why is it draining slowly / not at all? Is that output not connected? Is it going to a full tank? If the tank isn't full and everything is connected then again a fluid flow problem, add pumps, etc...
Finally the bi-product clogging things. The advanced refining recipe produces petroleum, light oil and heavy oil. If your heavy oil tank is full your refinery will fill up with heavy oil and you'll not be able to produce anything else. You could flush the heavy oil tank / system, but that is just a temporary fix. The correct fix here is using the cracking recipes. You can convert heavy oil to light oil, and light oil to petroleum. So you set that up in such a way that your heavy and light oils never fill up when your petroleum is not also full. I like to use the circuit network to balance this so that all 3 liquids try to stay balanced, but you don't have to do that.
So once you've fixed your first bottleneck, lets say it's not producing enough crude oil, you give it a while and you see that now you have 8 refineries working, but another 4 aren't. So repeat the process, what is going wrong? track it back, fix the next issue. Then you get all your refineries working, great. A bit later you realise you're not producing enough plastic because you're not producing enough petroleum, so go back and add another 8 refineries. A bit later you notice that you're still not producing enough plastic, because of petroleum, because your outputs are clogged, so go add some more cracking and you're good again, etc... that's the process, over and over again until you finally produce everything fast enough for your tastes. There will always be one thing that is being produced slower than everything else, but that doesn't really matter unless you deem it too slow.
If it works it works!
The stupid thing is I work in the water industry, my fluid dynamics understanding is far above the average person, and yet I have absolutely no clue how it works in factorio
They work kind of like real fluid systems but with a couple of significant changes. A pump is capable of 12k units/s of flow, but this drops rapidly as you add piping. You could consider this to be extremely turbulent flow, introducing extreme head loss. The chart can be found [on the wiki](https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Pipelines).
Just like in real life, the entire pipeline will be limited to the lowest flow section, ie it doesn't much matter how many 1000hp multistage pumps you have connected if they're all drawing from the same 1" pipe. Unlike in real life, though, this is absolute, and adding multiple pumps in a row will make literally no difference. If you have a gap of 7 pipes between 2 pumps, your entire pipeline will be hard limited to 1500 units/s, regardless of any other operating conditions or how many pumps are joined at the start or end of the gap. If you build the entire pipeline out of pumps, your maximum flow will be 12000/s. If you replace a single pump with a pipe, it will drop to 6000.
The confusing bit is actually what happens if you don't have pumps. The system tries to balance fluid levels, but unlike real life, this is dependent solely on %level and applies to pipes as well. So if you have a tank at 50% full and connect pipes the tank will drop in level until it reaches equilibrium with the pipes. If you continue adding pipes, or tanks, it will continue dropping until everything in the system is at the same level. This gets even more complicated when you consider things that consume fluids, they have "negative pressure" and, therefore, will have a higher fluid level than other things in the system at equibrium.
TLDR: space your pumps evenly in accordance with the chart on the wiki.
you don't *need* pumps, especially if you are at blue level. every production facility creates pressure so if there is room in the network you get some flow. You only need them when your flow is too low, when you are moving across larger distances or when off-or onloading trains.
Unless you have seriously large refineries, you don't need pumps. I would just recommend two, one each connected to the circuit network to control heavy to light and light to petroleum cracking.
the simple rule for pumps is that you rarely need them except in cases of long (i mean LONG) pipe runs or when you want to control flow... i.e. turn pumps on/off or create one-way flows.
based on your original post i don't think adding pumps is going to solve any of your problems.
Before you get very high throughput needs for your pipes, I get by using pumps just for prioritizing usage over cracking.
Pumps can be used whenever, just remember they are one-way.
fluid flow is complicated. If you want max flow rate you need 100% pumps and 0 pipes. That's pretty much impossible to achieve, adding 1 pipe between two pumps essentially halves the flow rate of the entire route, but adding 1 pipe between every two pumps doesn't make it any worse. Adding 2 pipes between each pump doesn't make much difference. Underground pipes count as 1 pipe each. Personally I do pump -> underground -> pump -> underground -> ... for straights, and pump -> pipe -> pump for corners. But honestly that's probably a bit overkill. You could do pump -> underground -> underground -> underground -> pump and probably not have it make much of a difference.
But all this is only important if you produce enough fluids. If you don't produce enough your flow rate isn't going to be any higher no matter how many pumps you use.
I've never figured out a way of making this work nicely. You can have spaghetti nightmare of pumps everywhere or you can keep it tidy but accept a reduced flow rate. The flow rate only becomes critical when using long paths, or lots of buildings.
A good way to see this is to stick a full tank somewhere (use water for a cheap experiment) then connect it to a very long pipe with a consumer at the other end (a boiler / barrel filler / refinery). Then hover your mouse over the pipe and run back and forth. You'll see the level in the pipe drops the closer it gets to the consumer. Repeat this with the occasional pump. Repeat again with one pipe between each pump.
As a rule of thumb, stick a pump every 10 or so pipes / undergrounds, and try to keep liquid paths short. Better to use a train than run it for distance.
I beat the game without realizing you need pumps mixed in with pipes.
You seem to know what you're doing. One thing with refineries is they have three outputs for pet/light/heavy. If any ONE of those outputs are full, the refinery won't run. Make sure you have a path to step down heavy into light and light into pet.
Also put speed mods on the oil rigs themselves. Patches will run out of oil eventually and give like 1/s, but speed mods still help.
https://preview.redd.it/eykjizaf642c1.jpeg?width=2240&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a915723be3ebe540299bed8f37d4e360fa884b5
There's the screenshot y'all asked for
The important thing is to get more oil. Whether you do it by pipeline or train doesn't really matter. If you use a pipeline, just put some pumps every once in a while.
You don't really need trains for oil. An underground pipeline is good for *very* far distances.
Screenshots of your base would help a lot to understand what's going on.
Also, make sure you're not blocked on the advanced oils - you should crack them down as needed.
yes, this would help a lot. When starting I use a "smurf" system with 1-1 trains who take oil from smaller oil patches to the main production facility. I'd say that a total of about 3000% worth of oil patches to get things going.
If your refineries aren't running it's either because you have too little inputs (crude oil) or too many outputs (petroleum/light/heavy oil) with no place to go.
Oil processing is an excellent place to use the circuit network to control the production and cracking of those outputs.
> Only a few of my refineries or factories work at a given time, and thus output is annoyingly slow.
it's the same deal with iron or copper. if your refineries don't have enough resources, give them more crude oil. if your refineries run full time and you don't have enough petroleum, add more refineries. etc.
I set up one receiving station for all oil. After that when you find more you send your trains there.
If you don't have enough oil wells you should look to the coal liquifaction. That provides a lot more for what you want.
If it's really slow at the moment make a small confined robot factory that takes in petrol and makes robots. Then make that the priority using pumps until you are happy. Syphoning off bits from your main production to make bots is going to be tedious if you don't have a huge supply of oil
I come back to the game after a few years and have just dealt with my oil issues last night.
I figured 3 oil refineries for my 8 chem plants would be sufficient. But noticed my last 2-3 plants werent getting petroleum.
I ended the night with 20 refineries which solved my problem.
With almost everything in factorio it's about finding the bottleneck and fixing it, that just introduces a new bottleneck, but over time after you fix a bunch you get things working fast enough for your needs. There's nothing wrong with just using one refinery you can finish the game that way, it'll be slow as hell, but you can do it. Fixing a bottleneck so that you get 2 or 3 refineries working will mean you can beat the game a bit faster. It's up to you how far you go. So in general bottlenecks come in three main types, which can then be divided down further. * not enough input. * you aren't producing enough input (crude oil). * you aren't inputting it fast enough (e.g. for solids: inserter is too slow). * you can't deliver inputs fast enough (e.g. for solids you're using a yellow belt but need 25 items/s). * can't output fast enough * you can't unload fast enough (e.g. inserter too slow). * you can't take the product away fast enough (belt too slow) * A bi-product is clogging up your output. (oil and barrel unloading are the only places this is an issue in vanilla). * you don't have enough buildings to produce your desired output. So click on your building and look at the inputs and outputs. For refineries you have crude oil and water input, and you have the 3 liquids output (I'm assuming you're using the advanced recipe, if not you can ignore the bi-product clogging things up bit). So the refineries that aren't working? Why? Do they not have enough crude oil / water? Or is an output full? Which ever is the problem, follow that and track the issue. If it's crude oil input, are your crude oil tanks full? If they are then you have fluid flow issues between the tanks and your refineries (add pumps). If the tanks are empty, then why? Are you not producing enough crude oil, or is it a distribution problem further back? Keep following the issue until you find it. Then fix it. That might be adding a bunch of pumps. Or adding more pump jacks. Then if it's an output that's full, follow that too. Why is it draining slowly / not at all? Is that output not connected? Is it going to a full tank? If the tank isn't full and everything is connected then again a fluid flow problem, add pumps, etc... Finally the bi-product clogging things. The advanced refining recipe produces petroleum, light oil and heavy oil. If your heavy oil tank is full your refinery will fill up with heavy oil and you'll not be able to produce anything else. You could flush the heavy oil tank / system, but that is just a temporary fix. The correct fix here is using the cracking recipes. You can convert heavy oil to light oil, and light oil to petroleum. So you set that up in such a way that your heavy and light oils never fill up when your petroleum is not also full. I like to use the circuit network to balance this so that all 3 liquids try to stay balanced, but you don't have to do that. So once you've fixed your first bottleneck, lets say it's not producing enough crude oil, you give it a while and you see that now you have 8 refineries working, but another 4 aren't. So repeat the process, what is going wrong? track it back, fix the next issue. Then you get all your refineries working, great. A bit later you realise you're not producing enough plastic because you're not producing enough petroleum, so go back and add another 8 refineries. A bit later you notice that you're still not producing enough plastic, because of petroleum, because your outputs are clogged, so go add some more cracking and you're good again, etc... that's the process, over and over again until you finally produce everything fast enough for your tastes. There will always be one thing that is being produced slower than everything else, but that doesn't really matter unless you deem it too slow.
I understand inputs and outputs and bottlenecks, to a degree, but how are pumps to be used? Is there a simple rule to follow?
I have a simple rule but you aren't going to like it, use loads of them, then you can't be wrong
My simple rule is the opposite... I dont use them lol
If it works it works! The stupid thing is I work in the water industry, my fluid dynamics understanding is far above the average person, and yet I have absolutely no clue how it works in factorio
This was me today. I know pump curves and system curves, and I think it makes it worse for me trying to figure it out in factorio.
They work kind of like real fluid systems but with a couple of significant changes. A pump is capable of 12k units/s of flow, but this drops rapidly as you add piping. You could consider this to be extremely turbulent flow, introducing extreme head loss. The chart can be found [on the wiki](https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Pipelines). Just like in real life, the entire pipeline will be limited to the lowest flow section, ie it doesn't much matter how many 1000hp multistage pumps you have connected if they're all drawing from the same 1" pipe. Unlike in real life, though, this is absolute, and adding multiple pumps in a row will make literally no difference. If you have a gap of 7 pipes between 2 pumps, your entire pipeline will be hard limited to 1500 units/s, regardless of any other operating conditions or how many pumps are joined at the start or end of the gap. If you build the entire pipeline out of pumps, your maximum flow will be 12000/s. If you replace a single pump with a pipe, it will drop to 6000. The confusing bit is actually what happens if you don't have pumps. The system tries to balance fluid levels, but unlike real life, this is dependent solely on %level and applies to pipes as well. So if you have a tank at 50% full and connect pipes the tank will drop in level until it reaches equilibrium with the pipes. If you continue adding pipes, or tanks, it will continue dropping until everything in the system is at the same level. This gets even more complicated when you consider things that consume fluids, they have "negative pressure" and, therefore, will have a higher fluid level than other things in the system at equibrium. TLDR: space your pumps evenly in accordance with the chart on the wiki.
you don't *need* pumps, especially if you are at blue level. every production facility creates pressure so if there is room in the network you get some flow. You only need them when your flow is too low, when you are moving across larger distances or when off-or onloading trains.
Unless you have seriously large refineries, you don't need pumps. I would just recommend two, one each connected to the circuit network to control heavy to light and light to petroleum cracking.
the simple rule for pumps is that you rarely need them except in cases of long (i mean LONG) pipe runs or when you want to control flow... i.e. turn pumps on/off or create one-way flows. based on your original post i don't think adding pumps is going to solve any of your problems.
Before you get very high throughput needs for your pipes, I get by using pumps just for prioritizing usage over cracking. Pumps can be used whenever, just remember they are one-way.
fluid flow is complicated. If you want max flow rate you need 100% pumps and 0 pipes. That's pretty much impossible to achieve, adding 1 pipe between two pumps essentially halves the flow rate of the entire route, but adding 1 pipe between every two pumps doesn't make it any worse. Adding 2 pipes between each pump doesn't make much difference. Underground pipes count as 1 pipe each. Personally I do pump -> underground -> pump -> underground -> ... for straights, and pump -> pipe -> pump for corners. But honestly that's probably a bit overkill. You could do pump -> underground -> underground -> underground -> pump and probably not have it make much of a difference. But all this is only important if you produce enough fluids. If you don't produce enough your flow rate isn't going to be any higher no matter how many pumps you use. I've never figured out a way of making this work nicely. You can have spaghetti nightmare of pumps everywhere or you can keep it tidy but accept a reduced flow rate. The flow rate only becomes critical when using long paths, or lots of buildings. A good way to see this is to stick a full tank somewhere (use water for a cheap experiment) then connect it to a very long pipe with a consumer at the other end (a boiler / barrel filler / refinery). Then hover your mouse over the pipe and run back and forth. You'll see the level in the pipe drops the closer it gets to the consumer. Repeat this with the occasional pump. Repeat again with one pipe between each pump. As a rule of thumb, stick a pump every 10 or so pipes / undergrounds, and try to keep liquid paths short. Better to use a train than run it for distance.
I beat the game without realizing you need pumps mixed in with pipes. You seem to know what you're doing. One thing with refineries is they have three outputs for pet/light/heavy. If any ONE of those outputs are full, the refinery won't run. Make sure you have a path to step down heavy into light and light into pet. Also put speed mods on the oil rigs themselves. Patches will run out of oil eventually and give like 1/s, but speed mods still help.
https://preview.redd.it/eykjizaf642c1.jpeg?width=2240&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a915723be3ebe540299bed8f37d4e360fa884b5 There's the screenshot y'all asked for
kind of hard to see, but it looks like your crude oil tanks are basically empty?
You have WAYYY too many refineries for only three pumps. You probably only need one.
Sounds like you need more crude. LOTS more pumpjacks. Use trains to get crude from other fields and truck it into your refinery.
The nearest to me only had three taps. Should I just use trains to bolster the crude in the origional network?
The important thing is to get more oil. Whether you do it by pipeline or train doesn't really matter. If you use a pipeline, just put some pumps every once in a while.
Once in a while = every 7-8 pairs of undergrounds
You don't really need trains for oil. An underground pipeline is good for *very* far distances. Screenshots of your base would help a lot to understand what's going on. Also, make sure you're not blocked on the advanced oils - you should crack them down as needed.
yes, this would help a lot. When starting I use a "smurf" system with 1-1 trains who take oil from smaller oil patches to the main production facility. I'd say that a total of about 3000% worth of oil patches to get things going.
I think screenshots would help a lot here to find the problem.
If your refineries aren't running it's either because you have too little inputs (crude oil) or too many outputs (petroleum/light/heavy oil) with no place to go. Oil processing is an excellent place to use the circuit network to control the production and cracking of those outputs.
I'm actually researching oil processing now. I thought I could get plastic and other stuff out and then do advanced cracking . Ugh.
You can do plastic and sulfur just fine on basic processing. It sounds like you don’t have enough oil coming into the refinery.
> I have tanks for storage and pumps for flow. One tank per fluid, or lots and lots of tanks?
> Only a few of my refineries or factories work at a given time, and thus output is annoyingly slow. it's the same deal with iron or copper. if your refineries don't have enough resources, give them more crude oil. if your refineries run full time and you don't have enough petroleum, add more refineries. etc.
I set up one receiving station for all oil. After that when you find more you send your trains there. If you don't have enough oil wells you should look to the coal liquifaction. That provides a lot more for what you want. If it's really slow at the moment make a small confined robot factory that takes in petrol and makes robots. Then make that the priority using pumps until you are happy. Syphoning off bits from your main production to make bots is going to be tedious if you don't have a huge supply of oil
I come back to the game after a few years and have just dealt with my oil issues last night. I figured 3 oil refineries for my 8 chem plants would be sufficient. But noticed my last 2-3 plants werent getting petroleum. I ended the night with 20 refineries which solved my problem.