I was asked about how Oil Refineries work regarding what happens to the goods it produces.
The person was new to playing OpenTTD and was a bit confused about what happens to the goods in his situation. The Oil Refinery is right beside a town and he has a truck station basically right on the road that is adjacent to the Refinery.
He has a truck to pick up the goods but was struggling with understanding what happens since the truck station had the goods available for pickup but he was wondering it the town just used the goods automatically or if the goods had to be delivered first. He wondered what was the use of picking the goods up if the town already consumed them. (Reminds me of a retro game from the nineties called A-Train by ArtDink from Japan – you had to deliver the blocks of goods to another part of town for them to be used by the town to build buildings automatically)
In actuality, yes the town will, in a sense use up goods sitting there slowly, but there is no money involved for the player. What ends up happening if you never pick up from that station, the goods will just accumulate and no cash is paid out, the oil refinery and the station lose ratings, and there is less production.
Another curious thing is that usually you have to pick up at least once for the Oil Refinery to start producing goods even if you give it oil on a regular basis.
So my advice to him was to take the goods to a destination station that receives goods but that is at least 100 tiles away in order to keep the station and refinery working well and to earn money both for delivering oil and for delivering goods.
The next issue is regarding stations since you really want two separate stations – one for oil dropoff and one for goods pickup. They can be the same type of station or different so you can have a truck station like he has and a train station or even add an airport with airplanes that are refitted for goods taking away to a far away destination.
The trick is JOINING those stations together so they work as one. This is not absolutely necessary but I think it works better.
In my case I have an oil rig with a PIPE (PIPE v6.41) station to pick up the oil from the Oil Rig and take it to the Oil Refinery. Then I have a train station (Universal Rail Type 2.0.1) with MagLev trains to take away the goods to the other side of the city, some distance away. The distance could be farther but mainly I did it for a demo for my friend to see one possible arrangement. (see screenshot below)
A point of clarification in case you are confused: the Oil Refinery has one station that receives oil and another has the goods it produces from the oil available for pickup. Although they are actually two ‘stations’ of different types one being for the MagLev train and the other for PIPE lines, it is JOINED together and therefore technically one large station.
It does not have to be different types of stations: you can use any station joined to another station so you could have a truck station and a rail station or even an airport – whatever works – you could even have an airport, truck and rail all joined together if that is what you want or need. Note: You do need to set your station spread however and the stations need to be within that spread area or they will not join together. Clear as mud?
Let me know if you have any questions or have a better suggestion by using the Contact form. Thanks!