Fracking Tower
The hydraulic fracking tower is an oil extracting machine that is capable of extracting crude oil from bedrock oil deposits infinitely when provided with fracking solution and power. It is also capable of extracting crude oil from deposits rapidly, but the additional costs of its operation make this not usually preferred.
Crafting
The hydraulic fracking tower can be made in an assembly machine with the following recipe:
Usage
Once the hydraulic fracking tower drills to a bedrock or standard oil deposit and it is provided with fracking solution and power, it will begin to extract oil from the deposit. Every time oil is extracted, a grass, stone, or dirt block that is exposed to the sky is selected by a normal distribution and converted into a dead or oily version of itself. These block variations can support mustard willows but will kill any other plants on them and are affected by gravity like sand or gravel.
The normal distribution that is used to calculate which blocks are chosen uses a standard deviation of 75, meaning that 68.26% of affected blocks will be within a 75 radius circle around the tower, 95.44% will be in a 150 radius circle, and 99.72% will be in a 225 radius circle. Effectively, this means that the fracking tower by default has a pollution radius of 300 blocks after which point any polluted blocks will be extremely rare.
Prior to unlocking the hydrotreater, the hydraulic fracking tower cannot be made to be self sustaining in terms of fracking solution, but if both natural gas and crude oil outputs are hydrotreated, it can be made to be barely sulfur positive.
| Speed Upgrade Level | Overdrive Upgrade Level | Crude Oil Production / mB/s | Power Consumption / kHE/ s | Fracking Solution Consumption / mB/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 100 | 100 | 10 |
| 1 | 0 | 150 | 125 | 15 |
| 2 | 0 | 200 | 150 | 20 |
| 3 | 0 | 400 | 175 | 40 |
| 3 | 1 | 1,000 | 350 | 100 |
| 3 | 2 | 2,000 | 525 | 200 |
| 3 | 3 | 2,000 | 700 | 200 |
Note that in the above table, speed 3 overdrive 3 does not yield more crude oil per second than speed 3 overdrive 2. This is because at the latter upgrade level, the fracking tower reaches a rate of oil extraction of once per tick and thus cannot extract any faster.