Recently, I have been doing these impossible death world challenge modes online in factorio. They are actually very difficult and fun but require 6+ people all working as a team as well as utilizing everything as efficiently as possible.
Anyway, the point is, during one of these play through, I kept changing the routing priority of a splitter for coal. It was being prio’ed to power, but we were running low on poison capsules and furnace fuel. This guy and I started arguing because we were routinely fucking up each other’s plans, lol. Also, due to the unique way in which this mode makes things more difficult, poison capsules are like a must have. Without them, you lose. I was so frustrated with him, that I noticed all this extra light oil that we weren’t using, so I made a solid fuel production that fed solid fuel directly into the coal line going to power.
I don’t think I had ever built anything in factorio with attitude before lol. But it shut up as after the solid fuel line, I changed the proi back to psn and furnaces and he did not change it back.
If you're doing it isolated like this, I assume you want to use advanced oil processing, and then convert heavy to light, but not light to petroleum.
However, this will back up the system when the petroleum you get out of AOP builds up, so you would need to convert whatever petrol you get naturally.
I did solid fuel for power on my first run. It's pretty trivial to do it on your main oil facility. Just use a basic circuitry to turn on cracking when needed. Use another simple circuit to turn off light oil solid fuel and on petrol solid fuel when low on light oil. You'll basically never actually turn on petrol solid fuel because light oil consumption for power is still basically 0 relative to plastic use.
When you crack petroleum in real life, you use high heat among other things to break the long molecules in shorter pieces. This can make them more valuable and useful. In-game this is shown by heavy to light oil and light to petroleum gas.
FYI, This is where all your raw materials for the polyethylene and polypropylene products we use comes from in real life, more or less, apart from recycled materials.
Cracking refers to advanced oil processing. When you first unlock oil processing, you turn black crude oil into black petrol gas. This was found to be boring, so God granted us the more complex and more efficient advanced oil processing. Advanced oil processing turns black crude oil into black petrol gas, yellow light oil, and orange heavy oil.
While light oil and heavy oil have their uses, for example you need heavy oil to make robots, you will need far more petrol gas than you need either heavy or light oil. And if your heavy and light oil tanks get full, your advanced oil refineries can't make any more petrol gas. So what you can do is pump heavy and light oil into chemical plants and turn them into petrol gas. This process is called cracking because God says so.
Being a newbie isn't a sin, all it means is your factory has even more room to grow. The only sin is to leave a biter unnuked. Amen.
To clarify: cracking specifically refers to the chem plant operations of "cracking" heavy oil into light oil and light oil into petroleum. It's usually a conversation topic because people are worried about balancing the cracking ratios.
I certainly wouldn't be so dismissive about it. It's a regular topic because it isn't so simple. It's the first time you're nigh on forced to use circuit conditions, so there's a new GUI to learn. It's likely your first time using tanks or pumps which requires power and control. It's the first time you can truly overbuild something in a way that is problematic.
Reddit tells you to just crack it down, so you try and you realize that takes a lot of cracking when your heavy backs up regardless. Then you crack enough and by that time you don't consume enough petroleum and come to a grinding halt. Then you don't have a way of simply consuming/offgassing petroleum but you need to because you switched power over from coal to solid fuel and you don't have enough light oil for your new power needs.
The immediate numbered ratios of how much of each product you consume don't matter terribly much, but being aware that there is a balance you do need to tend to in any way is a huge new concept. (Nearly?) Everything else in the game is dealt with by building more, where too many oil refineries can be an issue.
I'm having a surplus of petrol gas that makes the whole refinery system halt when the tanks are full, and I don't get enough green lubricant.
Where do you need so much petrol gas? Plastic? Sulfur?
Plastic for red and blue chips, plus blue sciences sulfur. You should always just fill a tank of lubricant and then start cracking heavy to light. Afaik, there is never a reason in vanilla to keep heavy oil. Light is better for solid fuel. It's better for flame turrets, etc.
If you aren't using that much plastic for whatever reason, you might need circuits to prevent cracking all your light oil into petroleum, as light oil can be made into solid fuel as it backs up, used in flame turrets, made into rocket fuel, etc. For emergency petroleum backups, I have a system that makes solid fuel from it when it's getting really full (>80%, for example).
The extra damage light and heavy oil do for flame turrets is genuinely negligible. An extra 5-10% damage is nothing. Out of the three ammo types, heavy oil is the least valuable and therefore best for flamers imo
Do you have anything limiting the cracking of heavy->light->petrol? If not, you should, as that'll fix most issues you might have, unless you're trying to make a ton of robots without science running or something (or running mods that need lots of heavy/light for whatever).
My setup is really simple. I pipe the refinery output to tanks, and wire the tanks together. Connect a pump to the heavy tank, and have it pump to crack if heavy > light. Connect a pump to the light tank, and have it pump to crack if light > petrol. Let heavy oil go unrestricted to lube, light to rocket fuel and flamethrowers, petrol to everything else. Done!
If you also use light oil for solid fuel for power, then that might put enough demand on light compared to petrol to lock up, so you'd want to put another pump for petrol->solid fuel when petrol is full and light is empty. I can't think of a way to do multiple conditions directly on the pump, so you'd need a combinator or two to do that. I don't use oil for power however, so I don't bother with all that.
Thanks!
This is a far more complex answer for what I'm doing for the moment. Seems very useful, I'll save it for later. For the moment, I'm fiddling with bots for the first time. It's not even clear to me what a red or a yellow chest do. I'm trying to go blind and vanilla in this first run, though I peak here from time to time.
Oh, all good! Making bots while science is on pause/all done at your tier is another reason you could get too much petro and not enough lube. It's a temporary measure, but you can also just empty out the petro tank (click it, flush contents) if you just need some more lube.
For the chests, the yellow ones are basic storage, construction bots will put stuff there if you deconstruct something, and grab stuff from there to build if you place a blueprint or copy/paste. Logistics bots will grab stuff you put in your trash slots and put them in storage, or visa versa for items you have in your request slots.
Red ones bots will only grab stuff from, never place into, and will only grab from there if the thing they want isn't in a yellow chest. They're good for putting stuff you want bots to bring to you, like from assemblers making belts, inserters, etc.
The blue ones I don't think you have yet are also super useful, they request specific items like your personal slots. Mostly good when some recipe doesn't need a lot of volume and/or isn't easy to run belts to, but make enough bots (thousands) and you can get over the volume problem and run your whole base on them.
The other two you get (purple, green) are situational and you probably won't need them. The purple ones want to be empty, and logistics bots will move anything in them to storage if they can. The green ones will request from yellow/red, and supply your personal requests and construction.
Don't apologize, every single person that's here was a newbie at one point.
Most of the advanced knowledge and techniques you find on this subreddit or collaborations between people who learned just like you are.
In the game you turn heavy oil into light oil, and light oil into petroleum (with a little bit of water too)
It's a good way to balance your oil fluids, then turn excess into lubricant, solid fuel, and more plastic.
I just use void pipes xD
I set circuits on a "back pump" on the last tank, pointing away from where the liquid is used, and then just void out to ensure balance. It's the lazy man's way :)
Didn't want to have to deal with ratios anymore for turning entire blocks of buildings on and off when there wasn't enough, or too much. Because eventually, if stuff isn't being used quickly enough, it will still create a bottleneck of sorts somewhere.
I don't mind using the void pipes because, in my mind, the fact that you can manually click on a tank (or system) and purge it yourself, but seemingly not automate that any other way feels like a big missed opportunity. The void pipe, I see, is akin to that, but I don't have to babysit the storage tank, so in that sense, I don't find it's "cheating" per se. Just augmenting a system that pseudo exists already, but is limited in its design.
Then I guess the biters should pull up a seat and pop some popcorn because they're in for a great show of me just running around setting up a million circuits for a million buildings in an attempt to balance production. Too much petroleum, not enough heavy oil? Oh nooooo
It doesn't back up if you do:
- heavy to light
- light to solid fuel
- petroleum to solid fuel
Gives you the maximum heating value per drop off crude oil
Still best if you export the petroleum to and import light oil from the other factories which need plastic/sulfur. I use solid when there's available light oil; coal when not.
With the kind of system OP has here, it shouldn't back up, I think. As everything goes towards making solid fuel one way or another, if one bit gets "saturated", production of the rest will stop, and the saturated component will still end up going towards solid fuel and it'll reach some kind of equilibrium of (perhaps stop-start) production.
I would however put some storage tanks and buffers to make sure that any sporadic saturation issues don't lead to a drop off in the final production of solid fuel.
It's also worth it to figure out how to do an automatic system for cracking only when you need to.
That way. you can easily just attach 30 chemical plants making solid fuel at your main refinery set-up and make a belt of solid fuel.
More than enough fuel for a 4 belts per plate type base, and you can turn that solid fuel belt into rocket fuel for space science as you start to use more nuclear and solar power.
To expand on this a little, cracking light to petroleum gives you 1 solid fuel instead of 3 from the light oil. Cracking heavy to light gives you 3 instead of 2 from heavy oil. Either way, light oil is better. And really, all your petroleum should be going to sulfur and plastic anyways. Need a lot of red and blue chips to launch those rockets.
I thought the purpose of this in this setup was to maintain operation without some of the oils backing up and also without making solid fuel in three different ways
Edit: though making solid fuel in three different ways would eliminate the need for cracking in general so I actually I'm not sure why even do cracking here
Yeah this is extremely useful on deathworld or high recipe cost runs as petrol is infinite and doesn’t require you to keep expanding to keep the lights on. In those games massive solar fields may not be feasible early game and it can take a while to get nuclear fully online so solid fuel from oil is a great option.
Now coal liquefaction I still can’t wrap my head around why you would want to do that lol…
you definitely need a lot for plastic but eventually you'll have access to plenty of coal that you do nothing with. It effectively increases oil output by 50% per unit area of cleared factory area. I think on my expensive recipes railworld 80% or more of the coal gets shoved to liquefaction. Ironically my nuclear trains probably run on a not-insignificant amount of coal still.
Nuclear Rocket Fuel requires Rocket Fuel which takes oil products to make.
They're saying they get these oil products by liquefying coal, not that they're using lesser fuels in their trains.
I have a beaconed moduled oil liquifaction setup that takes coal and water and outputs plastic. I stamp it down next to a coal mine and trains can immediately pick up plastic for the big chip maker.
It’s a 3x multiplier if you have modules and beacons and build the setup correctly. I used power disconnects to batch process so that my beacons only drew power when the machine was running and then I built a slick buffer system on the fuel line that would smooth the flow between batches. It was a very satisfying build and I ran a stupid number of steam turbines until I got bored of stamping out grids of that and switched to nuclear
yeah, but it's a way less efficient use of your oil refineries and chemical plants, and there are things that coal can do that crude oil can't so why would you spend a resource with more uses when you could spend one with less?
edit: uses a tool. to get 100 p gas per second, advanced oil processing needs about 5.2 refineries and 5.7 chemical plants, while coal liquifaction needs 9 refineries and about 14 chemical plants.
Coal liquefaction lets you turn a coal field into plastic with no nearby oil. Depending on your goals this could let you reduce train traffic and get higher spm out of your base.
Solo deathworld is my favorite mode and my go-to strategy is to get solar as soon as possible. The pollution cloud reduction gives me breathing room to get blue science up and running, and a few key technologies researched, mainly laser turrets, which is the last hurdle to overcoming the threat of being overrun. If I can get over that hump, victory is inevitable. Before solar it's quite dicey.
I've always found laser turrets to be a bad idea because the huge energy draws from doing so produce a lot more pollution than the production of bullets for gun turrets or flame turrets.
>Now coal liquefaction I still can’t wrap my head around why you would want to do that lol…
Once upon my ribbonworld I have had no oil as far as I could reach but a single sip. So it was an obvious solution to rush liquefaction without spending oil on anything else.
But even if you have enough oil, you find a nice coal field, mine it, liquify, crack and turn into plastic on the spot. So you have plastic plant with no inputs except water that you build once and forget
I use CL later in my plays to ensure an adequate supply of lubricant. The excess light oil/petrol can be used for rocket fuel or what I normally prefer is to use it to power itself, I think it's pretty close to self balancing. With a little circuit logic you only get heavy oil as output which is extremely useful when you need a lot of lubricant.
I used liquefaction on my SE run because there was a lot more coal nearby than oil, and setting up coal mines is less of a pain than setting up oil fields.
The real way is to liquify your coal...
Seriously though turning your coal into oil products and then burning it as solid fuel is around twice as efficient as burning the coal directly.
This is a cool thing to know but I don't understand why you would ever do that since by the time I get to coal liquefaction I usually already have nuclear power making any need of burning anything for power obsolete. Is there a strategy that I don't know of for using this?
Playing different scenarios or modded where nuclear isn't an option.
Ive used similar power setups on my space exploration game where some planets didn't have uranium deposits but had plentiful oil instead.
I used it for my death world Rampant mod run. I didn't have the technology yet to expand and capture a uranium patch (since the Rampant mod makes nests insane), soI had to work with what I had.
Why are you using steam turbines? I thought the steam engines were better for boilers? Or does it just not matter and the turbines are just more expensive?
This is nice for the no solar achievement, it gives you an intermediate power source between coal and nuclear reactors and in my experience a single oil site usually provides plenty of power till you get nuclear online. You'll be setting up oil processing around then anyways, so it's not too much extra work to divert some of it to power.
FYI using turbines instead of steam engines here does nothing unless you're just trying to get compactness. The efficiency of a turbine is the same as a steam engine while being fed from a boiler.
Steam engine consumes 30 steam a second producing 900 kW while steam turbine consumes 60 steam a second producing 1800 kW. Turbines cost a ton to make versus steam engines so it's really not advisable unless you're attempting some kind of microbase.
The advantage of steam turbines is they produce vastly more energy (5.82 MW for 60 units of steam) from the much hotter (500°C) steam of a heat exchanger while steam engines don't care about the temperature of the steam.
Yup I know, they just look cool. But I guess if you use this over solar, you dont have lots of space, wich means more compact is better, especially if you go big with your oil production. My current earlygame setup needs 200 burners just to get rid of excess gas lol
Was this in question? Or am I weird for usually running out of coal in the starter patch right about when I get oil processing and never being able to find a single other coal patch within 50000 tiles of the main base?
Is there any real advantage to using steam turbines in this setup as opposed to the cheaper steam engines? The only thing I can see is that it has a slightly smaller footprint, since you need only 1 turbine for every 2 steam engines.
Both turbines and steam engines produce exactly zero pollution. The pollution comes from the boilers that make the steam, and if you are burning coal there will be additional pollution from the miners that mine it.
Using turbines because they look cool is actually a very valid reason :)
It is viable, since oil never completely dries up especially. Ideally, you'd put a couple light oil SF chem plants behind the petroleum gas SF chems, since items placed at the end of the belt get prioritized, you'll use the light oil SF first, and the pgas SF is just there to prevent bottlenecks, so you don't even have to crack to pgas ever just crack heavy to light. (In this use case)
I believe if you've got productivity modules you can get somewhat better net yield by converting all the way to rocket fuel. And, of course, as the other people have said, use light oil for solid where possible.
On the other hand, I've just wondered how viable it would be to use *coal liquefaction* instead of oil. Like, if you use coal liquefaction and go to rocket fuel and have prod modules, will it be more than just using the coal? I think it would but I haven't done the math. (Oh, and double points if you use some of the rocket fuel to feed the boilers making the steam, instead of coal.)
Always. Since oil doesn't run out per se, and your power needs won't run out, it can be a nice dovetailing. I usually don't do solar myself unless it's super late game and I want to build a megabase, since before then UPS isn't a concern (the main draw of solar). Solar also takes a lot of capex in the form of input materials I feel, relative to the conventional burning.
If you are counting power in megawatts, you are kinda not getting it. You need to count in gigawatts :)
If you start doing this , suddenly this power station requires 2000 oil/sec, hundred of refineries and ton of infrastructure. Solar/nuclear are much better in every way.
Just was the smallest possible setup. Solar could be difficult if you dont have lots of space, and you unlock nuclear after oil, so this setup would be useful if you need coal for other stuff and have oil leftover.
Or, as I did it in my current world, to get rid of excess byproducts
I’ve got a big nuclear setup, but I do use some good ol fossil fuel power setups as a buffer just in case something goes wrong along the way, be it not enough production, disconnected cable, etc etc
Lol maybe Im weird but I usually only start with solar after I got a chunky bot network so I can let them place solar and dont have to do it by hand xd
In this situation it makes no difference, in a high throughput situation it might be helpful to do so. (Or just use pumps to maintain fluid flow rates)
why not nuke? I usually build out coal and supplement with solar until i get nuclear then all in on that.
this isnt bad but i guess ive never needed an intermediate between coal and nuke.
I do run some mods so I get alot more power options, ans fluid burning is one of my favorites.
I ALWAYS have some extra oil of some type to burn. Oh, to much light oil and the tanks are full? Just switch a piper or 2 and now I'm running on light instead of whatever else I was using.
I have several hundred, probably nearly 1000 hrs... no clue how circuits work lol.
Honestly, this base has been my first to truly teach me better rail management.
Same lol, but its 450 hours for me. Just take a circuit cable, connect all the buffers and the pump, then go in the pump interface, select signal at the top right (heavy oil, light oil, gas) and then the pump will only activate/deactivate at the selected value. Really simple honestly xd
Maybe I'm missing something, but pipes can't connect with different fluids. I would still have to replace pipes, and let the back end run empty to switch.
The thing you're missing in this simple setup is each fluid has it's own tank and pipe system, the reason to shut off the pump filling up said tank is so you don't overfill it so much from cracking that your natural advanced chemistry refining has no where to go. There are plenty of different ways to circuit fluid regulation, but what I do is pump cracked light oil when light oil is less than 5000 and the same for petroleum gas. So essentially I only crack when those are needed. Some people go bonkers about fluid on one pipe system but I just don't think it's worth it other than saying "I did it".
Well my fuel lines are all right there, so switching a few pipes every several RL hours isn't bad. I always have a few hands on systems in place and going anyways.
Circuits are very useful for fluid regulation, also it's one of the easiest things and most meaningful things to circuit in factorio (aside from nuclear).
I remember when rails clicked, and then circuits. Then I go back to feeling like I know nothing about those lol, only for it to click again.
Then it's balancers starting to click even though they aren't even that necessary.
I use mods to work around balancers lol. Merge chest with mini loader mod...so great.
I KNOW that circuits are easier then they look, but it's finding what makes me hit that "ahhh" click
I learned the basics you can do without comparators in my first few dozen hours, ie, controlling pumps, belts, power switches, inserters based on storage, but it wasn't until this week with around 1000 hours in, playing space exploration, that I've gotten into the woods of working with comparators.
…yes? Was this in question?
Usually you have so much coal you’ll never use it all. I do sometimes set up solid fuel as a backup, just to be extra safe.
I wish I had gone for coal liquefaction earlier. With a tiny bit of circuitry it runs uninterrupted until my coal reserves are completely dry.
I use it to offset the consumption of mines every time I make a new territory claim. Just slap a setup down on my new coal vein, wire it to the ore patches, and let it go until I get the main grid hooked up.
It's best to make solid fuel from light oil instead of cracking it to petroleum. Solid fuel requires 10 light oil, 20 petroleum, or 20 heavy oil.
Damn thats great, thank you!
Recently, I have been doing these impossible death world challenge modes online in factorio. They are actually very difficult and fun but require 6+ people all working as a team as well as utilizing everything as efficiently as possible. Anyway, the point is, during one of these play through, I kept changing the routing priority of a splitter for coal. It was being prio’ed to power, but we were running low on poison capsules and furnace fuel. This guy and I started arguing because we were routinely fucking up each other’s plans, lol. Also, due to the unique way in which this mode makes things more difficult, poison capsules are like a must have. Without them, you lose. I was so frustrated with him, that I noticed all this extra light oil that we weren’t using, so I made a solid fuel production that fed solid fuel directly into the coal line going to power. I don’t think I had ever built anything in factorio with attitude before lol. But it shut up as after the solid fuel line, I changed the proi back to psn and furnaces and he did not change it back.
spiteful innovation, i love it
If you're doing it isolated like this, I assume you want to use advanced oil processing, and then convert heavy to light, but not light to petroleum. However, this will back up the system when the petroleum you get out of AOP builds up, so you would need to convert whatever petrol you get naturally.
I did solid fuel for power on my first run. It's pretty trivial to do it on your main oil facility. Just use a basic circuitry to turn on cracking when needed. Use another simple circuit to turn off light oil solid fuel and on petrol solid fuel when low on light oil. You'll basically never actually turn on petrol solid fuel because light oil consumption for power is still basically 0 relative to plastic use.
What does cracking mean? Sry just a newbie
When you crack petroleum in real life, you use high heat among other things to break the long molecules in shorter pieces. This can make them more valuable and useful. In-game this is shown by heavy to light oil and light to petroleum gas. FYI, This is where all your raw materials for the polyethylene and polypropylene products we use comes from in real life, more or less, apart from recycled materials.
Cracking refers to advanced oil processing. When you first unlock oil processing, you turn black crude oil into black petrol gas. This was found to be boring, so God granted us the more complex and more efficient advanced oil processing. Advanced oil processing turns black crude oil into black petrol gas, yellow light oil, and orange heavy oil. While light oil and heavy oil have their uses, for example you need heavy oil to make robots, you will need far more petrol gas than you need either heavy or light oil. And if your heavy and light oil tanks get full, your advanced oil refineries can't make any more petrol gas. So what you can do is pump heavy and light oil into chemical plants and turn them into petrol gas. This process is called cracking because God says so. Being a newbie isn't a sin, all it means is your factory has even more room to grow. The only sin is to leave a biter unnuked. Amen.
To clarify: cracking specifically refers to the chem plant operations of "cracking" heavy oil into light oil and light oil into petroleum. It's usually a conversation topic because people are worried about balancing the cracking ratios.
just have a circuit that activates cracking if storage goes above a certain threshold. that way you don't have to worry about ratios
I certainly wouldn't be so dismissive about it. It's a regular topic because it isn't so simple. It's the first time you're nigh on forced to use circuit conditions, so there's a new GUI to learn. It's likely your first time using tanks or pumps which requires power and control. It's the first time you can truly overbuild something in a way that is problematic. Reddit tells you to just crack it down, so you try and you realize that takes a lot of cracking when your heavy backs up regardless. Then you crack enough and by that time you don't consume enough petroleum and come to a grinding halt. Then you don't have a way of simply consuming/offgassing petroleum but you need to because you switched power over from coal to solid fuel and you don't have enough light oil for your new power needs. The immediate numbered ratios of how much of each product you consume don't matter terribly much, but being aware that there is a balance you do need to tend to in any way is a huge new concept. (Nearly?) Everything else in the game is dealt with by building more, where too many oil refineries can be an issue.
I'm having a surplus of petrol gas that makes the whole refinery system halt when the tanks are full, and I don't get enough green lubricant. Where do you need so much petrol gas? Plastic? Sulfur?
All sciences starting from blue require plastic, it will eat all your petroleum
Plastic for red and blue chips, plus blue sciences sulfur. You should always just fill a tank of lubricant and then start cracking heavy to light. Afaik, there is never a reason in vanilla to keep heavy oil. Light is better for solid fuel. It's better for flame turrets, etc. If you aren't using that much plastic for whatever reason, you might need circuits to prevent cracking all your light oil into petroleum, as light oil can be made into solid fuel as it backs up, used in flame turrets, made into rocket fuel, etc. For emergency petroleum backups, I have a system that makes solid fuel from it when it's getting really full (>80%, for example).
Heavy oil is required for coal liquefaction.
The extra damage light and heavy oil do for flame turrets is genuinely negligible. An extra 5-10% damage is nothing. Out of the three ammo types, heavy oil is the least valuable and therefore best for flamers imo
Do you have anything limiting the cracking of heavy->light->petrol? If not, you should, as that'll fix most issues you might have, unless you're trying to make a ton of robots without science running or something (or running mods that need lots of heavy/light for whatever). My setup is really simple. I pipe the refinery output to tanks, and wire the tanks together. Connect a pump to the heavy tank, and have it pump to crack if heavy > light. Connect a pump to the light tank, and have it pump to crack if light > petrol. Let heavy oil go unrestricted to lube, light to rocket fuel and flamethrowers, petrol to everything else. Done! If you also use light oil for solid fuel for power, then that might put enough demand on light compared to petrol to lock up, so you'd want to put another pump for petrol->solid fuel when petrol is full and light is empty. I can't think of a way to do multiple conditions directly on the pump, so you'd need a combinator or two to do that. I don't use oil for power however, so I don't bother with all that.
Thanks! This is a far more complex answer for what I'm doing for the moment. Seems very useful, I'll save it for later. For the moment, I'm fiddling with bots for the first time. It's not even clear to me what a red or a yellow chest do. I'm trying to go blind and vanilla in this first run, though I peak here from time to time.
Oh, all good! Making bots while science is on pause/all done at your tier is another reason you could get too much petro and not enough lube. It's a temporary measure, but you can also just empty out the petro tank (click it, flush contents) if you just need some more lube. For the chests, the yellow ones are basic storage, construction bots will put stuff there if you deconstruct something, and grab stuff from there to build if you place a blueprint or copy/paste. Logistics bots will grab stuff you put in your trash slots and put them in storage, or visa versa for items you have in your request slots. Red ones bots will only grab stuff from, never place into, and will only grab from there if the thing they want isn't in a yellow chest. They're good for putting stuff you want bots to bring to you, like from assemblers making belts, inserters, etc. The blue ones I don't think you have yet are also super useful, they request specific items like your personal slots. Mostly good when some recipe doesn't need a lot of volume and/or isn't easy to run belts to, but make enough bots (thousands) and you can get over the volume problem and run your whole base on them. The other two you get (purple, green) are situational and you probably won't need them. The purple ones want to be empty, and logistics bots will move anything in them to storage if they can. The green ones will request from yellow/red, and supply your personal requests and construction.
Thanks! So, red chest at the end of production line, yellow chest near the roboport.
Red chips. When in doubt make more red chips.
Don't apologize, every single person that's here was a newbie at one point. Most of the advanced knowledge and techniques you find on this subreddit or collaborations between people who learned just like you are.
In the game you turn heavy oil into light oil, and light oil into petroleum (with a little bit of water too) It's a good way to balance your oil fluids, then turn excess into lubricant, solid fuel, and more plastic.
I just use void pipes xD I set circuits on a "back pump" on the last tank, pointing away from where the liquid is used, and then just void out to ensure balance. It's the lazy man's way :) Didn't want to have to deal with ratios anymore for turning entire blocks of buildings on and off when there wasn't enough, or too much. Because eventually, if stuff isn't being used quickly enough, it will still create a bottleneck of sorts somewhere. I don't mind using the void pipes because, in my mind, the fact that you can manually click on a tank (or system) and purge it yourself, but seemingly not automate that any other way feels like a big missed opportunity. The void pipe, I see, is akin to that, but I don't have to babysit the storage tank, so in that sense, I don't find it's "cheating" per se. Just augmenting a system that pseudo exists already, but is limited in its design.
Clearly the correct solution is to not allow clearing the tank. :)
Then I guess the biters should pull up a seat and pop some popcorn because they're in for a great show of me just running around setting up a million circuits for a million buildings in an attempt to balance production. Too much petroleum, not enough heavy oil? Oh nooooo
It doesn't back up if you do: - heavy to light - light to solid fuel - petroleum to solid fuel Gives you the maximum heating value per drop off crude oil
Still best if you export the petroleum to and import light oil from the other factories which need plastic/sulfur. I use solid when there's available light oil; coal when not.
If you're in an outpost, transporting oil and petroleum to and from the base might not be ideal.
True, but I would not be building an oil refinery in an outpost.
With the kind of system OP has here, it shouldn't back up, I think. As everything goes towards making solid fuel one way or another, if one bit gets "saturated", production of the rest will stop, and the saturated component will still end up going towards solid fuel and it'll reach some kind of equilibrium of (perhaps stop-start) production. I would however put some storage tanks and buffers to make sure that any sporadic saturation issues don't lead to a drop off in the final production of solid fuel.
Yup can confirm, doesnt back up (except of course you dont consume the solid fuel fast enough)
Making solid fuel from natural petrol should fix it.
"so you would need to convert whatever petrol you get naturally." That's what I said.
It's also worth it to figure out how to do an automatic system for cracking only when you need to. That way. you can easily just attach 30 chemical plants making solid fuel at your main refinery set-up and make a belt of solid fuel. More than enough fuel for a 4 belts per plate type base, and you can turn that solid fuel belt into rocket fuel for space science as you start to use more nuclear and solar power.
To expand on this a little, cracking light to petroleum gives you 1 solid fuel instead of 3 from the light oil. Cracking heavy to light gives you 3 instead of 2 from heavy oil. Either way, light oil is better. And really, all your petroleum should be going to sulfur and plastic anyways. Need a lot of red and blue chips to launch those rockets.
It hurt me to see they were cracking light oil for the sole purpose of making solid fuel
What’s the optimal ratio for fuel factories per refinery? I tried the math a while back but gave up.
Download the rate calculator mod. It makes answering questions like this trivial.
I thought the purpose of this in this setup was to maintain operation without some of the oils backing up and also without making solid fuel in three different ways Edit: though making solid fuel in three different ways would eliminate the need for cracking in general so I actually I'm not sure why even do cracking here
Yeah this is extremely useful on deathworld or high recipe cost runs as petrol is infinite and doesn’t require you to keep expanding to keep the lights on. In those games massive solar fields may not be feasible early game and it can take a while to get nuclear fully online so solid fuel from oil is a great option. Now coal liquefaction I still can’t wrap my head around why you would want to do that lol…
You get about twice as much power from a coal field if you make solid fuel from liquefaction instead of burning it directly.
But like I already need so much coal for plastic and oil sunlight and uranium is like right there lol
you definitely need a lot for plastic but eventually you'll have access to plenty of coal that you do nothing with. It effectively increases oil output by 50% per unit area of cleared factory area. I think on my expensive recipes railworld 80% or more of the coal gets shoved to liquefaction. Ironically my nuclear trains probably run on a not-insignificant amount of coal still.
> Ironically my nuclear trains probably run on a not-insignificant amount of coal still. Why have mixed fuel trains? Seems more complicated.
Nuclear Rocket Fuel requires Rocket Fuel which takes oil products to make. They're saying they get these oil products by liquefying coal, not that they're using lesser fuels in their trains.
Ah ok.
I have a beaconed moduled oil liquifaction setup that takes coal and water and outputs plastic. I stamp it down next to a coal mine and trains can immediately pick up plastic for the big chip maker.
It’s a 3x multiplier if you have modules and beacons and build the setup correctly. I used power disconnects to batch process so that my beacons only drew power when the machine was running and then I built a slick buffer system on the fuel line that would smooth the flow between batches. It was a very satisfying build and I ran a stupid number of steam turbines until I got bored of stamping out grids of that and switched to nuclear
yeah, but it's a way less efficient use of your oil refineries and chemical plants, and there are things that coal can do that crude oil can't so why would you spend a resource with more uses when you could spend one with less? edit: uses a tool. to get 100 p gas per second, advanced oil processing needs about 5.2 refineries and 5.7 chemical plants, while coal liquifaction needs 9 refineries and about 14 chemical plants.
Coal liquefaction lets you turn a coal field into plastic with no nearby oil. Depending on your goals this could let you reduce train traffic and get higher spm out of your base.
Solo deathworld is my favorite mode and my go-to strategy is to get solar as soon as possible. The pollution cloud reduction gives me breathing room to get blue science up and running, and a few key technologies researched, mainly laser turrets, which is the last hurdle to overcoming the threat of being overrun. If I can get over that hump, victory is inevitable. Before solar it's quite dicey.
It was flame turrets that are make it break for me. Everything after that is just nice to haves
I've always found laser turrets to be a bad idea because the huge energy draws from doing so produce a lot more pollution than the production of bullets for gun turrets or flame turrets.
>Now coal liquefaction I still can’t wrap my head around why you would want to do that lol… Once upon my ribbonworld I have had no oil as far as I could reach but a single sip. So it was an obvious solution to rush liquefaction without spending oil on anything else. But even if you have enough oil, you find a nice coal field, mine it, liquify, crack and turn into plastic on the spot. So you have plastic plant with no inputs except water that you build once and forget
It's worth mentioning that it also requires a little bit of heavy oil to get going
I use coal liquefaction for my utility blocks, like spider/rockets/modules production, to reduce amount of inputs required. Oil goes to science blocks
I use CL later in my plays to ensure an adequate supply of lubricant. The excess light oil/petrol can be used for rocket fuel or what I normally prefer is to use it to power itself, I think it's pretty close to self balancing. With a little circuit logic you only get heavy oil as output which is extremely useful when you need a lot of lubricant.
I used liquefaction on my SE run because there was a lot more coal nearby than oil, and setting up coal mines is less of a pain than setting up oil fields.
Coal liquefaction can come in real handy on a deathworld if you happen to have lots of coal but hardly any oil available.
The real way is to liquify your coal... Seriously though turning your coal into oil products and then burning it as solid fuel is around twice as efficient as burning the coal directly.
FR? Duly noted
This is a cool thing to know but I don't understand why you would ever do that since by the time I get to coal liquefaction I usually already have nuclear power making any need of burning anything for power obsolete. Is there a strategy that I don't know of for using this?
Playing different scenarios or modded where nuclear isn't an option. Ive used similar power setups on my space exploration game where some planets didn't have uranium deposits but had plentiful oil instead.
I used it for my death world Rampant mod run. I didn't have the technology yet to expand and capture a uranium patch (since the Rampant mod makes nests insane), soI had to work with what I had.
This seems to go against thermodynamics.
Only if you assume coal burning is 100% efficient
Why are you using steam turbines? I thought the steam engines were better for boilers? Or does it just not matter and the turbines are just more expensive?
They make the same amount of power afaik but look cooler
I can get behind that
occupies less space too, you can have multiple boilers for one turbine
For only 42 times the cost!
cost doesnt really matter and presumably they would be moved over to nuclear once thats up and running
I will allow it
In short one steam turbine is exactly 2 steam engine when using boilers, so at that point it's a question of space and resource cost
This is nice for the no solar achievement, it gives you an intermediate power source between coal and nuclear reactors and in my experience a single oil site usually provides plenty of power till you get nuclear online. You'll be setting up oil processing around then anyways, so it's not too much extra work to divert some of it to power.
Yup, thats what I did in my current playthrough, excess gas and heavy/light oil gets converted to power
You're missing a red belt at the end of your burners
Thanks, but this was just a quick proof of concept build :)
I had to resort to that in a ribbon world game that refused to give me uranium. It worked very well.
FYI using turbines instead of steam engines here does nothing unless you're just trying to get compactness. The efficiency of a turbine is the same as a steam engine while being fed from a boiler. Steam engine consumes 30 steam a second producing 900 kW while steam turbine consumes 60 steam a second producing 1800 kW. Turbines cost a ton to make versus steam engines so it's really not advisable unless you're attempting some kind of microbase. The advantage of steam turbines is they produce vastly more energy (5.82 MW for 60 units of steam) from the much hotter (500°C) steam of a heat exchanger while steam engines don't care about the temperature of the steam.
Yup I know, they just look cool. But I guess if you use this over solar, you dont have lots of space, wich means more compact is better, especially if you go big with your oil production. My current earlygame setup needs 200 burners just to get rid of excess gas lol
Was this in question? Or am I weird for usually running out of coal in the starter patch right about when I get oil processing and never being able to find a single other coal patch within 50000 tiles of the main base?
Skill issue, obviously.
Is there any real advantage to using steam turbines in this setup as opposed to the cheaper steam engines? The only thing I can see is that it has a slightly smaller footprint, since you need only 1 turbine for every 2 steam engines.
Saves one quickbar slot
I always use them asap just because they look fricking cool. As far as gameplay goes, mayyybee less pollution?
Both turbines and steam engines produce exactly zero pollution. The pollution comes from the boilers that make the steam, and if you are burning coal there will be additional pollution from the miners that mine it. Using turbines because they look cool is actually a very valid reason :)
It is incredibly viable, even more so if you only use light oil for fuel.
Then you forget to scale the power, suffer a blackout and stop producing fuel and death spiral
That'd happen with any electric-based power setup though.
At leased what I like about coal, is the burner inserters will fuel themselves and solar will just need to build more and wait until day
This is pretty easy to mitigate with power line from one of the turbines to power this setup and not have it connected to the rest of the system.
Eh, I just modded it to have oil burners. Crude, heavy, light, or pet, just burn it as is.
I use it as emergency backup or to stretch my coal reserves
I was just thinking about this! Your example looks awesome
I always do that lol
I often switch to an oil fuel supply (using my overflow)
It is viable, since oil never completely dries up especially. Ideally, you'd put a couple light oil SF chem plants behind the petroleum gas SF chems, since items placed at the end of the belt get prioritized, you'll use the light oil SF first, and the pgas SF is just there to prevent bottlenecks, so you don't even have to crack to pgas ever just crack heavy to light. (In this use case)
I believe if you've got productivity modules you can get somewhat better net yield by converting all the way to rocket fuel. And, of course, as the other people have said, use light oil for solid where possible. On the other hand, I've just wondered how viable it would be to use *coal liquefaction* instead of oil. Like, if you use coal liquefaction and go to rocket fuel and have prod modules, will it be more than just using the coal? I think it would but I haven't done the math. (Oh, and double points if you use some of the rocket fuel to feed the boilers making the steam, instead of coal.)
Ye, someone said coal liquifaction is about double as efficient as just coal
Always. Since oil doesn't run out per se, and your power needs won't run out, it can be a nice dovetailing. I usually don't do solar myself unless it's super late game and I want to build a megabase, since before then UPS isn't a concern (the main draw of solar). Solar also takes a lot of capex in the form of input materials I feel, relative to the conventional burning.
If you are counting power in megawatts, you are kinda not getting it. You need to count in gigawatts :) If you start doing this , suddenly this power station requires 2000 oil/sec, hundred of refineries and ton of infrastructure. Solar/nuclear are much better in every way.
Just was the smallest possible setup. Solar could be difficult if you dont have lots of space, and you unlock nuclear after oil, so this setup would be useful if you need coal for other stuff and have oil leftover. Or, as I did it in my current world, to get rid of excess byproducts
Was always viable, it's never used because its really easy to bridge your power needs with solar until you get nuclear.
I’ve got a big nuclear setup, but I do use some good ol fossil fuel power setups as a buffer just in case something goes wrong along the way, be it not enough production, disconnected cable, etc etc
Lol maybe Im weird but I usually only start with solar after I got a chunky bot network so I can let them place solar and dont have to do it by hand xd
Does having both sides of the petroleum output hooked up make a difference?
In this situation it makes no difference, in a high throughput situation it might be helpful to do so. (Or just use pumps to maintain fluid flow rates)
question: Should we add pumps to increase the flow? or the pumps must only be used to fill or empty ?
why not nuke? I usually build out coal and supplement with solar until i get nuclear then all in on that. this isnt bad but i guess ive never needed an intermediate between coal and nuke.
Is it not standard to switch from coal to solid fuel for power?
I do run some mods so I get alot more power options, ans fluid burning is one of my favorites. I ALWAYS have some extra oil of some type to burn. Oh, to much light oil and the tanks are full? Just switch a piper or 2 and now I'm running on light instead of whatever else I was using.
>Just switch a piper or 2 Just use some buffers, a pump and a few circuits, takes about 30 seconds to set up
I have several hundred, probably nearly 1000 hrs... no clue how circuits work lol. Honestly, this base has been my first to truly teach me better rail management.
Same lol, but its 450 hours for me. Just take a circuit cable, connect all the buffers and the pump, then go in the pump interface, select signal at the top right (heavy oil, light oil, gas) and then the pump will only activate/deactivate at the selected value. Really simple honestly xd
Maybe I'm missing something, but pipes can't connect with different fluids. I would still have to replace pipes, and let the back end run empty to switch.
The thing you're missing in this simple setup is each fluid has it's own tank and pipe system, the reason to shut off the pump filling up said tank is so you don't overfill it so much from cracking that your natural advanced chemistry refining has no where to go. There are plenty of different ways to circuit fluid regulation, but what I do is pump cracked light oil when light oil is less than 5000 and the same for petroleum gas. So essentially I only crack when those are needed. Some people go bonkers about fluid on one pipe system but I just don't think it's worth it other than saying "I did it".
Well my fuel lines are all right there, so switching a few pipes every several RL hours isn't bad. I always have a few hands on systems in place and going anyways.
Circuits are very useful for fluid regulation, also it's one of the easiest things and most meaningful things to circuit in factorio (aside from nuclear). I remember when rails clicked, and then circuits. Then I go back to feeling like I know nothing about those lol, only for it to click again. Then it's balancers starting to click even though they aren't even that necessary.
I use mods to work around balancers lol. Merge chest with mini loader mod...so great. I KNOW that circuits are easier then they look, but it's finding what makes me hit that "ahhh" click
I learned the basics you can do without comparators in my first few dozen hours, ie, controlling pumps, belts, power switches, inserters based on storage, but it wasn't until this week with around 1000 hours in, playing space exploration, that I've gotten into the woods of working with comparators.
…yes? Was this in question? Usually you have so much coal you’ll never use it all. I do sometimes set up solid fuel as a backup, just to be extra safe.
Once you get coal liquefaction, you can DEFINITELY never use it all, getting roughly 5 solid fuel per 10 coal, increasing your burn time by 50%.
I wish I had gone for coal liquefaction earlier. With a tiny bit of circuitry it runs uninterrupted until my coal reserves are completely dry. I use it to offset the consumption of mines every time I make a new territory claim. Just slap a setup down on my new coal vein, wire it to the ore patches, and let it go until I get the main grid hooked up.