Oil Extractor

Oil Extractor is a building used to extract Crude Oil from a Crude Oil seep. It can only be placed directly on a seep, and its base production rate is determined by that seep rather than by the building itself. Crude Oil seeps are guaranteed to exist on the starting planet, but they are not present on every planet and are relatively rare overall.

The production rate shown in the game tooltip is the base output of the seep. Oil Extractor output is affected by Veins Utilization, so the actual production rate can be higher than the displayed value after related research is unlocked. Because the output depends on the seep, different Crude Oil seeps extract at different speeds when plasma is used to pull oil from them.

A few practical points matter when planning an oil setup:

• A seep’s production per hour is fixed for that seep, while the Oil Extractor’s power consumption does not change with output. Early on, it is more power-efficient to prioritize the highest-yield seeps first.
• The displayed production rate is only the baseline. With Veins Utilization upgrades, an extractor can produce more Crude Oil per second than the tooltip suggests.
• Since the output rate can exceed the transport capacity of a Conveyor Belt Mk.III, excess output will stack on the extractor. Once this happens, the building outputs items in two-item stacks when needed.
• The stacking limit increases by 1 for every additional 1800 items/min of Oil Extractor output, up to a maximum stack size of 4.
• This stacking behavior applies regardless of the belt tier connected to the extractor. If the output exceeds the threshold, the extractor will still stack its output even when connected to a Mk.I or Mk.II belt.

Because Oil Extractor performance is tied to the specific seep, it is often worth designing oil fields with room for expansion and keeping higher-output seeps available for later throughput upgrades. This becomes especially useful once Veins Utilization research increases extraction rates enough to create belt bottlenecks.