Factorio Tutorials: Setting up Oil Refining: Basic & Advanced 

The current ratio of Oil Refineries to Heavy Oil -> Light Oil Cracking to Light Oil -> Petroleum Cracking is 25:3:21, (or 8:1:7 for smaller arrays). In the combinators, you'll want to use a value of 1,000, (instead of 100), for the current version.

Jesus wept! I'm a Factorio beginner and largely ignored networks, as well as pumps and combinators. And after seeing this, I feel like a caveman who just discovered the stone wheel and 10 minutes later saw a sports car. Thank you for this tutorial!

There should be more teachers in the world like you , your manner and tone are excellent. Your students are lucky to have you.

I have tried watching several posters who think they can produce tutorials, and I must say, you have the concept down pat. Love how you progress through your explanation. Also, you obey a cardinal rule which is always show what you are doing slow enough so the viewer can follow what you are selecting and where you are placing things. You also explain what NOT to do, which is vital. Keep doing this type of video. Your help is badly needed. Also, your voice is lovely and you don't put annoying music or other background sound into your video - THANK YOU! AND - you don't just assume the viewer knows how to do anything. Great point to remember. I really enjoy your tutorials. I subbed your YT channel so I could watch all your vids over and over if need be.

Jesus Christ! I'm a Factorio beginner and struggled a lot with oil refineries. But this was before ! Thousands of huge thanks for this tutorial! You're super clear, the tone and voice are perfect, even for foreigners! Thanks thanks thanks!

Nice detailed tutorial, like it a lot. As an alternative, lately I've been using power switches instead of pumps to turn the cracking plants on and off, mostly because power switches can be crafted for cheap and pumps need electric engines, which I don't build until after my cracking is done usually. It also saves the drain from an idle machine attached to the power grid.

Thanks for the guide I was struggling a lot, just started playing factorio and it’s cool you’re still making updates to your 5 year old video😊

OH my God! the best tutorial on this game so far and I have seen many! this is well explained amazing!!! actually one of the best tutorial I ever seen!!! in any game! no words to describe you are amazing!!!

btw around the 29:00 I finally understood how combinators work :) good explanation

I love how you plan everything in your base, and the pipe management is absolutely amazing :D Thanks for teaching me how to do proper oil refining.

Shit, I've been playing for years and I still learned a few things. Articulate and knowledgeable tutorial. Subscribed

I have 100 hours in this game just messing around. I thought I was getting an idea of how the game works. I watched this video and I feel like a total newbie again. Good lord, so much stuff to learn, and such a great tutorial. The content in this video could have taken up 5 videos at least.

your Factorio tutorials are just pure gold! Thanks for your tremendous work and solving out many spaghetti issues :)

This video is brilliant! Has all the information, explains what you need to do, shows examples of how you could do it, and ways to implement circuitry and other stuff! 7 years old, still the best video i could find after a while of confusion, that is a sub

extra thanks for putting the playlist link in the description and saving people a few more actions. truly the spirit of efficiency lies within you.

Youuuuuu.... are an artist, and this game is your canvas.

Factorio really brings out the logical side of people, made me look at everyday problems from a different perspective. Thanks for the tutorial solved my problems!

I just found this video. I have been search for a while for a decent oil setup video and this is the best one by far. Even though it is from a couple versions ago, it still seemed to work. This was the first time I am satisfied by the way I have my oil set up after abandoning 8 previous starts. It was always the oil that made me give up each time. Thank you!

Pretty cool conection of the pipes with the refinery helps to make the setup more expansive using blueprints later too.

you are the jesus of factorio, because you keep saving everyone

I stood through every aspect of the game alone without any tutorials and still, after 575 hours ingame, I like to improve on my own behalf, finding out new ways of setting things up myself (figured out logic circuits after 300h and train signals after 400h, but my factories are really advanced, and are only getting smarter now). I wouldn't want to change that, but the oil process was really tedious. This tutorial might just be what a newcomer to factorio needs.

I came across your channel last night, and I'm loving your tutorial videos. Thank you! Oil always gives me a headache, but now I feel like I can move on and let other things give me headaches instead :D

One of the better Factorio channels I've seen. I thought I had this game handled. Then I realized I need to start making red chips, which means I need to make plastic, which means I need to even start doing fluid works, which means I want to cry. This video is the tissue to dry my eyes. I hope.

I have only been playing the game a few weeks and stumbled onto this tutorial, which i have to say all of the tutorials you have made are well thought out extremely insightful and very helpful. I really do like the layout you have made not just for the oil refineries but i love the design you made for the belts/splitters/underground belts plus the inserter's, very compact and wonderful design thank you for you help so far and for your support i'll have in the future from you other tutorials.

Thank you very much for this tutorial. I built this set up in my world (0.17) and never had to touch it again. I launched a rocket for the first time and wouldn't have succeeded without the excellent plastic production from this build.

Thank you so much. I was so much in the dark about oil and how to set up everything properly. Then you gave me a match (liquid bus), a flash light (area design) and a fu**ing sun (pumps and logic network). Thanks.

Hello KatherineOfSky Thanks for this great tutorial. I learned quite a lot today from you, not only how to Setup a better oil production, but how to use those combinators too. I always wondered hoe they work, but i was lazy to search for it, but now i know how it works :).Btw. you have a nice and clear voice. I had no issues to understand you, even as a foreigner.

These are genuinely some of the best (if not THE best) tutorials I have ever seen, thanks!

I'm new to Factorio. I bought it just a few days ago. Seeing you so effortlessly build this was awesome! haha.

Holy shit. When I saw this is going to be a 39 minutes video I said to myself "Look at the first 3 minutes, then randomly click forward to a few sections." but now I'm sitting here after watching the whole video in one run without DARING to move my mouse anywhere as it was just fascinating. Thumbs up!

Hi Katherine. As a new player - thanks so much for these tutorials. Absolute sanity savers. Easily understood, caters to all factorio types (including newbies like me who have never seen a storage tank let alone built one) and never a wasted moment throughout the video. Just awesome.

I started watching your videos yesterday, and I totally regret not starting before, this is some good videos you got.

After many years, I am returned to learn from one of the best.

Really good tutorial, I think a lot of the fun of Factorio is figuring stuff out yourself but it's not as user friendly as one might hope, so this tutorial will really help me clean up the mess that is my oil/chemical production. Thanks for making it.

This game blows my mind more and more the more I look into it.

I've been using a mod that allows me to set what specific product I want from a refinery because oil setups are way frustrating. After watching this tutorial, I'm willing to try the normal way again. Ty so much for this!

Picked up facotio recently and found this tutorial to be very helpful in an area I was having difficulty with. thanks a bunch

making orderly refinery was one of my biggest issues playing this game and after watching this it makes me feel a little dumb for how easily you put them in order. Thank you very much for the help! looking forward to more videos from you.

21:22 OMG THANK YOU. I always used filter inserters for this but this is wayyyyy more efficient. THANK YOU!

Thank you for the video, the light oil cracking is a fantastic way to set it up, I adopted that for my own factories.

I come back to this video on every new save. Hard to believe it's 7 years old now.

It´s so satisfying seeing you bild this because the spacing fits so perfect

coming back to factorio, it's all so complicated! You've made everything so straightforward and I wish I didn't have to use tutorials but its no issue when I get to hear about your cats and their antics, Cheers KoS!!!

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to make this :) helpful beyond measure.

You're my hero, was feeling a little intimidated by the step up to oil but you explained it all very well and gave great layouts! Many thank you's ^_^

Very long video for what I wanted, but it was very detailed, and I also learned about circuit usage as well. So great video thank you. I learned a lot of tricks I will be attempting to elaborate on to fit my play style.

Pedantically, it's slightly better to set the Pump condition to: Work IF [Blue Square] > 1, instead of to = 2, because you might accidentally, perhaps tens of hours later, add more [Blue Square] value to your base-wide Red Wire for another purpose entirely, having forgotten about your earlier usage. Either way, it'll screw things up, but > 1 will do somewhat less harm. Also consider multi-player. Ideally everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and all keep track of which signals are already being used. However, some multiplayer games take place in the real world, rather than in an ideal world.

Just started with the game and in searching out tutorials on youtube I have found yours to be the best of the lot. Excellent job.

this was SO. EXTREMELY. USEFUL. thank you so much for making this video. Explained like no other factorio tutorials around. Very didactic and entertaining, learnt heaps of new things. Will most likely browse your channel for further help. KUDOS!!! sub and like

Thank you KatheineOfSky for pointing me to your tutorial here. I don't want another long game to be ruined because I fumbled my Oil set up ;)

This is a super helpful video. I've been on RU-vid for hours looking for how to set this up and nothing was working until I found your video. Many thanks! Also it's great to see a woman making a tutorial on a video game, I love to see it! Great job and thanks for doing what you're doing.

I was having my big fat brain out the other day and did some calculation. I was thinking... in there must be somewhere. So i check out... What is the fastest producing unit of anything. Sulfuric acid. So i calculated would the power draw increase or decrease if i put production (3) modules in the sulfuric acid production. And the break point was actually as high as 0.6 average oil drils. For Sulfur and Plastic production (they are very similar) it was somewhere in the 0.3 region. For refining and cracking (about the same for all) it was in the 0.15 or something region. And that punpjacks all with out speed modules. So actually having production modules in the oil industry actually reduces the power constraints in total. Also intresting. Production-modules makes everything slower, so one might imagine that one would need more refinearies and so on. Productivity 3 with 2 modules give a net speed reduction of 10%. So if one have the acid production it will produce 10% less. But the sulfur production will produce 10% less, but throw the end production (via the acid plant) be 20% more productive, that makes it a net effect that the end result is actually 10% more production. For the Refining the and cracking the plants will produce about 10% less, but that is on the productivity of both acid and sulfur production the net result is actually 30% more. So one can actually cut down on the number of refining and cracking plants, and still produce more acid. Actually cuting down from 4 refining plats to 3 with productivitymodules will produce a tad more accid. For plastic the result is about the same, but the difference is just 10% in this level. The reason it works is because one will probably never use efficiency modules at the oil plant. For green circut it really don´t give the same kind of result. Even thow the green circut have high trhowput, if one use efficiency modules at the smelters and miners the reduced power is very little. But for blue circut it actually do make sence. Its souch a huge amount of components going into them, Even tho the time is quite long. The time for the prior production is a bit longer. The diffrance needs to be greater than 1:3 to get a gain. For blue circuts its 15:48, that is 1:3.1 (of cause with no efficiency modules). but ad smelting, acid and plastic to that, the diffrance is more like 1:6 or something like that.

Katherine, thank you for making these videos. And for your guide on Steam. Great info and nicely presented. I only have ~80hrs in game (haven't even made blue science packs yet, yikes), and this info will definitely help me for the next 80+! You rock! :)

I was genuinely stuck with oil processing, this is a great and simple explanation of the entire thing, thanks!

min 21:46 its the moment i said im such a noob look at what she build and i barely got turrets and i was feeling proud of myself ! you got a new sub.

i like that you go step by step and you go slow so it is easy to follow and even beginners can learn i do know a fair amount but oil was always a tricky one

I'm a newbie. I come here for tips about oil refining, and i also learned how to use combinators :) Very good tutorial, thank you

the best explanation of oil processing for factorio I have seen, wish I had seen this earlier

This hurts my head... not gonna lie. I'm still so new to this game that I'm overwhelmed. BUT I'LL FIGURE IT OUT! I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this video multiple times. Thanks for this!

Thanks, this will help, my group is very new to factorio, we are just now getting to the age where we need oil(oil>batteries>blue potion) and oil is by far the hardest thing we've run into

I love your tutorials, they are easy to understand. I think it may be harder to follow what you are doing if we have not tempered with oil and understood it at the basic point; in which case I did. Thank you.

Goodness gracious. I just made my first pumpjack and refinery and was very confused about what was going on, so I came to look up some videos on the topic. You seem to have incredible knowledge of the game and go really in depth about it, but a ton of the things you talked about in this video are things I haven't gotten to yet (researched, but not tried). Trains? Circuit networks? Tanks? This is getting over my head really quickly! All I wanted to know was how to get something out of a pumpjack turned into a useful product, but it looks like I have a ton of stuff still to learn before I can do that.

You are a Factorio God! I bow to your skills!

You're just a marvel of engineering. I came here to learn how oil goes from crude to product, and now my head hurts lol

You answered every question I had! After getting my answers i kinda just kept watching. Your Voice is very calming. Greetings from switzerland :)

Brilliant tutorial, probably the best I've ever seen! I finally understand how the circuit connections work, and how to actually use a main bus for oil!

I, personally, prefer to adhere to KISS principle and keep cracking locked to the "is there more of crackable oil than the oil I can get in result?" condition. Works for me. I was quite fascinated, however, by the placement and the 100 units condition, since I didn't know those. Anyway, thatnk you for the tutorial and that wonderful Steam guide that introduced the whole idea of main bus to me.

There's so much more in this guide than just oil refining! I learned a lot thank you. I had to adjust the numbers slightly due to some updates by the looks of it but I got the combinators working as you described.

Katherine, your layouts are wonderful and have given me some ideas for my next map :) I love the term "bus" which is very apt; and also loved how you interleaved joined your pipes coming out of the factories. Happy New Year!

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, the hours I have just wasted watching videos and trawling the web for a “simple” tutorial you would not believe, I appreciate the other content creators but sometimes my simple brain just doesn’t understand them.

11:57 The 1 reason i came to look this up

23:40 the sulfuric acid line did not get connected to your base with pipe-to-ground. On a serious note, I've been following this step-by-step, and I sincerely appreciate you sharing your approach. I'm decent with busses for materials, but when it comes to oil, it normally ends up looking like a hot mess! Thank you for helping me!

Such a pleasure to watch! Am almost tempted to go home (am at work now) just to play this! hahahha

SUPER tutorial! Thank you so much for walking through it step by step and explaining not only the process but the thinking behind it!

This is still the best factorio tutorial channel even now!👍👍

Fantastic tutorial, easy to follow, very nice tips, lot of things started to make sense after viewing this. I managed to build this setup step by step, with pausing the video of course, since I am way slower then Katherine :)

I just discovered this game 2 days ago and... jesus.... there's so much things to get done but don't know how or why and this video is the answer to almost everything. Thank YOU!!!

21:40. *I have a wall. I have a big wall around my whole base* Katherine for PRESIDENT! Make the base great again!

You describe everything so well and its very easy to follow. Love this!!!

finally good tutorial. lots of details :) respect ^^ keep up the good work :D

Thanks! You're quite thorough, and you explain the steps well.

This is a great tutorial. You speak on a good level en good tone and you actually explain very well what you're doing and why you're doing stuff. Very helpfull! And on a side note, you've a nice voice ^^ You got a sub from me :)

Oh my Goodness, I'm just discovered your Channel today. Your tutorials are really good. Your way, the speed, the voice, perfect 10/10. For sure I'm a new subscriber of your channel.

Watching factorio tutorials makes me think, that my lifetime won't be enough to master this game :D

Really enjoyed this video. Would love a tutorial of how you get your buses all set up. Thanks a bunch

i still come here when ever im building an oil setup

One thing i noticed, is the lack of small pumps, small pumps are the best way to move fluids to/from storage tanks and keep the line charged as max as possible and storage tanks as empty as possible. Also if you put small pumps between multiple storage tanks all pumping to the last tank that tank will be filled first rather then all fill roughly at the same time. Making a true "buffer" that will empty down to 0 instead of sitting at around 100 and a line charge of < 0.1 taking forever for items to get enough fluids to make products

Excellent!! Very clear and easily understandable. You covered several difficult topics, and really made it easy to grasp. Thank you, you have earned another sub!

Wow, lot of good information here that I'll be putting to use when I get home. Thanks!

OMG, I always hated oil production, now I love both you and it ;) Thank you so much for this amazing tutorial!

I appreciate the quality and information you give. Honestly, best Factorio tutorials. I know its been a while, but do you have a video explaining lane balancing and the different types. I'm watching your Megabase vids but can't remember exactly when and where you discuss them. I think you even had a 3 to 6 lane balancing. Only if you have one already or some other reference that you use. Not just blue prints lol. I want to understand them. When to use, when to care. Anyway, thanks for the vids!

Really helpful! Pleasant to listen to while playing as well :)

Just found your channel. This guide is well thought out, easy to grasp, and thorough. Thank you for it.

A bit late on the video but... that was amazing, just started playing factorio now and your videos are an excellent source of information and learning knowledge, thank you for your time and congratulations, you made a product you should be proud of.

Your videos are amazing and well explained!! It helps a lot for me as a beginner... 💓

This was very informative and easy to follow. Thanks so much! I will be checking out your other videos soon.

fml wish i saw this before i built my crappy oil industry, i got to tear alot of stuff down and rebuild, best tutorial ever thank you.

just subscribed because your commentary is amazing and your designs are the best ive seen

Great tutorial, you really know how to learn people stuff.

This was very informative, thanks muchly for making. Even though I have played Factorio for over 150 hours I still need to learn more.