Oil Processing Simplification and Blue Science Changes
I've been refraining from writing another guide post about science packs, while the discussions about changing some of the recipies in recent Friday Facts were still ongoing. But as of now, the only change is to chemical science, which I already did anyway. So here's an explanation of the changes as well as a quick update to the blue science guide from last time. Afterwards I'll get to work on the remaining two science packs, when I can.
The changes described here are already live in the most recent update to the experimental and include changes to oil refining and chemical science. As discussed in the recent Friday Facts, these changes are meant to make it easier for new players to get into chemical processing. For this, the basic oil processing was greatly simplyfied. Instead of crafting each type of oil and having to balance those, the basic processing now produces exclusively pertoleum gas.
Unlike previously, the basic processing no longer takes crude oil in both inputs. The inputs are now dedicated to only one type of input, so you no longer have to remember which one is for water if you want to make switching over to advanced oil processing easier. This will also avoid the problem of changing the recipe the refineries are set to, which previously caused the new "can't mix two fluids" warning if there were still refineries with the basic recipe in the pipe network.
The other two liquids often seemed much less useful to new players. You're just going to put all heavy oil into making lube and then crack everything down into petroleum, once you get advanced processing. The new update changed some things to improve this. I already talked about the previous change to requiring solid fuel in blue science and even praised it for making your first chemical build more straightforward, since you could now make plastic from petroleum and put everything else into crafting solid fuel. At least until you get advanced oil processing.
Now it is even more simple. Since you only get petroleum out of the basic processing, you can then craft plastic and sulphur from it without having to worry about any of the other liquids. The first still goes into making red chips, while the latter replaced solid fuel as an ingredient in chemical science packs.
Only after you unlock new research using your first couple of blue science packs will you get the other types of chemicals. Heavy oil still goes mainly into making lube, while light oil is now an ingredient in rocket fuel. So aside from that, you can still use it mostly for cracking into petroleum or use it for making solid fuel.
The only downside to this is, that it doesn't incentivise crafting solid fuel early on, like the previous recipe change did. You still need it for rocket fuel of course. But having blue science require solid fuel was a nice mid-game incentive to make lots of it and use it for your steam engines, trains or even your furnace lines. Now it's been relegated to "that intermediate product you need for rocket fuel" again.
Since rocket fuel now also requires light oil, this means a new liquid that needs to be piped down the main bus for those of us who build using that principle. I usually don't put all the liquids on the bus, only lubricant and sulphuric acid, since those are needed in more advanced recipes. I keep the other chemicals in their dedicated oil processing area and do most of the crafts there.
With these changes an early blue science build could look something like this.
I chose to make sulphur locally since it crafts pretty quickly and you don't need a lot of it. So no need to go overboard with chem plants for now. And making them in a dedicated area and putting sulphur on the bus doesn't seem worth it due to the low demand and not being needed in any other recipe (besides for making acid). That's up to you though
Now that the blue science changes are hopefully final and won't be changed again in the foreseeable future, purple science is up next!
Below the cut is the revised chemical science pack build.
Assuming you have build military science, the chemical science pack is the fourth one you will have to build. So you're probably thinking you've got this! But if you look at the ingredients for blue science, you'll notice some new icons you haven't seen before. As the name implies, this science pack requires you to get into processing chemicals!
Anything involving liquids is admittedly a little different from the game mechanics you'll have encountered so far. And based on all the cries for help- I mean forum posts, lots of people struggle with it at first. I know I did! So I will probably make a more detailed post about the way oil processing works in the game, but for now I just want to give you all you need to get started on blue science.
When you look at the recipe for blue science, the easiest ingredient is engines. These are pretty trivial to make. Just a normal assembly machine, getting all the ingredients in and that's it. They have a pretty long crafting time, so you should build a lot of assemblies to get a regular supply of them. Then you need to belt in gears and pipe (either made locally or on the bus, depending on your preferences) as well as steel. At this point in the game, that last one might be a bit of a bottleneck, so this is the perfect opportunity to scale up your steel production.
Once you've done this, you'll need advanced circuits, which require plastic, as well as solid fuel. This is where you'll have to start getting into fluids. A little trial and error will usually lead you to successfully using pumpjacks to produce the raw, crude oil. Unlike ore patches oil is infinite (there is a little more to it, but we can ignore all that for now), so just build enough pumpjacks for all the spots in a nearby oilfield and forget about them. Afterwards you can pipe the crude oil into a refinery and this is where it can start to get tricky.
There is a new feature in 0.17 that prohibits fluid mixing, so you can't actually make any really big mistakes anymore. Just know that each type of fluid should go in its own line of pipes and that if ONE of the fluids is backed up, the whole refinery will not work anymore. Because each crafting cycle produces all three types of liquid. Meaning that if you're not consuming one type of liquid at all, all three of them will eventually get stuck. Below is a very common layout for piping the three dirrefent fluid in a compact way that doesn’t mix any of them.
The problem of refineries getting stuck because one liquid is backed up has actually been alleviated by the recipe changes in the 0.17 update, due to the introduction of solid fuel as an ingredient for blue science. It used to be you just needed lot's of petroleum for making plastic and the other types of fluid where kind of just sitting there until you unlock more tech that makes them more useful later on. So you would build fluid tank after fluid tank whenever they backed up and your refining stopped.
With the new recipes you still need petroleum for plastic, but since any of the three basic types of fluid can be made into solid fuel, you can just turn all of the the other two into that and they won't back up! Now the only thing missing is some coal for the plastic production and you have all you need for blue science.
A very basic oil processing build for getting the plastic you need for red chips and the solid fuel for science could look something like this:
Side note: solid fuel also works as a great source of, well fuel. It works for both smelting and steam power generation. So you can use a splitter with output priority towards you science and any overproduction of solid fuel can go into power or smelting to save you some coal! Just make sure the coal line you're merging the solid fuel into doesn't also go into e.g. plastic, grenades or other things requiring coal specifically.
With the oil processing set up and operational, you can just belt the solid fuel and the red chips (once you've got the plastic I'm assuming you can take it from here) into your blue science assembly and you're good to go!
I already explained how to get the ratios for a science build in the last post, so I'm not going into the details of that for this build. If you want to, you can use my blueprint for a simple oil processing build that'll at least get you as far as blue science or the science build itself, there is a blueprint string after the cut.
Blueprint book with basic oil processing and blue science build:
