Factorio Oil Tutorial - Absolute Basics

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I've previously done two other tutorials of this style that were pretty well received, so continuing with my kind-of series, Absolute Basics for Absolute Beginners, here is an oil tutorial.

For the longest while, Oil has been one of the largest hurdles in the game and more than once I've seen a new player give up the game because the sudden jump in complexity baffled them. The changes to oil in 0.17 has no-doubt made this much better, but it can still be a little daunting, hence this video. It's geared towards newer players who have pretty much conquered how assembling machines work, but haven't yet gotten to blue science.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/minibetrayal 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Nice editing! The highlighting is very clean.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Kano96 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Definitely gonna save this post. I have a couple of hours (~120) in this game and I still struggle with Oil

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/1_hele_euro 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Excellent video. Clear, informative, and entertaining, and as concise as it could be. I also took a look at your train tutorial video while I was at it, and was just as impressed.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/unsynchedcheese 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

I love your videos. I always go back to your circuit tutorial, because that shit just keeps eluding me once it get's a little more complicated and you're great at explaining. You deserve way more subscribers man.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/j_ayf 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

This is the video everyone struggling to start with oil should watch. It's concise yet complete, you have a pleasant speaking voice and just enough humor to make it fun but not so much it distracts from the content. If ever I encounter someone who needs a little help with oil, this'll be the video I will link them to!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/wPatriot 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

I haven't had a chance to watch the entire video yet, but it's off to an excellent start!

One question: at about 8:20, you claim that if one mines a storage tank, any fluid in that tank is lost. Is that actually the case? I've heard that before, but I've also heard that if there's room for the tank's contents in the neighboring fluid boxes (tanks or pipes, for instance), the tank's contents will move into those when the tank is mined. (Not sure what's supposed to happen if the neighboring fluid boxes only have room for some of the tank's contents, though I'd expect that they take on whatever they can hold and the rest is lost.)

I'm not at my Factorio computer at the moment, so I can't try it out to see what happens, but I'll give that a shot once I get home this evening.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/fdl-fan 📅︎︎ Oct 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Thank you so much! I usually use some blueprint and get frustrated when it eventually stops producing. Thanks to your tutorial oil production finally makes sense. Very well produced and explained. You deserve a lot more subscribers, this is some quality content.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Chillosophy_ 📅︎︎ Oct 12 2019 🗫︎ replies
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Hello, hello and welcome! My name is MiniBetrayal and this is a Factorio Tutorial on oil and oil products. This video is geared mainly towards people who are new-ish to the game so I'll be explaining everything in a greater level of detail, but if you just want to learn about something specific, check the video description for a list of chapter headings and timestamps that you can skip to. So, you've recently started playing Factorio, and have probably spent a great deal of time more than you can really afford getting to grips with the basics of the game. Mining resources, belting them over to your furnaces to be smelted into plates, and then onto assembling machines to turn them into science packs, which you then feed into your labs to advance the tech tree. Simple, right? And then you reach the point where you need some of these newfangled blue science packs. Okay, what do I need for that? Advanced electronics? Plastic? Oil? What's all this? How the hell does this Oil refinery work? It's long been something of an issue that the complexity jump to Chemical science has been massive compared to previous steps in the game. To advance any further with the tech tree, you have to figure out complex pipe systems, pumpjacks, oil refineries and chemical plants all at once before you can make the advanced circuits - the red version and next step up from the green electronic circuits - that you need to craft the chemical science pack. Now this was addressed in one of the more recent major updates to the game, which decreased the complexity involved in the basic version of oil processing, but there's still a lot to take in. Let's start by having a look at the available researches in the tech tree. The first item in the tech tree that kicks off the oil processing section is fluid handling. It requires the Engine and Automation 2 researches as prerequisites, costs 50 of each automation and logistic science packs, and unlocks two buildings and a bunch of other recipes as well. The two placeable buildings are the storage tank, which is used to store fluids like oil or water in the same way that a chest can be used to store normal items. The second item is the pump, which is used to control the flow of fluids around your factory. More on how to use the pump later. The research also unlocks the Empty barrel, which can be crafted either by hand or in an assembling machine for just 1 steel plate, and can be used to bottle up the various fluids using the recipes that you see here. I'll go into how to do this later in the video, but the short version is that using the barrels allows you to hold onto fluid items in your inventory or on a belt, or allow logistics bots to move them around your factory. Related to the storage tank is the item unlocked by the next research in our list: the Fluid wagon. This requires both fluid handling and the Railway researches as prerequisites, and costs 200 of each automation and logistic science packs. If you've played with the train system at all in Factorio, you can use the Fluid wagon like a Cargo wagon that holds a fluid item instead of normal solid items. Check out my train tutorial for more information on how to use them and integrate them into an existing rail network. Next up is the big boy, oil processing. This requires you to have completed the fluid handling research, and costs 100 of each automation and logistic science packs, and unlocks three buildings and two recipes. The first unlocked building is the pumpjack, which is what you use to extract oil from a deposit in the same way you would use a mining drill to extract ore. Next is the Oil refinery, which is how you process that raw oil extract into useable products. Then you have the chemical plant, which is how you can combine these products into useful things. To draw an analogy, if the Pumpjack is like your mining drill, then the oil refinery is like your furnace, that turns the ore into plates, and the chemical plant is like your assembling machine, that turns those plates into other things. The two recipes that are unlocked are Basic oil processing that turns Crude oil (which is the raw oil extracted by the pumpjack) into Petroleum gas, and a recipe that turns Petroleum gas into Solid fuel - an alternative fuel source for boilers, furnaces and vehicles, and a vital component of rocket fuel. Following the Oil processing research, there are three directions you can proceed. Sulfur processing costs 150 of each automation and logistics science packs and allows you to make sulfur and sulfuric acid, a component of Batteries, Explosives, and the high-tier Processing units. Plastics costs 200 of each automation and logistic science packs and unlocks the plastic bar, which is used to create the mid-tier Advanced circuit that you'll need to create chemical science packs, amongst other things. Flammables costs just 50 of each automation and logistics science packs and does not directly unlock anything, but is a required research to get to the end of the game, and unlocks the tech tree required to get some interesting weaponry. Once you have unlocked the Chemical science pack, you will be able to research Advanced oil processing, which unlocks five new recipes that offer more efficient means of managing your oil. It costs 75 of each automation, logistic and chemical science packs. The first recipe to unlock is the Advanced oil processing recipe, which gives you an alternative way to turn Crude oil into Petroleum gas at a higher rate, but also creates two other products, light oil and heavy oil, that you'll have to deal with. The other four recipes give you such ways to deal with them. Firstly, Heavy oil cracking allows you to convert heavy oil into light oil, and then Light oil cracking allows you to convert light oil into more Petroleum gas. Additionally, there are two recipes for Solid fuel, one from each Heavy oil and Light oil. The last research to mention here is the Coal liquefaction research. It requires Advanced oil processing as a prerequisite and costs 200 of each automation, logistic, chemical and production science packs. This unlocks one last recipe - Coal liquefaction - that allows you to essentially turn coal into oil products. This can be useful for the later game when you have either run out of useable Crude oil sources, or have a surplus of coal, as in the late game power generation often comes from alternative sources, reducing the need for coal in general. Now you've done your research and want to go about actually getting some oil. First, we'll need a Pumpjack. Each Pumpjack will cost 5 Steel plate, 10 Iron gear wheels, 5 Electronic circuits and 10 Pipes. They also need to be placed directly on top of an oil patch, which looks like this. Note that the patches can be a little trickier to see in the wild, but you can use the map view to help you locate some. When you hold a Pumpjack in your hand, you'll see green boxes where you can place one. After you've placed it, you'll see a little blue arrow indicating where the Pumpjack outputs its crude oil. You'll need to attach something there that can accept Crude oil, usually a pipe or storage tank. The storage tank is one of the items unlocked by fluid handling. It costs 20 Iron plate and 5 Steel plate, and can hold up to 25,000 of any one fluid. Note that, unlike a chest, you can't have multiple fluids in a single storage tank. In fact, the game will prevent you from connecting anything that holds two different kinds of fluids. The storage tank is also relatively large, so bear that in mind when planning your oil refining area. It has four places that you can input to or output from, on opposite corners of the tank like this. You can press 'R' while you have a tank in your hand to rotate it so the corners switch around, or even rotate an existing tank by pressing 'R' with your mouse over it. One last important thing to note is that if you mine a storage tank with any fluid in it, that fluid will cease to exist, so be be sure that's when you want before you tear up thousands of units of precious oil fractions. Finally, a quick note about oil yield. Unlike other resources like iron or copper, oil is infinite and will never run out. If you mouseover an oil patch, you will see a number here, yield, given as a percentage. The higher percentage, the faster you can expect to get oil out of a given deposit, as each percentage point gives you 0.1 oil per second from a given pumpjack, to a maximum of 100 per second. This patch here has a yield of just 3%, so the connected storage tank is barely filling at all. Over here I have some patches with a much higher yield, which can fill a tank much much faster. Yield will slowly decrease over time to a point where your pumpjacks will be able to draw no more than 2 crude oil per second, or 20% its starting value, whichever is more. Lastly, on the map view, you can see a summary of the total yield of a group of oil patches, as well as more easily being able to locate the bright pink dots indicating oil deposits. By now we should have a nice stockpile of crude oil sitting in one or more storage tanks, but theres not a lot we can do with crude oil at this point, so we need to refine it. We do this - funnily enough - with the Oil refinery. It costs 15 steel, 10 gears, 10 green circuits, 10 pipes and 10 stone brick, and is quite a large building, so give yourself plenty of room to work with when you design the oil refining area of your base. Now the first thing you should notice when you place the building is that it needs power, so you'll need to supply a power line. I'm currently using the Creative mode mod so I'll just use some cheat objects to give power to the building here. Next, you should see that this building has blue arrows like the Pumpjack, but five of them. Two pointing in, and three pointing out. These indicate the various input and output connection points the refinery has, but we dont need to worry about that just yet. Clicking on the building to configure it, we can select a recipe just like with an assembling machine, although you'll probably only see one recipe here, the first, which is Basic oil processing. This takes 5 seconds to turn 100 Crude oil into 45 Petroleum gas. Click on that to select the recipe and You'll see the window change to something like that of an assembling machine, where you see inputs as a list at the top - in this case just crude oil, which we have none of - and outputs at the right, which will be Petroleum gas. There's also a space for modules so you can upgrade the building later to be faster, more efficient, or more productive. Exiting that menu, you can see that there are now only two blue arrows, each with an item indicator next to it. This recipe only needs one input and only has one output, and thats just what the arrows indicate. Important to note is that even though there were previously more input and output spots, it IS important to use the correct places, for a reason that will become obvious when we look at the advanced oil processing recipe. So to actually get this working, we need to connect it to some Crude oil, and give the output somewhere to go. Ordinarily this would be a pipe leading to your crude oil storage tank, or perhaps where a train might drop off crude oil, but in this case I'll just use a creative fluid source to make infinite oil for me. And now we can see the refinery is doing its thing, turning the crude oil into Petroleum gas, which in turn will go into this output pipe. Now, if there isn't enough room for the petrol to exit the refinery, it's going to back up, again like an assembling machine. If it backs up too much, the building will stop working. This isn't a problem now, because if it backs up that simply means we aren't using the petrol as fast as we're making it, but it is an important concept for later. So, to prevent the backup, let's just connect the output to this tank so the petrol has somewhere to go. now with each refinery cycle, you can see more petrol flow into the storage tank. Great! We've found some oil, gathered it, processed it into Petroleum gas... now what? Well, the two things requiring petrol that you're going to need the most of are plastic and sulfur. Let's start with plastic. Most recipes that use oil products use the Chemical plant, and Plastic does just that, so let's have a look. A Chemical plant costs 5 steel, 5 gears, 5 green circuits and 5 pipes, and is a 3x3 building. When we place it down, you'll see that once again we have little blue arrows to indicate the points where fluids can be input or output. If we click on the building to configure it we can see the recipes it can perform. Plastic bars take 1 second to craft, and use a coal and 20 Petroleum gas to make two plastic bars. Remember that it does make two if you're counting up anything to do with ratios or throughput! Once again we get a window similar to that of an assembling machine with inputs, and output and spaces for modules. Now that the building is configured, you can see that the output arrows have disappeared. This is because this recipe does not output any fluids. I'll use the creative mod to feed in some coal, and we can use an inserter to grab items from the belt and put them in the Chemical plant, just like we can with an Assembling machine. We also need to pipe in some petrol to one of the input points, and I'll grab that from our petrol storage tank up here. As soon as it's connected, you'll see the plant spring to life. Again, just like an Assembling machine, we can use another inserter to take the finished product out of the plant and place it on a belt, or in a box, or do with as you will from there. In this case, we've not cleared enough space for the plastic to go, so the plant has backed up and will cease production until more space is cleared. As mentioned, the other thing you'll need a lot of is sulfur, which is used primarily for Sulfuric acid, both of which are also made in chemical plants. Selecting the Sulfur recipe here, we can see that two sulfur items are made in 1 second from 30 water and 30 petrol. Again, the sulfur item is not a liquid, so the output arrows disappear, but we can also see that the two input arrows have icons next to them to indicate which fluid item needs to be put where. The order does matter, so you'll need to plan out large areas of chemical plants carefully. Once again, I've grabbed some petrol by piping it in from the storage, and I'll just create a water source with the creative mod, but you'll need to find a lake somewhere and use an offshore pump to get water, just like you do when collecting water for boilers and steam engines. Once hooked up and powered, the plant starts making us some sulfur. I'll use an inserter to take it out of the plant and put it onto a belt. Now let's have a look at Sulfuric acid. This recipe makes 50 sulfuric acid in 1 second from an Iron plate, 5 Sulfur and 100 water. Now, we have a fluid that is being output, so the blue output arrows light up with sulfuric acid indicators, as well as the input arrows indicating water. Don't forget though, that we also need to feed in iron plates and sulfur using inserters. Once again, I'll grab water from the creative mod. Now the plant starts to make Sulfuric acid, but quickly backs up as we've not given the acid anywhere to go. I'll add an output pipe and connect it to a tank to allow the system to keep working. Here, I've connected the pipe to both outputs, but only one is required. Similarly, I only need to connect the input Water to just one of the input arrows, so long as there's only the one input fluid type. Sulfuric acid usually isn't needed in vast quantities, so in my factories I often connect the Chemical plant directly to a storage tank like this. The acid can then be piped elsewhere in the factory, where it can be used in yet more chemical plants to make things like batteries, or even piped directly into an Assembling machine to make things like Processing units. While we're here, let's have a quick look at Solid fuel. 20 Petroleum gas can be converted into a Solid fuel in a chemical plant every two seconds. Solid fuel is extremely useful as a fuel source in furnaces, boilers, etc, and has a higher fuel value so it's burned through less quickly. If used in a vehicle, it provides an acceleration and top speed percentage boost, and can be converted into rocket fuel later on. However, with just basic oil processing, there are drawbacks. Firstly, as you can see here, it eats into our precious petrol supply and means we can no longer produce enough petrol to keep our sulfur and plastic production up and running, so we would need to gather more oil and build more refineries. Secondly, the Advanced oil processing research unlocks another solid fuel recipe which is far more efficient than making it out of Petroleum gas, so my advice would be to leave off on solid fuel production unless you really need it, or until you research advanced processing. Advanced oil processing is a step up from basic, in both efficiency and complexity. In addition to the 100 Crude oil that basic processing uses, it also takes in 50 Water. It takes the same 5 seconds, but produces 55 Petroleum gas instead of 45, as well as two new oil fractions: 25 Heavy oil and 45 Light oil. You can see now that we have two inputs and three outputs, so all of the blue arrows on the refinery building are active, with their relevant inputs and outputs indicating where each thing should go. For the ease of upgrading from basic to advanced oil processing, the Crude oil input and the petroleum gas output remain in the same place, but this is only useful if you build the basic processing setup with this in mind, so plan ahead where you can. I'll connect up the inputs to some creative fluid sources so we can see what's going on. So with the inputs connected, the refinery starts refining the crude oil into its three fractions. Of course, The outputs have nowhere to go just yet, so I'll put down a storage tank for each fraction. This will work fine for now, but we'll run into a problem a little later unless we actually do something with each of these outputs. Here we are a little later. You can ignore the buildings around the edge, they are a late game item called a beacon that, used like this, will simply make the refinery faster. The Refinery has stopped working, because it can't get rid of the Petroleum gas it makes. If you look at the indicators on the tanks on the right, you can see the petrol tank is full. The important take-away here is that even though there is space in the tanks for both Light oil and Heavy oil, the refinery will produce nothing at all unless there is space for ALL THREE PRODUCTS. Now this particular scenario isn't so bad at this point. Petrol is what we use the most of, so if our petrol supply is full, what's the issue? Well, I'll simulate a drain on the petrol supply with this creative mod item here which will remove all the fluid from the tank. After a little more time, the Light oil has now backed up, so the refinery isn't producing. This is a much more serious issue, because we're now producing no petrol. Sooner or later, we'll run out, which means no plastic, no red circuits, no mid to late game items and the entire factory will shut down. There are a couple of ways of resolving this issue, which I'll go into in a moment, but I think it's important to highlight this. Sooner or later, you WILL run into it, and the root cause may not be as simple as you might think. For example, in a recent game of mine, I noticed I was having issues with low power. My power at the time was fuelled by solid fuel, which was, in turn, made from Light oil. I had run out of Light oil. Why? because my petrol was full and I had no space for my refineries to make more Light oil. But that wasn't the root cause. The petrol was full because I wasn't making as much plastic as I was supposed to, because I wasn't using as much plastic as I was supposed to, because I wasn't making any advanced circuits, because I had a copper shortage. So I had a power shortage cause by a copper shortage. Ordinarily, two completely unrelated systems like this would have no bearing on the other, but the three-fraction oil system has a habit of linking things together like that, so keep an eye on how much space you have left for each fraction. As for how to deal with each fraction, there are a couple of ways. Probably the simplest is to just add more storage when you need it, but that can get out of hand surprisingly quickly and you'll need to keep going back to manually fix it every so often. The next is to find a way of using each fraction. Petrol can of course be used to make plastic or sulfur as previously mentioned, and heavy and light oil each have their uses too. If I place a Chemical plant down here and we have a look at the recipes, you'll can see that as well as making Solid fuel from Petroleum gas, there are also recipes to make it from the other fractions as well. 10 Light oil can be made into 1 Solid fuel in 2 seconds. This is the most efficient of the three recipes, as the others take 20 of their respective fractions to make a solid fuel, though you can of course still use them if you're desperate to either make extra room or desperate for more solid fuel. If I start turning the Light oil here into solid fuel, you see the refinery sputter back into action, and I can make it run full time again by simulating more draw on the supply of Light oil. Sooner or later though, we'll just run into the same issue again but with heavy oil. Heavy oil has another recipe that's useful, and that's Lubricant. Each second, a Chemical plant can turn 10 Heavy oil into 10 Lubricant, which can then be used elsewhere in the factory for higher-tier items. However, lubricant is also a fluid, so you'll also need to manage storage of that, as generally speaking, lubricant's not in particularly high demand in a normal factory. The other main solution to managing the oil fractions is with the other recipes unlocked by Advanced oil processing: Cracking. The first of these recipes takes two seconds, and will turn 40 Heavy oil into 30 Light oil, if you additionally supply 30 Water. I'll hook it up to the Heavy oil Storage tank and give it a water supply, and you'll see it start its conversion. The Light oil product needs to go somewhere, so I'll hook it back up to the same Light oil storage tank that the refinery outputs into. The other cracking recipe works almost identically. In two seconds, a plant can turn 30 Light oil into 20 Petroleum gas with the addition of 30 Water. I'll give it an input from the Light oil storage tank and some water, and connect it's output to the Petroleum gas storage tank. Now these two plants together should ensure we never fill up on heavy oil or light oil, assuming there's space to crack them into light oil and petroleum gas respectively. Now all we need to do is to make sure there is no backup of petroleum gas and we should be okay. However, you can see here that even with a simulated draw on the petroleum, the refinery is still having trouble. It won't shut down altogether now, but it's still making heavy oil faster than the cracking plant can get rid of it. This is an easy one to fix though. By moving things around a bit, you can hook up cracking plants in parallel to make sure you are always cracking faster than you're producing. This does, however, have a side effect. Notice here that even though the refinery is running full time, which is good, the plants cracking Heavy oil to Light oil are flickering on and off. If you look at the heavy oil storage tank, you can see that it's virtually empty. Now given what I've said so far, you might think this is a good thing, but remember we do actually need some heavy oil to make lubricant! With no lubricant, we are unable to make some necessary higher-tier products, the factory shuts down, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, general woe all around once again. Don't worry, there are, of course, ways to reduce the severity of this problem. in this video, I'll discuss the two main methods. You've set up your pumpjacks, you've gathered your oil, you've processed it into your three fractions, and now you're having trouble managing them. You have set up cracking so you dont fill up your tanks with heavy or light oil, but how can you keep some for uses like solid fuel or lubricant? I present to you: the Circuit Solution. An item thus far largely undiscussed in this video has been the pump. It is unlocked all the way back with the Fluid handling research, and takes just 1 steel, 1 engine and 1 pipe to craft. The way it works is like this: If you have two storage tanks, or two pipes that are near each other, you can connect them with pipes. If one is full and the other is empty, the fluid will flow such that the level in each connecting tank or pipe is roughly balanced. If, however, you instead connect them with a pump, then as long as the pump is connected to a power source, it will actively move all the fluid in the tank or pipe behind it, to the tank or pipe in front. It does this as quickly as it can, so its great for moving fluids from one place to another. You can also connect them to a parked Fluid wagon to empty or fill it. Also useful is that the pump acts like a valve, only allowing fluid to flow in one direction. notice that the water doesn't flow back from the second tank to the first against the direction of the pump. This is all great, and can be used to great effect, but what we're interested in is how a pump can be connected to a circuit network. If I hook up a pump to this power pole here, you can see that a little red light comes on, on the side of the pump, indicating that the pump is disabled, and it will not work. Click on the pump to open it up, and we can have a look. The mode of operation of a pump is enable/disable, which means it will only be active when a condition is met. Have a look at my circuit network tutorial to learn more about what you can put in this condition box, but as an example, let's set the condition to be Water greater than 5000. Now, the pump will only turn on if it receives a water signal that is greater than 5000. Let's test that out. I'll fill the input tank completely, and as soon as I connect the input tank to the little circuit network, the pump switches on. Keep an eye on the level of water in the input tank. As soon as it drops below 5000, the pump switches off and no more is removed from the first tank. Now let's head back to our cracking area and see how this helps us. I'll put pumps that lead from the Heavy oil storage to the Heavy oil cracking, and the Light oil storage to the light oil cracking. Make sure though that the output from the heavy oil cracking still has a path back to the Light oil storage though, bypassing that pump, or it'll get blocked. Now let's connect our three storage tanks to the two new pumps. The pumps switch off at first, but we'll set some conditions to tell them when to turn on. Now we could use actual numbers, but a very common way of setting this up is to only enable this pump if Light oil, is greater than, Petroleum gas. That way, the plants cracking light oil to petrol will only receive an input if we have more light oil than petrol. Now we can assume that we should always have at least some petrol in storage, or if not then we need to build more oil refineries! Therefore, we can turn off the consumption of light oil for cracking whenever it drops below the level of petrol, and we should never run out of light oil due to cracking. We can still run out if the consumption of light oil by other means is higher than production, but that's a far less troublesome condition to be in. We'll set up a similar condition on the Heavy oil pump, enabling it only when we have more Heavy oil than light oil, and with these two pumps set up as they are, The three oil fractions should always remain at a roughly equal amount in the storage tanks, which also makes it much easier to judge if you need more refineries. I'll set up a simulated drain on the petrol tank, and after a while you can see that the cracking plants switch off and on automatically to keep the levels roughly even. In this case, a little under 5000. While I'm here, I'll point out something that I've often done. While not an oil fraction, you can add a third pump to a plant making lubricant, and set its condition to be active if you have less lubricant than heavy oil. This way, you also have a tank of lubricant for use around the base without stealing too much away from your more important oil-based production. The second method for managing oil fractions is by calculating ratios. What follows is a walkthrough of how to calculate the ratios of how many oil refineries and Chemical plants you'll need set up to refine and crack to have everything turned into Petroleum gas with nothing left over, so If you're implementing this, you'll want to have a little extra set up so you have at least some heavy and light oil production. This will probably get a bit math-sy, so if you're only interested in the final result, you can skip to this timestamp. Otherwise, break out the calculator and let's get down to business. Firstly, let's assume that we don't have any modules or beacons to worry about. They are late-game items that you can use to improve your production, but for now we'll just stick with the basics. If there's greater interest, I'll do another video on how to calculate proper ratios in Factorio, regardless of modules. Both Oil refineries and Chemical plants have a crafting speed of 1, which simplifies things nicely. If a recipe says it takes 5 seconds to complete, then that's how long it takes. Good. Now we need to know how long each recipe takes. The Advanced oil cracking (*processing) recipe takes 5 seconds to complete, and gives us 25 heavy, 45 light, and 55 petrol. The cracking recipes each take 2 seconds, and take 40 heavy to give 30 light, or 30 light to give 20 petrol. That works out nicely, because for every Heavy cracking plant, we need exactly one light cracking plant to turn all the heavy oil right the way through into petrol. So how many heavy crackers do we need? Well if we make 25 heavy oil in 5 seconds, then a refinery makes 5 heavy oil per second. If we crack 40 heavy oil in 2 seconds, then a Chemical plant uses 20 heavy oil per second. 20 divided by 5 is 4, so for every four refineries, we need 1 heavy cracker. Or, each refinery needs 0.25 heavy crackers, and 0.25 light crackers. Applying the same logic to light oil, a refinery makes 45 light oil in 5 seconds, or 9 light oil per second. The light crackers use 30 light oil in 2 seconds, or 15 light oil per second. 15 divided by 9 is 1.66666, or one and two-thirds. So for every one and two-thirds of a refinery we have, we need an additional light cracker. One divided by that is 0.6, so each refinery needs an additional 0.6 light crackers. Add that to the 0.25 light crackers we need for the heavy oil, and get the result that for each refinery you have working on advanced oil cracking, we need 0.25 plants cracking heavy oil to light oil, and 0.85 plants cracking light oil to petroleum gas. As a ratio of refineries to heavy crackers to light crackers, we have 1 : 0.25 : 0.85. Of course, you can't build 0.85 of a chemical plant, so we want these as whole numbers. Writing 0.25 and 0.85 as fractions, find the lowest common denominator to be 20. Multiply our fractional ratio by 20 and we get our final result: 20 Oil refineries performing advanced oil processing, 5 chemical plants performing heavy oil cracking, and 17 chemical plants performing light oil cracking. Assuming you supply enough water and power to keep it running full time, this will give you a grand total of 390 Petroleum gas per second, which is more than enough for a small- to medium-sized base. In fact, this is probably too much for most, and would take an unnecessary amount of resources to set up, as well as requiring a constant supply of 2000 crude oil per second, which is no mean feat. If we instead multiply by 8 rather than 20, we get 8 refineries to 2 heavy crackers to 6.8 (rounded up to 7) light oil crackers, which - as the factorio wiki states - is "Close enough", and can be a much more reasonable number to work with. Calculating exact ratios is all well and good, but it means you need to be able to place multiple refineries and chemical plants, ideally set out neatly to avoid pipe spaghetti, which is - I promise you - much, much worse than belt spaghetti. As with anything in Factorio, there are uncountable ways of doing this, but there is one method so common I feel I should divert some attention to it here, as it is simple to set up and easy to understand. If you try the naive approach of setting up a refinery like this, with the inputs and outputs coming out on each side, and simply copy and paste, the game won't like it at all. The Heavy oil output of one refinery is right next to the petrol output of the refinery next to it, so the game will prevent you from either placing the pipe, or placing the refinery itself, depending on the order you do things. Therefore, you need to have a space of at least one between each refinery. Thats easy enough, and it gives you a convenient place to put power poles or lights. But now, you need to connect the like-outputs and inputs of each refinery without getting things muddled up. Underground pipes, which work similarly to underground belts, are useful, but can only get you so far. Instead of getting yourself all tangled up, you can take advantage of the fact that a pipe to ground will not connect to pipes next to it, other than the one directly in front. for each of the three outputs, lay a stretch of pipe leading straight out of a different length. Here, I've just used 1 for petrol, 2 for light oil and 3 for heavy oil. You can do the same for inputs on the other side of the refinery. Then, using pipe to grounds, connect the end of each pipe left and right like this. Now you have a convenient unit you can copy and paste. Then the ghosts will tell you exactly where you need to build and what you need to build. Later on, when you have construction bots (or if you're using a mod like I am here), it'll even get built for you. This method makes sure that each of the inputs and outputs are connected to all the other inputs and outputs of the same type, without crossing over or looking too ugly. Even if you're only setting up for basic oil processing, It's a good idea to build like this, or to at least leave space for it, as it becomes much easier to upgrade production to advanced oil processing later on. As you can see here, Basic oil processing, Advanced oil processing and even Coal liquefaction all have the same outputs in the same places, so you won't have to worry about rebuilding everything when it comes time to upgrade. The same method also works well for chemical plants. If a chemical plant has two different inputs, like cracking or sulphur production, again you need to make sure the inputs dont cross-contaminate. In the earlier example I used the godlike power of the creative mod to circumvent this, but you'll need to leave a space of at least one between each chemical plant. You can copy and paste the same pattern of pipes from the input side of the oil refineries into the chemical plants, and it should just work. For these cases, you don't need to connect the outputs in the same way as there's only a single fluid being output from the chemical plants. You can see a variation of this method at work in the complicated example from the introduction. Here, the pipes don't branch out directly next to the refineries and plants, they are separated by an underground pipe to give room to fit in a row of beacons, but the principle is the same. Earlier in the video I mentioned barrels but didn't go into any detail. Let's take a closer look at them now. I have here a little setup to explain how barrelling fluids works. Let's say we have a situation in which we want the oil in the tank over here to be in the tank over there, but for whatever reason we don't want to just use pipes. By instead piping the oil into a regular Assembling machine, we can choose the fill crude oil barrel recipe. It takes just a fraction of a second, and uses one empty barrel and 50 crude oil to make a Crude oil barrel. Simple enough. We can then use an inserter to take the barrel out of the machine and put it on a belt, on a train, in our inventory, give it to the logistics network, or whatever we wish to do with it, as if it were any other item. It's worth noting however, that barrels, empty or otherwise, only stack to 10, so keep an eye on available space. For now, I'll just put them on a short belt here. When they get to the destination, we can place another Assembling machine, with the recipe Empty crude oil barrel, which again takes just a fraction of a second, and takes one crude oil barrel, and outputs out an empty barrel and 50 crude oil - exactly the inverse of the earlier operation, which is pretty much just what you'd expect. The assembly machine now has a fluid output indicator, so we'll connect a pipe to that, and we're done. You'll have seen there is a recipe for each different fluid, aside from Steam, which cannot be barrelled, though if you really want to move steam around the map, you can use a fluid wagon on a train. The last thing to look at is Coal liquefaction. I don't necessarily consider this to fall under the umbrella of "absolute basics", as you can quite easily complete the game without ever having looked at it, but I'll give a brief summary here for completeness. The recipe for Coal liquefaction is a little unusual. It takes in 10 Coal, 25 Heavy oil, and 50 Steam, and produces a whopping 90 Heavy oil, 20 Light oil and 10 Petroleum gas. The first thing you should notice here is that Heavy oil is both an input and an output. As it produces more heavy oil than it consumes, you can just loop the output back around into the input so it can provide its own Heavy oil supply, you just need to take care of the initial 25 Heavy oil to prime it and get it started in the first place, and do something with that net gain of 65 heavy oil and the other outputs. Steam is produced by boilers or heat exchangers, and you should already be familiar with boilers to make steam for use in steam engines to power your factory. Exactly how many boilers you'll need I'll leave as an exercise for the viewer, but as a quick hint, one boiler can turn 60 water into 60 steam every second, provided it's properly fuelled. As I said, Coal liquefaction is primarily used as a late-game method of getting extra oil products by using up spare coal left over after it is no longer needed for power production, but feel free to experiment as you wish. After all, Factorio is just as much about exploration and experimentation as it is about optimisation and design. [Drax]: That's a made-up word! [Thor]: All words are made up. This has been my latest video in a series of absolute basics for absolute beginners, where I try to explain a concept in Factorio in the simplest possible terms, but also in enough detail to actually be useful, occasionally even to seasoned players. If you have any questions, comments or corrections, please leave a comment below. If you're new to the channel, I'm primarily a solo let's player, centering mostly around factory-style games, of which Factorio is naturally the poster child. I don't have a set upload schedule per se, but I try to upload at least a few times a week. Now, I make a point of not doing this kind of thing on my other videos in this channel, but as these tutorials take far more time and effort to make than my other videos I'll grant myself an exception here and say that if you learned something, or just enjoyed the video, I would really appreciate likes, comments and new subscriptions. After all, what better cure for crippling self-doubt is there than watching a fake internet point counter tick up? If you really liked the video, you can find links in the description to my other tutorials, my Patreon, and my other youtube channel, which is entirely different to this one but I think its funny and informative. Videos on that channel take even more time and effort to make though, so you'll have to excuse the lack of much content. If it grabs a lot of attention, maybe I'll make more. That's all for now though. I hope you enjoyed the video, and I hope that Factorio is now a little more accessible to you for having watched it. In the meantime, I will say thank you very much for watching, and I will see you again soon!
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Channel: MiniBetrayal
Views: 114,715
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Keywords: MiniBetrayal, Mini Betrayal, factorio, tutorial, oil, absolulte, basics, beginner, walkthrough, example, explained, explanation, crude, heavy, light, petroleum gas, petrol, cracking, basic, advanced, plastic, chemical plant, refinery, guide
Id: oC_q9JpkNRk
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Length: 42min 54sec (2574 seconds)
Published: Thu Oct 10 2019
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