Oil

Oil is an incredibly important resource in GT. It serves two main purposes. One being power generation, while the other is material production. Looking through NEI can be a bit jarring, especially once you hit the cracked fuels. This guide will aim to break down the general concepts, and serve oil usage to you in a much more palatable way.

Power production
Power can be the first thing you use oil for. It can serve as your main generation starting in LV, and going as far as fusion (LuV) if you wish. It is incredibly strong, and arguably the single best fuel source for the early game. There's a lot of options, and a lot of discussion on the which is the best, but this can be a bit deceiving. At the moment it seems as though these are the best options for power.

Oil generation
Despite these being the simplest fuels, they still have a ton of routes of production. First you are going to need the oil itself. The best methods are pretty simple but do change with tier. In LV the best option is to find a buildcraft oil spout. These generate randomly in the world, and you should be able to find one somewhat close to your base. They will poke out of the ground and very obviously be oil. If you place an LV pump on this oil, you can pump it and pipe it to your machines.

Once you reach MV, you have the option of building the multiblock oil drilling rig. This is a beast of a multi, and can serve as your oil generation until the end of time. The downside of this machine is finding oil, but it is well worth it. If you are curious about this mechanic, I would recommend reading this page here. Normal oil is the best option to make LF and diesel. Being 1:1 oil to LF helps a lot, and the heavy fuel output is pretty much in line with the diesel ratio.

Fuel production
Equipped with your oil source, it's time to starting making fuel. In LV you can't make diesel yet, so the best option is light fuel. The best route should be using a distillery to turn oil into sulfuric light fuel, then combining it with H2 in a chemical reactor for light fuel. Generally these steps don't use much H2, so an electrolyzer with water will be able to keep up.

Once you reach MV, it's diesel time. Simply making more distilleries to distill oil into sulfuric heavy fuel, and making an MV mixer will boost your power generated by a lot. The ratio is generally 3 LF distilleries to 2 HF distilleries.

From here, you have many options. There are other fuels, like cetane boosted diesel, or high octane gasoline. It seems that at the moment however, diesel is the best fuel that exists. Despite having a lower energy density, the production is so simple and scalable that it blows the others out of the water. Generally the scaling for diesel involves many lower tier parallel distilleries and eventually using a PA for them. You can swap out single block chem reactors for an LCR in HV which makes that step a little simpler as a single LCR is usually more than enough. Tiering up your drilling rig is a huge help, as each tier will 4x the lifespan of your oil vein. This is vital as you progress, as diesel only has a singular downside. This downside being the oil usage. You most likely will not be able to scale diesel with an oil source other than a drilling rig, however these rigs can carry you very far.

The is one main rule when using diesel power, and it is to keep it simple. Diesel benefits from its scalability, something that other fuels lack. Multiblocks like the distillation tower, or alternative distillation routes with crackers generally just slow things down. Avoiding the distillation tower might seem wrong as it is generally so much better than singleblock distilleries, but that is not true with diesel. The math behind it is pretty simple, and intuitive once you understand it. The DT recipe for oil is the same speed as using an MV singleblock, however it gives all byproducts. That said, you only really want light fuel, and heavy fuel, so you can more or less say it is just 2x better than a singleblock. This is awful when you think about it, as two singleblocks will always be a lot cheaper and easier to use than a distillation tower. Especially when diesel setups can use dozens to hundreds of singleblocks. What is easier, 32 HV distilleries, or 16 Distillation towers?

This spreadsheet can help a bit in understanding your setup. It will give you some machine quantities and power output based on how many drilling rigs you want to make.

Material Generation
Compared to power generation, this can get a lot more complex. Here you might actually want to crack your fuels, and use distillation towers to increase yield. The good news is that at least until UV, this setup can be very slow and unoptimized. A simple HV setup will last you a very long time if you understand the basics. Primarily this comes down to cracking routes.

When cracking fuels, you have 2 main options, broken into 3 levels. Hydro cracking with hydrogen, and steam cracking with steam. *Usually* steam cracked fuels are good for material production, while hydrocracked fuels give lots of methane and fluids for power generation. Here it's a good idea to look through the options for each fuel, and pick which you need. However you can get by with simply severly steam cracking LF/HF/Naphtha and throwing them in a distillation tower. Besides some inputs from charcoal distillation, that will cover all your needs for a very long time.