I need input for minimum values from people who have used the mod.

What do you think the minimum rate at which you pump sea-oil should be and why? I feel that it should be above 0.1/s (to justify the infrastructure) and it's currently at 0.4 in game, but that can easily change.

Should oil-rigs be sea only? They kind of sound like it from the name. I've made them placable on land so far for convenience, but I might restrict this in the future.

What else should change? I'm really excited to add battleship textures in a few weeks for some fun multiplayer naval battles :)

Oil rigs should definitely be sea only... and, they should also be placeable only in deep water, too...

Perhaps have a couple versions.

A smaller 'off-shore' rig, for shallower (light blue) water, as they would typically be designed to be supported by land-based workers, running out to the rig daily for their shift, and supported by land-based structures. These don't need to be so large in real life.

A larger 'deep-water' rig, for deep (dark blue) water, as they would typically be designed to keep their workers on the site for days/weeks at a time, and have all of their support equipment and supplies, on site. Those are MUCH larger in real life. (I mean huge! I've seen, on video, one of these being towed out to the drilling site by 9 or more tug boats, and they're just massive!)

I've been considering adding self-sustaining oil-rigs in terms of power which would be closely aligned with what you've suggested for the deep-sea ones.

At the moment, oil only spawns in deep water (due to the way water-tile collisions with resources work and how I had to make deep-water not a water-tile)

I think you're right. I was enjoying using them on land, because something in my modpack was breaking pumpjacks, but I'll change them to sea-only

another thing that popped into mind...

the shallow water ones should be able to have pipes laid out to them...

the deep water ones, in RL, sometimes will lay pipe too, but for the game, perhaps not allow that.

To give your ships more purpose, you could set up a tanker, which can run out to the rig, pick up the oil, then deliver it to either the shallow water rig, or perhaps a type of dock off-shore (but in shallow water), which wouldn't drill itself, but whos only purpose would be to offload ships, with pipes leading from it to storage tanks on shore.

You'd have to be able to set up schedules, like with trains, tho... and do some path-finding... which will probably be a pain... but if you can pull it off, then your mod, I'm sure, will grow in popularity.

-- Smoov

Okay so disable pipes on deep water and replace them with a tanker? I'm not certain that I can get the tanker working, but I would love to try it. Maybe if it's adjacent to an ocean silo, it starts to fill up or something like that. I'll probably look at the railtanker code haha.

A schedule for tankers would be really hard haha, but I still really want to try it.

Thanks for the feedback Smoov, keep it up!

and then! after you get done with those, (begin-silliness), when evolution reaches around 75-80%, biters start to figure out how to do submarines, and start cruising the oceans underwater, searching for our tankers and rigs to destroy!!! (end-silliness)

Seriously tho... there was another mod I liked to use which hasn't been maintained since 0.12 I think... it didn't look all that well designed either, but the code might give you some ideas... it was a dump truck that would roam around, mining ores somewhat randomly, and haul them back to dump at the garage.

It had issues, but it was the kind of thing I was wanting to do myself one of these days.

Red Alert Harvesters
Official: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=87&t=12747
Unofficial: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=18311

Maybe it'll give you some ideas for some automated ocean cargo transport?

-- Smoov