StaTech Industry Part 7

Oil and Upgrades

The goal this time is to get basic oil processing going to make upgrades. There's three subtasks - upgrade the energy network to use HV distribution, make chromium, and make upgrades.

First, making chromium. I decided that I would be getting salt water through an oil drilling rig to make brine to electrolyze, and along the way I could also upgrade my water pumps to a copper drill rig. I set up magnesium and chromium production.

Next, upgrading the network to use HV distribution - this involved a lot of time waiting for aluminum plates to process, in fact, it involved AFKing overnight, and that still wasn't quite enough. Some minor adjustments to input priorities solved this issue.

The actual upgrade process was a bit messy, but since it involved temporarily shutting down the factory. The restart wasn't going to be a full on black start, where there's no resources in the factory at all, but I did have to plan for the water mains being empty. The aluminum tank normally used as a water source in the workshop solved this issue nicely.

Last was the actual upgrade production line. While I was waiting for everything to be built, I headed into the end and killed the dragon. The fight is a lot easier with fall damage immunity, a helium flamingo for temporary flight, and serious knockback resistance from the bedrock armour.

The first machine to be upgraded was the aluminum blast furnace. While I waited for more upgrades to be produced, I went into the nether and hunted some wither skeletons. After I came back, I upgraded the bauxite electrolyzer, the steel blast furnace, and a few other machines in the motor production chain, and then I upgraded the upgrade production line. Seeing as how I was starting to run low on resources, I also upgraded the bronze and steel drill quarries.

Additionally, I made a gold drill quarry. As it happens, the gold drill quarry products aren't at all useful. This is probably going to languish unupgraded like the copper drill quarry.

Next, I looked into the simple animated guns - that, apparently, required brass, which required zinc, which required a zinc drill quarry (or I could make it manually, but zinc drills were a good source of other materials). I tooled around a bit here building a reasonably secure testing room, waiting for the factory to make some more upgrades.

As the upgrades finished construction, I decided to make some secondary production lines - notably, the tuff to carbon dust and the carbon-using processes. I then made the stainless steel ingot and kanthal ingot processing lines.

Next, I fininshed off the kanthal processing line - I needed to make annealed copper since my goal was to make distillation towers.

I next made the whole annealed copper processing line, minus the cables. This was made simpler since only annealed copper wire was relevant.

Next, after some manual crafting, I made the distillation tower controllers. The actual stainless steel for the distillation tower was taking a while to process, and I noticed that I wasn't making full use of my power plant, since the processing room and the advanced refining room were maxing out one MV network. Since I had both cupronickel and electrum cables to play with, I split both networks.

After the distillation tower components were done crafting, I set about building the actual oil refinery. This involved a lot of pipework and reactors.

Some last cleanup tasks were to setup the rubber sheet from styrene-butdiene rubber and PTFE ingot freezers, and the assemblers for stainless steel components.

Next time - the digital age, and going to space.