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!
