Quick Links
So, you’ve landed on the alien planet of Factorio. You’ve got smelting set up, you’ve dabbled in laboratory research, and you maybe even have some trains running. But now, you’ve come to a roadblock — you need oil for the Chemical Science Packs, cars, and almost everything else you want to be doing next. Where do you get started?
Related
Factorio: How To Build And Use A Main Bus
Here’s how to set up and use a main bus base design in Factorio.
Here we will cover where you can find oil, how you can extract it, and what is the most optimal way to process it. Also, you’ll find some more advanced setups for late-game factories that can complete these ratios perfectly. Let’s dive in.
Where To Find Oil
Oil can be found all around the map, though it frequently spawns far from where your spaceship crashed. On the map, it appears as pink squares, and hovering over them reveals that they are what’s called “Crude oil”, with a certain combined yield.
The combined yield here tells you how much oil you can extract per second, with the calculation being: 100 percent yield = ten crude oil per second, 200 percent yield = 20 crude oil per second, and so on.
Each pink square on the map represents an oil tile, meaning you can put pumpjacks on it.
To extract oil and turn it into something useful, you’re going to need pumpjacks. Every oil tile can only have one pumpjack, and there are no other ways to extract oil other than using those.
Once the pumpjack is placed, it will start outputting as much oil as the yield of the tile is, plus any modules that you put in it and any “Mining productivity” research you’ve done beforehand.
You can put a pumpjack on every oil tile, and they will automatically start outputting oil into any pipe connected to their outputs as long as there is power.
When you’re done doing this, it’s not a bad idea to put a storage tank or two at the end, so that the oil can accumulate for future processing.
How To Refine Oil
Alright, so now that you’ve got oil, it’s time to refine it into something useful. This will be done by using oil refineries.
As every map generates content differently, now is the time to decide where this refining and processing will be done: at the oil spot, or back at your factory.
If you choose the first option, the oil refinery part of your factory will become its own excluded system, outputting only the items required for research.
If you choose the latter option, however, you’ll need to deliver the raw oil to the factory and then refine it from there, but you won’t need a lot of planning in advance.
In both cases, you’ll need defenses and either a line of belts or pipes leading to your factory, or, more preferably, a train that can deliver large quantities of items or fluids at a time for cheap.
No matter which one you decide on, there are two ways to process oil:
- Basic oil processing, which you unlock when you first mine oil, and
- Advanced oil processing, which requires further research using chemical science packs.
How To Make A Basic Oil Processing Setup
The raw oil must be first inputted to an oil refinery. In the oil refinery menu, select “Basic oil processing”, and the machine will be ready to take in fluids.
Enable Alt-mode to see which port in the refinery takes in the oil. If the refinery requests oil in an inconvenient port, you can flip it — check the in-game settings to see the shortcut to do so.
The process takes in 100 crude oil to convert into 45 petroleum gas, and takes five seconds to complete. Then, this machine takes 20 oil and outputs nine petroleum, so take a look across your pumpjacks and add up the amount of oil they all output per second to see how many refineries you’re going to need.
If, for example, you’re making 100 oil per second, you’ll need five refineries to process all of it.
Always try to produce more oil than you’re converting into petroleum. If you’re making 123 oil per second, for example, don’t use seven refineries to refine it all, and use six instead to refine 120 oil per second, leaving the remainder to be stored in a buffer storage tank. That extra oil will come in handy if you ever want to make some flamethrower ammo, as it’s the only recipe in the game other than oil barrels that specifically requires crude oil in the recipe.
Once you’ve got the setup running, you can take all the petroleum from the refineries and send it forward into chemical plants.
Chemical plants are the main assembling machines for this operation, as these are the machines that make items that can be put on belts. Petroleum gas can be transformed into plastic and sulfur from here, to be used in future recipes.
Keep note of how much each chemical plant takes in, so that you don’t end up making less petroleum than you need.
Related
Factorio: How To Build A Smelting Setup
Here’s how to set up an efficient, beginner-friendly Smelter array in Factorio.
How To Make An Advanced Oil Processing Setup
Shortly after you’ve made the basic oil processing setup, you will research the far superior advanced oil processing option for oil refineries.
This setup is more complicated, but will create more materials for the same amount of oil provided.
Advanced oil processing has the following recipe with a five-second crafting time: 50 Water and 100 Crude oil → 25 Heavy oil, 45 Light oil, and 55 Petroleum gas.
As you can see, there are now more products than just petroleum — this is a problem, because the whole system will clog up if we don’t store or use up every product created.
Thankfully, there is an optimal solution, but it requires a very specific setup.
Beginner Setup
If you want to have any light and heavy oil for future use, you can simply supply the water with an offshore pump and use a similar layout you used in the basic oil processing setup, except they’ll each need to be separated by one tile.
Pipes cannot be connected if they house different fluids, so you’ll need to experiment with underground pipes to find the optimal layout for your factory, as those can be placed next to one another without the fluids interacting.
Then, once you have each of these placed down, the outputs can be sorted into three lanes connected into storage tank buffers at the end.
As it still takes 20 oil per second, you can simply change the old recipe for the new one, rework the pipes, and voilà! Now you have both light and heavy oil to use as you please.
This setup will stop working from time to time. This is because the storage tanks will fill up with one of the three products, in which case you’ll either have to take out the storage tank that’s full and place it down again to have it empty — or simply place more storage tanks in the sequence.
Optimal Setup
Getting more into the math side of things, we can see that we are making five heavy oil per second and nine light oil per second.
In chemical plants, researching advanced oil processing also unlocks the option of cracking down oils into petroleum with water.
If we ever have an excess of a certain product, we can turn it into petroleum, which will almost always be used up — and if it isn’t, the oil process will just resume when storage isn’t full.
For this following setup, you can process up to 400 oil per second, in which case you can set up a train system that will deliver the oil back to your factory from an oil spot somewhere in the world.
This setup includes the following:
- 20 oil refineries.
- Five chemical plants cracking heavy oil to light oil.
- 17 more chemical plants cracking light oil to petroleum gas.
The inputs are on the left, being crude oil and water, and they both get sent down the lane of oil refineries. These can be flipped, allowing the products to all be shipped in three lanes of pipes.
We can add buffer tanks on the right, so we can store some of the products for later use, and we can use a green wire to connect tanks with pumps that will only allow the liquid to be pumped if the tanks are almost full.
Then, these three get sent to the chemical plants, where we can put a lane of water that will let us crack heavy oil down into light oil, and following that, crack down the light oil into petroleum.
The ratio here is key, as these refineries will be perfectly supplying these chemical plants, up to the point where we’re making a lot more than 400 oil per second, in which case this setup can be copy-pasted to another location.
If this sounds intimidating to build, don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with the blueprint for the optimal setup, which you can insert into your game by pressing the “import string” button on your hotbar, and then copy-pasting this text:
Next
Factorio: How To Make A Belt Balancer
Here’s how to balance your Belts for peak efficiency in Factorio.