How to Hook Up an Oil Extractor to a Refinery

The physical connection takes thirty seconds. The reason your first oil setup stops working an hour later is the byproduct, and nobody warns you about it.

The connection itself

1. Place the Oil Extractor on the oil node. It draws 40 MW, so make sure power reaches the site first.
2. Run a pipe from the extractor’s output to the Refinery’s fluid input. Refineries have separate fluid and solid ports; the fluid input is the one you want.
3. Power the Refinery — 30 MW each.
4. Belt the solid output if your chosen recipe produces one, and pipe the fluid output if it produces a fluid.

That is the whole connection. If oil is not arriving, the usual causes are no power at the extractor, the pipe attached to the wrong port, or head lift — fluids do not climb for free, and even a level pipe needs about 1.3 m of lift to fill.

Rates: how many refineries per extractor

An Oil Extractor’s output depends on node purity and clock speed. Match refineries to what you actually have rather than to a number from a guide.

Both base recipes consume 30 crude oil per minute per refinery:

Recipe	Input	Output	Byproduct
Plastic	30 Crude Oil	20 Plastic	10 Heavy Oil Residue
Rubber	30 Crude Oil	20 Rubber	20 Heavy Oil Residue

So a normal-purity node feeding 120 oil/min supports four refineries. Note that Rubber produces twice the residue that Plastic does — that asymmetry matters enormously below.

The byproduct problem

This is the part that breaks first oil setups, and it breaks them quietly.

Both Plastic and Rubber emit Heavy Oil Residue. If that residue has nowhere to go, the pipe fills, the refinery cannot output, and the whole refinery stops — including its main product. Your plastic line simply stops producing, and nothing indicates why.

You have four options, in rough order of preference.

Turn it into fuel. Heavy Oil Residue converts to Fuel, which burns in Fuel-Powered Generators. This is the standard answer: the byproduct becomes your power supply, and the problem becomes an asset.

Turn it into Petroleum Coke. Useful for steel production without coal.

Make it into more plastic or rubber. Residual Plastic and Residual Rubber consume Polymer Resin rather than residue directly, so this route needs the residue converted first. Worth knowing the recipes exist; not usually the first solution.

Sink it. Route surplus residue to an AWESOME Sink. Wasteful, but it keeps the line running and it is far better than a stalled refinery. Use an Overflow Valve so residue only goes to the sink when the useful consumers are backed up.

Do not simply leave the output pipe unconnected and hope. It will fill and stall.

Balancing plastic and rubber

Because Rubber makes twice the residue of Plastic, a factory producing both at equal rates generates unequal residue. Two practical patterns:

Run more plastic than rubber if you want less residue to manage. Most factories need more plastic anyway.

Use the recycled recipes as a pressure valve. Recycled Plastic makes 60 plastic/min from rubber and fuel; Recycled Rubber does the mirror image. Running both in a loop is the classic late-game trick for converting surplus of one into the other, and it is far more ore-efficient than making either from crude.

Those recycled recipes are also worth comparing directly against the base ones on raw ore per unit — the difference is large enough to change how you plan the whole oil section.

Pipe sizing

Pipeline Mk.1 carries 300 m³/min; Mk.2 carries 600. A single Mk.1 handles ten refineries’ worth of crude at 30/min each, so pipe capacity is rarely the constraint on the input side.

The residue side is where lines get tight, because residue accumulates from many refineries into one destination. Size that run generously and put a Fluid Buffer before the consumer; residue arriving in bursts from several refineries is exactly the situation buffers exist for.

Packaging, and when not to

The Packager turns fluids into belt-able canisters at 10 MW. It is tempting as a way to avoid pipe problems entirely.

It is usually the wrong call. Packaging costs a Packager at each end plus empty canisters circulating, and it turns one pipe into a belt plus a return belt for the empties. Use it when you genuinely cannot run a pipe — crossing terrain that would need a wall of pumps — not as a default.

A setup that will not stall

The shape that works, in order:

1. Extractor on the node, power connected.
2. Pipe to a Fluid Buffer near the refinery row. This absorbs extraction fluctuations.
3. Buffer to refineries, manifold style — one pipe past the row with a junction at each.
4. Main product out on belts to wherever it is used.
5. Residue out to a dedicated line, into fuel conversion, with an Overflow Valve to a sink as the last resort.

Build step 5 at the same time as the rest. Adding it later means dismantling a stalled refinery row to get at the pipes.

Reading the refinery when something is wrong

A stalled oil section gives you three signals, and knowing which one you are looking at points straight at the cause.

The refinery shows an output blocked warning. Something downstream is full. On an oil line this is almost always the residue side, because the main product usually has somewhere to go and the residue often does not.

The refinery is idle with no warning. It is not receiving input. Check the extractor has power, then check head lift on the run between them.

The refinery cycles briefly and stops repeatedly. Input is arriving but too slowly. Either the extractor is underclocked, the node is impure, or too many refineries are sharing one supply.

That third case is the one people misdiagnose most, because the machine visibly works sometimes. If four refineries are sharing a normal-purity node, they will each run at roughly a quarter rate rather than one running and three idling — the fluid gets shared, not queued.

Scaling up later

An oil section built to the pattern above extends cleanly: add refineries to the end of the manifold, add residue capacity in step.

The thing that does not extend cleanly is the residue handling, because it grows with total refinery count rather than with the product you care about. A row that doubles from four refineries to eight doubles its residue output, and a fuel setup sized for four will back up. Size residue conversion for where the row is going, not where it is now.

Common mistakes

Leaving the residue output unconnected. The refinery stalls completely, main product included.

Assuming plastic and rubber behave the same. Rubber makes twice the residue.

Reading a “four refineries per extractor” rule without checking node purity. Impure, normal and pure nodes are very different numbers.

Packaging fluids to avoid pipes. Two Packagers plus canister logistics is usually worse than a few pumps.

Adding the residue handling later. By then the row is stalled and full.