

No matter how much heavy oil you have, you can always convert it to light oil. The basic chain of oil processing is: heavy oil -> light oil -> petrol. You don't need to predict the ratios, but know that you will need some amount of each. In late game, you need all three oil products: heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum gas. There are many ways to avoid these problems, but I argue that you only need to understand three basic points to avoid the vast majoritythat you will encounter: excess petroleum gas, excess light oil, insufficient petrol). Many issues can arise which do not have obvious causes or solutions (e.g.
#FACTORIO OIL SETUP CRACK#
Once you crack, you can't go back: only crack heavy/light oil that you don't need. I'd only put the Lubricant and oil cracking chem plants near the refineries (because they convert fluid into fluid and require no item inputs).TL DR: You need never have excess petrol, light oil, or heavy oil. This means that chem plants can be where you want them to be rather than tied into the refinery area. Use underground pipes and fluid transport becomes super easy. The most important lesson is that you can pipe fluids where they are needed. You could use it for solid fuel for your boilers/furnaces, or crack it into more petroleum gas. Light oil: You don't really care much about light oil. Just jam it into the heavy oil output of the refinery, you don't need heavy oil for anything else anyway. You can place the chem plant near the refinery. And you only need lubricant for electric engines (which will be used for bots) and express transport belts. Heavy oil: You basically need heavy oil for lubricant. Don't worry about sulfuric acid, you can just make another sulfur chem plant. You can place it close where you will make blue science. It takes in two fluid inputs which are extremely easy to pipe in from wherever. Sulfur chemical plant: This can be literally anywhere. Don't feel forced to put chem plants near refineries. You can pipe in petroleum gas from anywhere. Plastic chemical plant: Put this where it will have access to coal and/or near where plastic will be consumed. Fluids are extremely easy to transport using underground pipes. I like placing them far and out of the way of anything and roughly in the direction crude-oil is coming from. Refineries: You can place these almost anywhere. It's always better to have idle chemical plants than blocked up refineries. The one thing you absolutely don't want is for you to have more heavy or light oil than your chemical plants can process because if there's no more room for either of those, your refineries will stop making anything at all including petroleum. You don't have to worry about how that effects the ratios because the worst that happens is to have less heavy and light oil to turn into petroleum and some chemical plants stop until needed later. Use a pump to pull heavy oil for lube and light oil for rocket fuel before getting cracked. It might seem like a hassle but once you figure out that you need x heavy oil cracking and y light oil cracking chemical plants for every z refineries, it gets a lot easier. Once for advanced oil and once for liquefaction. Second, take the time to work out the ratios. Give yourself room, this is the worst place to have spaghetti if you want to easily see what you're doing. So first, go big on your oil processing area. The hardest part of using these is figuring out the ratios and giving yourself enough space to do it right. Advanced oil gives you more petroleum for the same amount of crude oil, and later coal liquefaction makes it just silly.
