[2020] How do i find Oil?

Hey,
open the map and on the right side choose the layer for oil to see where you can find oil on a heatmap.
The more oil that is available at a specific place, the faster you can create the oil products with the pumpjack.

Originally posted by Duke Tyrag: this post is obsolete. there is no oilfield option in the map

That is incorrect, it is just hidden by default now as long as oil drilling has not been researched on the server. You can turn that off in Balance.eco.

Originally posted by Ranix: that is not a good idea as it greatly harms discoverability of the feature for no benefit

We think it is, on multiplayer servers it has been common that people settle with a come-first mentality within the first view minutes on the best oil fields, despite oil drilling being far away and no realistic means to actually detect oil technically being present. This has caused a gameplay state that is not desirable and prefers people that had the time to join the server at the first second. It also removes any sort of incentive to interact with others and potentially buy their property. You will find similar functionality in other games, like Civilization as well, by the way.

If you are not happy with it, however, you can easily disable it in Balance.eco. :)
We however have purposefully decided on that after taking lots of feedback in regard to it into account and there is no reason to reconsider at this point.

Originally posted by Ranix: Then why was it implemented so hastily that it hides the entire feature from users? Grey the map out and put red text that says "research oil drilling to unlock this view" or something. This took great effort and discussion and the implementation was less than half-assed?

We do plan to do that in conjunction with a feature update that will generally hide the world map and world features until the respective parts were discovered.

The impact on multiplayer games this had however was much more severe than any potential confusion that will quickly be adapted to could ever cause, as such we have decided to implement this functionality immediately, especially as popular servers had been hiding the oil layer with mods for a good while already - and as such the confusion was already there. This change is also already present since the first release of Update 11 and hasn't caused any visible notable issues so far.