help with oil cracking

[supple gale]

help with oil cracking

the pic on the right is how i would normally wire my chem plants for oil cracking. also ignore my inventory,,this mod has saved me a lot of insanity making random storage bins,,lol

[supple gale]

also i know the way im doing it is bad,,but ive tried to use circuit parts and i have no idea what to actually have them do,,or what to use

[wraith rampart]

For this application, you don’t actually need to use any of the combinators or dedicated circuit items

Just the wires from the hotbar shortcut will do

You basically want logic that dictates “if there is too much of one type of oil, crack that type”

Oh, but from the looks of things you seem to already have that down

You say you have “too much petrol”, but that’s not really a concern

That just means you have enough oil

Petrol is used a lot more than heavy and light oil, if you have enough petrol you should have enough of everything

[cyan nymph]

holy shit

it never crossed my mind to do it by comparing the amounts of each oil

[fallen arrow]

now you're thinking in circuits

[ebon siren]

Note that those compairions are prone to wasting oil products in times of shortages since they bias towards petroleum even if you need the others.

Instead I prefer to use an absolute level, such as half a tank. That way it assures a buffer of the less useful oil products while cracking the rest.

If using solid fuel for power you might find yourself running out of light oil. In this case you need to use a petroleum to solid fuel plant that turns on when petroleum is over 22k and light oil is below 2k, this would be implemented using a decider combinator. Prioritise using the petroleum solid fuel.

[glad cloud]

The majority of oil products use petroleum gas. Some light oil is used for rocket fuel, and a tiny amount of heavy oil for lube. That build is fine.

[supple gale]

i tried to do that but i can never get the balance right for them,,and something always ends up running out. it doesn't help that im constantly going back to switch out the '<' and '>' signs because my brain is dumb and cant remember the difference between greater than and less than half the time

[glad cloud]

Not sure we can help you with that

they bias towards petroleum
I read that again. That's factually wrong. The only reason PetGas keeps increasing is because Adv. Oil Processing also yields PetGas.
There should be no cracking happening whenever Light Oil < PetGas.

[neat shoal]

Another thing you can do if you dont like the comparison is set up a buffer. Basically, do what it says there, but instead of comparing heavy oil to light, compare it to a flat number like 20k. Then do the same for light oil. That way you'll always have a decent supply of non-petroleum products in case you need them

[glad cloud]

That is exactly what Dr Super Good has been suggesting.

[thick stirrup]

explain how it wastes the fluids
it just makes things more readily available by removing the forced buffers, so actually helps more in times of low oil

[fast oar]

I use deciders for keeping some buffers and cracking excess

if Heavy > 90% capacity OR Light < 10%: crack heavy
if Light > 90% capacity OR Petroleum < 10%: crack light
Usually there aren't problems with excess petroleum but in that case you could setup Petroleum -> Solid Fuel
Anyhow those numbers are approximations I last used, you will see what suits you best

[ebon siren]

All the heavy oil is cracked and/or all the light oil is cracked because the condition breaks when everything is being used.

[thick stirrup]

the conditon doesn't break, it works as expected

[ebon siren]

Yes which is bad/unwanted behaviour, or kind of broken. Example being if your base uses light oil for solid fuel for power. You might produce enough light oil for all your power needs but because of that condition prioritising petroleum it cracks all your light oil resulting in you running out of solid fuel and so running out of power because your petroleum is always 0 due to something like high plastic or sulphur usage.

If a fixed buffered amount is used as the decider for cracking, it assures that as much as needed light oil is consumed before cracking the rest.

[glad cloud]

I don't see how that condition is prioritising petgas.
If light oil is consumed, cracking of light oil is slowed down to keep the stored amount above petgas.
This works best in a steady state obv.

[thick stirrup]

if more complicated things are desired, more complicated things can be built
a buffer on its own is not very useful, it is idle material
but if one wants a buffer, they can set thresholds to try and maintain one

at that point i'd use an AND instead of replacing the condition

[ebon siren]

It works if petgas is not 0. When petgas is in a shortage situations it breaks. Yes, technically "scale up" is the solution but until then it is working wrong. This is because the condition breaks when both are hovering around 0 as individual production cycles will enable and disable the condition. Having any reasonable amount of reserve solves this since it is no longer comparing around 0.

[glad cloud]

There is no fixing starvation other than with more production.

[ebon siren]

Alternatively you can use that condition in a decider combinator and also throw in that substance being cracked is greather than 1,000 to solve the issue. Just that needs a decider combinator as opposed to only machines or pumps.

[ebon siren]

Yes but you can handle it better though, such as not prioritising petroleum over your solid fuel used to power your base.

[glad cloud]

When petgas is in a shortage situations it breaks
No it doesn't. It does exactly what it's designed to do: Make more petgas.

[thick stirrup]

also, the easier way to add a buffer while maintaining balance between fluids is just use a constant combinator

light oil(-5k) if you want a 5k buffer

[ebon siren]

That is pretty broken behaviour as the entire reason to regulate is to stop that.

[ebon siren]

I did not think of that. That would also solve the issue.