The Youtuber who goes by “TotalXclipse” posted a useful video recently about how to get 4x the generators out of a given amount of Crude Oil compared to using default recipes. Which is to say, normally your 300m3/min extracted oil ends up powering 10 Fuel-powered Generators. By adding a fair chunk of additional hardware (and unlocking two key alternate recipes) you can get that headcount up to 40 instead.

So after years of playing this game and knowing that “everyone says” the Diluted Packaged Fuel alternate recipe is the key to great power (great responsibility is optional) and armed with a fresh how-to, I decided to give it a try.

This process requires a few key prerequisites, of course. Not only must you be in Phase 3 (thus having access to petroleum products at all) but you absolutely want to work up to having Mk2 pipes. It’s not impossible to do with Mk1 pipes but there would be a great deal more subdivision of machinery involved and the pipe logistics would be an absolute headache. (Okay… more of a headache.) Trust me, just unlock the Mk2 pipes milestone. Grab the Fluid Packaging milestone while you’re at it. You should, of course, already have Oil Processing and Petroleum Power.

Speaking of Mk2… the upgraded Blueprint Designer is optional. I don’t yet have that unlocked and my power facility’s working perfectly. Total’s video shows how to make a blueprint for this project in the Mk2 and it’s arguably a neater & tidier layout… he does this sort of thing for a living, one would expect that. Mine’s a bit wider but also a bit shorter. Everything’s a trade-off.

You really do want to blueprint a part of this, though: There’s a complicated bit of machinery and belting and pipework that would be exceptionally tedious to build “by hand” 14 times. Here’s roughly how it works:

1. Place a Refinery, set it to Diluted Packaged Fuel, the requirements for which are Heavy Oil Residue and Packaged Water. Run a Mk1 belt from the output of the refinery into…
2. Place one Packager such that its output is aimed in the general direction of the input end of the Refinery (since we’re creating a loop) and set it to unpackage the Packaged Fuel we’re getting out of the Refinery. Route the pipe wherever you need to in order for it to be able to join the other fuel pipes, route the belt output of Empty Canisters into…
3. Place the second Packager in whatever way makes sense for taking in Water and the aforementioned canisters from the first Packager while outputting Packaged Water (thus feeding the Refinery).
4. Once you have the three bits of belting hooked up, arrange your input pipes (Heavy Oil Residue and Water) and your output pipe (Fuel) such that you’ll be able to easily connect them to your three main pipe manifolds. I recommend the input/output points to be placed at three different heights to facilitate this.

My version of the end result looks (mostly) like this:

I included power wiring in those concrete pillars (so I only need to connect one power lead to provide juice to the whole bundle) but once everything was up & running I realized one cosmetic mistake… the machinery animations for the Packagers clip right through the horizontal pillar segments. Whoopsie. I’m not going back to fix them all now, though.

You’ll notice there’s no input/output belting. The genius bit of Total’s design is that you don’t need a permanent, dedicated means of supplying (and/or destroying) Empty Canisters. When the time is right you’ll load 100 canisters into each of the two Packagers, creating a permanently-reused stockpile to loop through the three machines for the lifespan of the facility.

(If anyone wants my blueprint for this just say the word. I’m happy to share, I just don’t think it’s actually all that good. Some day I’ll revisit the design… probably just before I build the 2nd installment off of the same Crude Oil source that I did for the inaugural version…)

The final pieces of the puzzle may be the most tedious. For this process to work at its most efficient (and why would you bother otherwise?) you absolutely need two specific alternate recipes: Heavy Oil Residue and Diluted Packaged Fuel. The first allows you to get that output as a primary result instead of as a byproduct of doing something else with Crude Oil in a Refinery, and the second lets you turn Packaged Water (a default unlock from the Fluid Packaging milestone) plus Heavy Oil Residue into Packaged Fuel at a prodigious rate… and you’ll be unpackaging that Fuel pretty much immediately.

While you’re scavenging hard drives to process in the MAM, make sure to set a Constructor to the task of filling an Industrial Storage Container with Empty Canisters. (Remember, we’re going to be hand-feeding these into each of the 28 Packager machines later.) Don’t go overboard, and don’t bother putting them into “depotspace,” just aim for ~2,800 total available. It won’t really take long. I got all of them that I needed while laying out the factory build and running all the pipes required to connect it all.

Once you’ve assembled the Avengers everything you need, it’s time to build. Where? Any location which provides 300m3/min Crude Oil from an accessible node, and which also has access to enough water (there’ll be six Water Extractors placed partway along the facility), and which has enough room for ten standalone Refineries and fourteen instances of that blueprint (which includes a Refinery) we put together earlier. Oh, and enough room for forty freakin’ Fuel Generators. Don’t forget those.

(I considered doing a “tower of power” vertical structure to save horizontal real estate but since there’s a 50/50 split in Fuel output from this build anyway, it seemed like more work than it was worth.)

The machinery & materials flow goes like this:

1. Oil Extractor clocked to provide 300m3/min. Double this if you want to build two of these facilities side-by-side or whatever. I’m only going to describe what you need to build in order to handle that 300 output level. The Crude Oil goes into…
2. 10 Refineries making Heavy Oil Residue. Make sure to sink or otherwise do something useful with the Polymer Resin waste. (I like using some of it to keep Fabric stored in depotspace, but there’s also the option of just making Even More Plastic. It’s not like you ever don’t need more plastic.) The Heavy Oil Residue flows toward…
3. Two rows of 7 each of those blueprinted rigs we talked about earlier. The last one in each row should be clocked to 2/3. The math is easy, just type ’40’ into the target production rate value to replace the default ’60’.
4. Additionally, two sets of 3 Water Extractors are required, one from each trio overclocked to 133.33% (just add a power shard and type ‘160’ into the target production rate) so you get a total of 400m3/min Water heading down two Mk2 pipelines toward those rows of blueprinted rigs.
5. Hook up a lot of pipes: Heavy Oil Residue and Water into their respective assigned inputs for the blueprinted rigs, Fuel pipes coming out of the array routing into two groups of 20 each Fuel Generators. To prevent sloshing, it’s a good idea to make sure the feeder pipeline for your generator array is elevated somewhat. Just “vertical nudge” the pipe junction up a couple notches. This will result in the pipes into the generators “dropping down” preventing any fuel from escaping back into the main line. Slosh averted! (Note that this may take some experimentation with how you arrange and space out your rows of generators.)

Now: Before you hook up power to the blueprinted rigs, go around with your stacks of Empty Canister to feed each and every one of those 28 Packagers with a stack of 100. (One will accept it in the input side, the other you’ll have to drag over to the output side.)

And… that’s it, honestly. Fire it all up and enjoy your 10-gigawatt boost to available electrical power. As for me, I’m off to my next adventure…

Aw yeah, baby. I’m baaaaaaack!