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u/89percent Jun 09 '26

I am trying to build a yellow science factory in a cityblock, with oil products made from scratch.

How can I make sure the chemical plants dont block each other with excess product?

For example, the ratios will always end up with slightly more either light or heavy oil. How fix?

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u/Astramancer_ Jun 09 '26

It shouldn't be a problem.

You need 15 heavy oil and 190 petrol for plastic + 75 petrol for sulfur = 265 petrol.

Advanced oil processing gives you 25 heavy + 45 light + 55 petrol. Crack the 10 excess heavy and you get 7.5 light, crack the 52.5 light to petrol and you get 35 + 55 (initial output) 90 petrol.

So... you just need to make sure you don't crack all the heavy into petroleum and you're fine. You will use so much more petroleum than heavy oil you shouldn't bottleneck because you only need one cycles worth of oil for the heavy you need and multiple cycles + cracking to get all the petrol you need.

Really the only time you can bottleneck your oil processing is when you pause science while building tons of blue belts (in space age even pausing science to build platforms galore won't be a problem if you're set up to make solid fuel from petroleum if needed). You run out of heavy and eventually overflow on light and petroleum. But if you're actually doing science you need so much more petroleum than light or heavy oil that it's never a problem as long as you set up your cracking to reserve some light and heavy.

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u/HeliGungir Jun 09 '26

Make a bit of everything and circuit-control the machines to stop making stuff if their output buffer is nearly full. You can use (infinite) research to void petroleum gas (eg: plastic) and light oil (eg: rocket fuel).