Advanced Oil Processing often feels like a tombstone for the new players. It shouldn’t be. Here I explain how to easily understand and balance different oil processing outputs.
All the Basics
Well, Advanced Oil processing is not as much confusing as it is just a new concept (after producing red-green-blue science). You’ll get it, it’s not exactly rocket science.
Look at it this way:
Basic refineries take oil (and later water) and produce petroleum gas, and advanced processing also produces heavy oil + light oil. You use petroleum mostly for plastic (but also can use for some other products, for example, solid fuel and rocket fuel). Just for the start, you may have 5 to 8 refineries, you will hardly need more soon.
Then later you’ll have to do with heavy oil and light oil. And it’s easy:
- Convert as much heavy oil into lubricant as you can (and you don’t need much – one liquid tank of the buffer is usually enough, and one or two chem. Factories are usually enough for the start).
- In case you have excess heavy fuel — just check the level on the tank of heavy fuel with a wire — then you pump it to the cracking on your chemical factories and convert it into the light oil. Say, if the tank level is more than 20,000 units. You need like 5 chem. Factories for that, maybe a little more.
- As much of the light oil as you can you convert into solid fuel and rocket fuel until you top up your buffers of rocket fuel (and solid fuel if you like). That’s some big columns, depending on your needs, but probably not bigger than 15 factories each.
- Excess of light oil you control the same way as the excess of heavy oil — with a wire on the tank and a pump. If the tank is almost full you pump the light oil into another cracking column and convert it into petroleum gas. But you may like to have a bigger buffer for the light oil, maybe like 4 tanks or more — whatever suits you. I prefer to have just one. For cracking “light into petroleum” you’ll need a rather big column, say 15 factories.
- Petroleum gas, as I said, goes into plastic and sulfur. Also, in case you have excess petroleum, you may convert it into solid fuel and rocket fuel, but I really don’t need it, so I skip it. But you can have it just in case. For the plastic you’ll need somewhere around 8 factories — depends on your petroleum supply (and it will not be too big). For the sulfur probably 4 factories would be enough.
That’s it. You’ll need ~1 pipe of raw oil and ~1 pipe of water for the whole industry, maybe two. Later you will put like 4 chem. Factories to convert some of the sulfur into the sulfuric acid – I assume it’s enough to have you started. And that’s all the oil processing for you.
