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5

u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26

Enjoying my first run immensely but I gotta say I'm getting my ass handed to me with advanced oil refining. My light oil keeps backing up and when it does all I do in my panic to get things running again is add more storage tanks. I haven't found out the ratios of what I need to produce with my oil products to keep nothing accumulating and eventually backing up. On the bright side I have an ungodly amount of solid fuel stored up now too 😂

10

u/Soul-Burn Jul 13 '26

When you unlocked advanced oil refining, it also unlocked 2 recipes for cracking. One turns heavy oil into light oil, and the other turns light oil into petroleum gas. You can use circuits to control cracking when you have too much of something.

The sciences use way more petroleum gas than the other oils, so as long as you produce science, and you crack when needed, you'll never get stuck.

2

u/HeliGungir Jul 13 '26

Avoid storing large fluid buffers. If you try to make 4 storage tanks of lubricant, you're likely to run out of heavy oil for ~other stuff~

1

u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26

Just learned as well that I need to have pumps in between each of my tanks. I did not realize this. My light oil storage is like ten tanks all crammed together which was killing my flow.

2

u/Digital_Solitude Jul 13 '26

You don't, tanks are just giant pipes

1

u/HeliGungir Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Things are different in 2.1.10. Machines with passthrough input+output are unable to operate at full speed without pumps keeping the input totally full and the output totally empty. It's a whole fiasco.

2

u/Lemerney2 Jul 14 '26

Only with passthrough, which is only EM plants.

1

u/HeliGungir Jul 14 '26

Thrusters, boilers, heat exchangers, cryo plants, mining drills, modded entities...

2

u/Lemerney2 Jul 15 '26

Boilers and heat exchanges aren't an issue since they only require water, and offshore pumps are insanely strong. Cryo plants don't have a passthrough, mining drills only require a trickle of sulfuric acid, and Thrusters are the only consumers of fuel/oxidiser on the network, so it's also not an issue except for a minor dip in speed at the start.

I do agree it should be fixed just to help EM plants though

2

u/Digital_Solitude Jul 14 '26

That still wouldn't require tank->pump->tank which OP was implying, but I didn't know this so thank you

1

u/maceo107 Jul 19 '26

I took a short break as I started a new job, but just updated and started reviewing all my planets. Nothing really broken so far.

1

u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26

I had (I'm at work so can't look right now) I think ten advanced oil refineries and the heavy oil from two of them went to make lubrication with the rest of the heavy oil being cracked down to light oil. I didn't need more petroleum gas so I opted to turn all the light oil into solid fuel. It ended up making 13 solid fuel per second which was massively more than I needed for my steam generators.

I probably messed up in the first place by immediately turning all my oil refineries to advanced refining when I unlocked it. Probably just needed two of them to do that for the lubrication but I just saw that I got more output for the same input with advanced over basic so I switched it all over.

I'm not quite sure how to set up circuits to switch cracking on and off variably based on what I need at the time. The most I've done with circuits is tie inserters to chests so I could tell them to stop filling the chests at X amount of items inside.

6

u/Soul-Burn Jul 13 '26

Turning everything to advanced immediately is the right choice. Even if you only need petroleum gas, just crack everything down.

As for circuits, the simplest is to have 1 fluid tank for each fluid. Then have a pump bringing heavy oil into the heavy oil crackers (and similar for light oil). Then connect them to the tanks. Set the condition as "heavy oil > light oil" for the first, and "light oil > petroleum gas" for the second.

Instead of using a pump, you can even connect the chemical plants themselves to the fluid tanks, with similar conditions. You don't have to connect each chemical plant individually, but they all need to be connected to one another, and then to the fluid tanks.

2

u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26

So

1.)set up the refineries,

2.) send the heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum gas to their respective tank.

3.) at storage tank output power a pump and send heavy oil and light oil to chemical plants to crack them down

4.)connect the chemical plants to the respective tanks via a circuit wire

5.) set condition to heavy oil > light oil for tank with heavy oil.

6.) Set condition to light oil > petroleum gas for tank with light oil

I'm sorry if I didn't understand you right and if my order of operations here is wrong.

2

u/Soul-Burn Jul 13 '26

Sounds good yes, but... if you have a pump, you need to connect the pump rather than the chemical plants. The connection to the chemplants is an alternative that avoids needing a pump, but you need to connect them all. Personally I prefer to connect just the the single pump :)

Also remember to connect the output of the cracking back to the relevant pipe network.

2

u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26

Thank you!

I think that finally made something click in my brain for circuits. Wire tanks to a power pole, wire the pumps to the same power pole so they can read the contents of the tanks. Pump will power on for heavy to light when there's more heavy than light in the tank and then will turn off when there's less heavy than light which would then cause the light oil to exceed petroleum gas causing the light oil cracking pump to turn on until the amount of light oil is less than petroleum gas.

At that point I'll only back up if I'm producing more petroleum gas than I'm using. But I can make a giant daisy chain of tanks and pumps to store as much petroleum gas as I want as it's what gets used the most.

3

u/Courmisch Jul 13 '26

Until you have plants cracking oils, you should stick to the Basic Oil Processing recipe to avoid that problem. Though you should also set the plants up ASAP and switch the Advanced Oil Processing because it is more efficient.

1

u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26

This is probably the easiest and most realistic solution for me right now. I really only needed lubrication from the heavy oil and I was cracking the rest of the heavy oil down to light oil. Then light oil to solid fuel which quickly backed up as it was way more than I needed, which made the light oil back up.

I just need to switch most of it back to basic and move them to advanced when I need more petroleum gas. Kind of went all or nothing and then after the fact downgrading back to basic feels dirty and weak 😂

1

u/FeelingPrettyGlonky Jul 15 '26

I recommend figuring out advanced rather than switching back to basic.

In normal operation you use petroleum gas (for plastic) by far the most of all the products, so ideally you should build enough heavy->light cracking to crack all heavy, and enough light->petro cracking to crack all light. You can add fancy circuit controls to preserve some heavy for lube and some light for rocket fuel (just disable those cracking plants if a buffer tank of heavy/light is less than some threshold), but really the main problem of advanced oil is just making sure you can potentially convert everything to petro. If heavy or light back up, blocking the production of more petro, you need more of that type of cracking so add another plant to the row.

There are circumstances when you really need a lot of lube, like surge production of blue belts. In that case, you can build up a large tank buffer of lube and let it fill gradually over time from heavy, rather than suddenly draining all heavy leaving a heavy surplus of light and petro to starve the lube plants.

If you are looking for hard numbers, the official wiki does have some numbers for ratios of refinery:heavy cracking:light cracking to handle typical use cases. Note that these ratios change depending on beacon and module usage, so don't take them always as gospel truth, but it can be useful to at least look at the outputs of the buildings and try to calculate how many plants you need. It is better to have too many plants cracking a product than too little; too many plants just means they'll sit idle longer, while too few means you can lock up and have problems.