Actually my oil isn't that far away, it's just that there are some really narrow obstacle-filled canyons that are hard for the tractor to navigate, and I'm sure the auto-pilot would end up getting snagged in there. I could build a road up where the crevices are wider, but ugh. My first base had a skybridge that went on and on, I'd rather avoid that this time if I can.
But no need now, finally have my railway up and working! More plastics coming in than I can shake a stick at! =)
I have the same problem! Not with oil, but with quartz. I want to start mining it finally, and I finally found two pure nodes in an obscure cave (it took me for freaking ever) but it's going to be just a nightmare to route that stuff back to my refinery area.
Speaking of which, I got my little truck network up and going a while back. Just two trucks, running plastic and rubber from the oil city back to my base. I found out a little secret about the trucks - they don't get hung up, unless you're around to see it. Literally. See, when you're making the autopilot route for a truck, it leaves these little "play" symbols along the ground over the route, which are the route markers. Well, it turns out, trucks on autopilot only ever "travel", as in actually rolling over the ground, within a certain distance from you - close to but not quite your max visual rez distance. When it's farther from you than that, trucks just magically teleport from one route marker to the next in sequence. So they can never get hung up on obstacles, or even other trucks - seriously, you could build a wall right across the truck route, and unless you're actually standing close enough to watch the truck run into it, the trucks will run like it doesn't even exist.
As things currently go I'm not using rubber for anything really except occasional craft bench stuff, so it's just stacked up in the container and that particular truck never offloads much. I'm having a problem keeping my plastics up though. I made a huge mistake setting up my refinery area; I first went with direct plastic and rubber, and was using the heavy residue to make fuel, which I then packaged. Except now I've got a couple of full industrial containers of packaged fuel, and it's only ever used to refuel the trucks - which is not much. So those fuel refineries idle a lot, which means the heavy residue backs up and idles my plastic and rubber refineries. The rubber is not a big enough deal right now to care about, but I neeeeed plastic! Right now I'm in the process of switching over to direct fuel, which is running gas generators so the fuel's rarely backing up, and using the resin from those to make plastic and rubber. I'll need to keep just a couple of direct plastic refineries around because I will need the residue to make coke eventually for aluminum, but for now I don't need it.
But GUESS WHO ALSO JUST GOT TRAINS? So once I've fixed the plastic inefficiency I'm gonna run a train loop for the plastic and rubber and retire those trucks. Now that I think on it, I might use a truck or two to run that quartz from the nodes to the refinery. Right now I can't justify all the materials it would take to route a belt all the way around and back in there, especially with how little I'll actually be using the stuff for a while.
Once I got my plastic stable, and the quartz going, and my train route set up, it'll finally be time to start on the next Elevator project for the next two tiers.
