Dear Stormworkers & Roughnecks,

The Oil Drilling Update - our next major update, is due out on Thursday 16th March 2023 at 5pm UTC!

Drilling for oil is coming to Stormworks via a series of new components and systems to facilitate creating and operating rigs.

Oil drilling is very complex and there are a lot of nuances, and a variety of techniques, with differences between on-shore, off-shore, geology considerations, and generational changes. While Stormworks will simplify drilling, the principles remain, and our goal has been to encourage design with logistics and operation in mind. Lets talk about what that means:

Oil Deposits

Under the world of Stormworks there will be hundreds of oil deposits, of varying depth and size. Survey data for these deposits can be purchased from various oil sites.

The Well Head

Well heads will be a new component that form the starting point of a well. They can be established on any flat surface, above or below the ocean. They incorporate the drill head, and some plumbing, and act as the interface for the well.

Drilling Rods

Drill rods will be new 10m long physical rods that can be chained together to form longer rods. These rods can be fed into and recovered from a well.

Rod Handling

There will be various robotic parts for grabbing, handling, feeding, joining, separating, and driving rods. For example, you will need the rod threader to merge two rods together, and the driver is required to turn the rods for drilling.

Slurry

Slurry, or drilling mud, is required for drilling. Slurry must be pumped down the rods into the drill head to lubricate drilling and transport the cut stone and material away from the drill head. The slurry must be circulated and cleaned in mud scrubbers to remove the debris and keep the well drilling.

Refining

We are also adding some new parts to allow fractional distillation of oil into diesel and jet fuel!

We are really excited to launch this new update and look forward to sharing it in a few weeks. In the mean time we have next weeks minor update, and we continue work on finishing this update and many others!

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this new update!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers