Infinite oil exploit using plastic mixer

[BorisMulder]

When you use polyethene to make some plastic in a pneumaticraft plastic mixer, you use up 50 mB of PE for one plastic.
You can also melt any plastic to make 400mB of oil. The oil can be distilled into Ethene and made into PE again, yielding more PE than it costs (not including other oil products).
I'm pretty sure this way of making raw oil straight from plastic is not intended at all and should be removed

[pyure]

Plastic -> Oil is built into Pneumaticraft, but the recipe we have in place was an attempt to do it exploit-free with all the changes we made to polyethylene/oil/etc. The Ethene (Ethylene?) trick was unexpected, woops.

Just so I'm sure I understand (feel free to fill in the X and Y below):
Problem: 50mb PE -> 1 Plastic -> 400mb Oil -> X Ethylene(?) -> Y(>50) Polyethylene

Hypothetically, what could we change the 400mb Oil to in order to remove the exploit? I'd rather fix the math than disable the recipe entirely since PC players expect to be able to magically melt plastic back into oil.

[BorisMulder]

why not melt plastic back into PE?
it's rather strange to be able to turn PE into plastic and then into oil which is a mixture of many hydrocarbons

[pyure]

Because you can optionally get plastic directly from oil. This would make it too easy to get PE (game design trumps realism here. I'd rather disable the oil extraction completely if you're curious)

[BorisMulder]

it is not really comparable in math because you could use it to make PE from sulfuric acid and ethanol (sulfur is bulk material and can be made from netherrack which is renewable) and ethanol is easily automatable) and turn that into oil to just make an infinite oil farm
oil should not be that easily renewable if you ask me
so unless you change it so it produces like one or two mB of oil back it will continue to be an issue, in which case you'd better disable the recipe altogether

[pyure]

Thanks, good feedback. I believe we will indeed kill the recipe.