Oil
Summary
Oil is the mod's first fluid and the only resource you can neither craft nor smelt — you find it. It sits in the world as lakes: mostly deep underground, occasionally breaking the surface as a rare patch. A deposit is finite: every block of oil you scoop out is gone for good and never regrows the way water does.
Mini-example: you find a small black pool underground and scoop it with an empty bucket — one
bucket of oil. Scooping by hand takes a while; put a Pump next to it and it drains the whole deposit into its own tank.
| Form | How you get it |
|---|---|
| Oil in the world | find a lake — underg or on the surface (rare) |
| Oil bucket | scoop with an empty bucket, pour it back with a right-click |
| Oil in a tank | drain the deposit with a Pump |
| Oil in a capsule | scoop with a Vacuum Capsule |
Where to find it
Oil generates everywhere in the Overworld — biome makes no difference. There is none in the Nether or the End. Deposits come in four sizes, from a puddle to a vein worth mounting an expedition for. A surface patch — the smallest find. Turns up about once every 150 chunks. Its job is to tell you oil exists at all, not to be a mining source. A lake in the mines — the real source. Sits in the Y −40 … −8 band, never closer than five blocks to the surface, in roughly one chunk in fifty. That is the same depth as lava lakes, so oil often sits right next to lava — which is harmless in itself (see "Flammability"). A deep reservoir. Three times wider than the mine-depth lake and lower down — Y −50 … −30, roughly once every 40 chunks. This one is worth hauling a pump and a tank down for. An oil vein — the rarest thing in the ground. Roughly once every 600 chunks, and you can spot it from the surface: a one-to-three-block spout of oil erupting out of the ground with a black patch spreading around it. Below the spout a one-block-wide shaft runs down almost to bedrock, where a huge oil-filled dome is waiting. One vein holds roughly as much as twenty mine-depth lakes. Oil never generates inside structures: villages, mineshafts, strongholds and the Ancient City. Dig inside those without worrying. A deposit's volume, in oil source blocks (= buckets, 1 bucket = 1000 mB):
| Deposit | On average | Up to |
|---|---|---|
| Surface patch | ~8 buckets (8 000 mB) | 38 buckets |
| Mine-depth lake | ~160 buckets (160 000 mB) | 448 buckets |
| Deep reservoir | ~1 200 buckets (1.2 M mB) | 2 786 buckets |
| Vein dome | ~3 700 buckets (3.7 M mB) | 5 497 buckets |
The deep reservoir — not just "considerably more" than the mine-depth lake — is the world's main oil source (76 % of all oil in the ground). It is a one-shot resource: drain it and go look for the next one. Exact figures and the method behind them are in
Block Properties
Oil is a thick fluid. It spreads slower than even lava, and shorter than water — its level drops twice as fast, so a spill stays compact.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Spread | slower than lava; a spill is a third the length of a water one |
| Source regrowth | none — the deposit is finite |
| Moving inside | heavily slowed: you wade through oil, you do not swim in it |
| Falling | no fall damage while you are in the oil |
| Breath | never spent — oil does not drown you |
| Boats | boats do not float on oil |
| Harvesting | fluid containers only (bucket, capsule, pump); a pickaxe does nothing |
Inside oil your view suffers badly: a dark, beaded film clings to the screen and nothing is visible past about nine blocks. You can still find your way — swimming to the edge of a pool or riding a shaft down both work — but it is not pleasant. Going under is safe, though. Oil breaks your fall and never takes your breath, so you can ride the shaft of an oil vein all the way down — slowly, but in one piece. Getting back out is on you: oil will not push you up.
Flammability
Oil burns. It catches from fire — not from lava: a neighbouring fire block turns oil into fire, and the flame walks the pool block by block until the whole spill is gone. You can light a deposit by hand with flint and steel — a click on the oil lights it instantly. Lava on its own does not ignite oil, and that is deliberate. Underground lakes often generate flush against lava lakes, and without this rule any deposit you found would burn away the moment you broke the first block next to it. The spread across a pool obeys the vanilla fireSpreadRadiusAroundPlayer game rule: with it turned off on a server, a stray fire will not run through your oil. Lighting it by hand always works. Flammability can be switched off entirely with the oilBurns mod setting (on by default). With it set to false oil is completely inert — neither fire nor flint and steel will light it, which is handy if you keep oil next to your production line.
Progression
Oil is the start of the rubber chain: oil → raw rubber → vulcanization → rubber. The Polymerizer takes 1000 mB of oil and 400 EU/FE and returns raw rubber; a Vulcanizer combines it with sulfur dust to make rubber. Rubber itself is not consumed by anything yet — its users (insulated cables and MV components) arrive with the next phase, so it is worth stockpiling what you make. The practical takeaway: drain a deposit you find into a tank and mark the spot — it will not come back.
Compatibility
Oil is declared under the common fluid tags c:oil and c:crude_oil, so machines from other mods that work with "oil" in general accept it with no extra setup. At the same time oil is listed among the fluids that must not become an infinite source in other mods' mechanics — the deposit stays finite whatever else is installed. The biome sets oil generates in (surface and underground lakes are separate) and the list of structures lakes stay out of are both driven by tags, so a modpack can retarget or disable generation without touching code.
Related
Pump — the main way to drain a deposit. Vacuum Capsule — a portable fluid container. Polymerizer — turns oil into raw rubber. Rubber — what the oil is mined for.