Oil

Oil seeps are rare sources beyond Wall Sina. In the world's history, they are small openings the Cascade left to a hydrocarbon world. They replenish, but pressure and a weekly limit control how much oil you can extract. See Holding a seep.

The seep

A seep is one chunk; oil is drawn only by Diesel Generators pumpjacks whose pipe runs straight down onto an unbreakable seep block over the bedrock. As many pumpjacks as blocks; over plain bedrock a pumpjack draws nothing.

Find

Past the wall, look for the eternal flame over an abandoned oil site: its smoke stands from far off, with a sulphur vent and a pool of tar beside it. The site depends on the layer: a derrick with the flame on top, a fenced wellsite, a trestle over the sea, or a burning pit. The air there is sour, so come masked.

A gas detector says how near a seep is and never which way; the survey archive and old maps found in caches say which stretch of ground to search. Each seep block lies under a stub: dig straight down, and the blocks lie just above the bedrock.

1. 1Campfire
2. 2Bitumen
3. 3Oil Seep
4. 4Bedrock

A flame and tar mark a seep; its seep blocks lie just above the bedrock.

The black pools past the wall are tar, not oil: nothing but a seep gives crude.

Chart

To add a seep to the registry, file a survey report. Standing in its chunk past the wall, hold up a survey notebook. Carry the survey report home, use it in the Safe Zone and press File report.

The first report filed charts the seep under the name its filer gives it. Every map shows the cell it lies in, and the exact point goes to the filer and everybody in their groups; a later report gives its own filer the point.

Charting a seep does not make it yours: nobody owns a seep past the wall.

Every week the registry publishes each charted seep's last week — how much of its cap was drawn, how long it stood dry and how long full — and never who drew it.

Sell

Oil is counted automatically when a player or a whole train brings it back from the Dark Zone's oil layers. Oil your team previously took out is deducted, so moving the same oil back and forth does not add deliveries. Place Oil Haul Statistics near the wall to see the week's totals and your share; nothing is handed in there.

Oil trades on the market in metal drums, and the market's Oil tab follows their prices; a filled canister or oil barrel cannot be listed. It can be sold by contract too: the oil itself with a delivery term, a survey or a share of a seep with the Survey sale and Seep share terms.

Use a train for large deliveries: carrying metal drums can slow you down. Build Create fluid tanks on a train and stop it at a train station: a portable fluid interface on the car and one by the track move the oil.

1. 1Train Station
2. 2Portable Fluid Interface
3. 3Fluid Tank
4. 4Train Casing

Fluid tanks on a bogey, emptied at a station through two facing interfaces.

Past the wall a track is anybody's to break, and the registry sees none of it. A pipeline can run all the way home, and a pipeline meter counts what flows through it; anybody can splice into a pipeline.

Next: Holding a seep.