How to get more fuel — the Ultimate Once Human fuel farming guide

Getting more fuel in Once Human can sound like an arduous task. Who wants to run around for hours collecting the fuel from car trunks? Thankfully, there is an easier way.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can start your very own fuel farm in Once Human, and get all the fuel you could ever need… or, at least, as much as you can afford to get. Let’s dive in, it’ll all make sense in a second.

What do you need to farm fuel in Once Human?

To start getting fuel while you sleep (this is a semi-passive method), you’ll need to unlock some Memetics. The first thing you’ll need to understand is how to generate power in Once Human.

Next, you’ll need to unlock the Water Pump Memetic, which can be found under Logistics in 03, after Water Filters.

Then you’ll need to unlock the Fuel Refinery Memetic, which can be found under Infrastructure in 02.

The final prerequisite to farming fuel in Once Human is you need an oil vein. They can be found all over the Red Sands area, especially around the Blackfell Oil Fields (5257,-1545). Look for dark spots on the map, as shown in the image below.

Once you get there, you’ll know you can extract oil by the black spots on the ground. You can find them really easily anywhere you see an oil drill.

And that’s it. Move you base, and it’s time to farm fuel!

How to farm fuel in Once Human

Now that you have everything, it’s time to place your water pump, which can be found in Build menu under Facilities > Production Processing > Gathering & Production. Location doesn’t matter, since they’ll extract oil anywhere on the base now. Place one (or a few) down, and connect it to a power source. And just like that, crude oil production has begun.

Look at you, an oil baron now!

Sadly, you can’t use crude oil for anything in the game, as far as I know. So to get something useful —Portable Mixed Fuel — we’ll need to refine this crude oil. And for that, we need the refining Facility. This can also be found in the build menu at Facilities > Production Processing > Crafting.

Place down one of these, and you’re ready to become an oil farmer. If that’s even a thing. Oil baron does sound better.

All you need to do now is wait for your fuel pump to produce crude oil, and then move the crude oil to your refining facility in multiples of 10.

But how much fuel does actually make you? Let’s do some math (the fun kind, don’t worry!).

How much fuel can you farm in Once Human?

Producing power is pretty expensive in Once Human. Once you unlocked Advanced Generators, you’ll be able to build the Advanced Biomass or Hydraulic Generator. These produce 30W of energy each, and you can build six of them.

That gives you a total production limit of 180W of power. Each fuel farming set, which consists of one water pump and one refining facility will use 20W of power and produce five fuel per hour. Here’s a table with a little more detail:

Now we can calculate how much we can produce, based on our target production.

Producing Portable Mixed Fuel in Once Human

Given the information in the table above, we can produce five portable mixed fuel every hour per set. We can build 9 of them, so we’re looking at a theoretical limit of 45 Portable Mixed fuel per hour. But we can go one step further.

Electric Eels are a deviation that boosts your generator’s output. Having six of them active on each of your generators means an extra 10W or so each. This gives us three more sets, which means the theoretical limit of production is 60 Portable Mixed Fuel per hour.

If you’re lucky enough to find a spot for your house in a place with both Stardust Pollution and Oil means that you’ll be able to build Deviation Energy Generators, and produce an absolute limit of 300W of energy. This means 75 Portable Mixed Fuel per hour.

That’s significant, since if you move all of your crude oil over and go sleep for eight hours, you’ll end up with 600 Mixed Portable Fuel in the morning. But what if you want to produce Barreled Premium Oil instead?

Producing Barreled Premium Fuel in Once Human

The most optimal way to produce Barreled Premium Fuel is to build at least one extra refining facility. This lowers your cap to 14 sets, and 10 sets will produce enough for a Barreled Premium Fuel once per hour.

That’s your maximum output, basically. But if you have some Portable Mixed Fuel saved up, you can produce one of the premium stuff every hour per refining facility, which means 15 per hour until you run out of Portable Mixed Fuel.

And that, my friend, is all you can possibly know about farming fuel in Once Human. You’re an expert now, so go forth and farm. Though you might want to bookmark this article in case you forget anything. 😉

But before you go, do you need Acid? (Who doesn’t!)

Check out my detailed Acid farming guide in Once Human if you want to learn how to get Acid both passively and by actively farming.