Thrust into your role as an employee of Vacuum Oil Company, Oil Well Drilling gives you one task and one task only: dig. You travel around various biomes, like mountainsides and deserts, clawing through layers of soil and bedrock with your mobile rig and inching your way closer to striking oil, like a modern-day Daniel Plainview.
Oil Well Drilling, developed by Rollic Games, sits in the top 10 of the Google Play Store’s Simulation charts as of writing. This genre often takes real-life activities and turns them into games, ranging from the awe-inspiring likes of Microsoft Flight Simulator, to the statistical nitty gritty of Football Manager, and even to the slapstick craziness of Goat Simulator. While Oil Well Drilling is a very simplified version of the real thing, playing surprisingly close to an idle game at times, it does let you operate a bona-fide rig with just the pull of a lever.
So if you’re keen to dive in, we’ve put together a guide to get you started. If you enjoy this article, please consider checking out our list of the best mobile sports manager games, the best mobile strategy games, or the best mobile idle games.
Here’s what’s in our Oil Well Drilling guide:
How do I download Oil Well Drilling?
To sign up for the Vacuum Oil Company, go to the links below:
- iOS: App Store
- Android: Google Play
- PC: MemuPlay
- APK: APKPure
Oil Well Drilling tips, tricks, and cheats
Without further ado, find out how to break through the bedrock and discover oil:
Drilling
Pull the red lever in the lower right corner of the screen to start drilling. A meter fills to the left of the lever as you progress, indicating how close your drill is to overheating, and your oil supply falls steadily as you go. You can also keep an eye on the drill itself, which turns a progressively deeper shade of red and starts to let off steam as it heats up, and listen out for telltale hissing and beeping noises.
To cool down, pull the lever up and wait for your heat meter to drop back down. If your drill does overheat and break, you can choose to watch an ad and continue, although runs are brief and restarting is a relatively painless alternative.
Upgrades
As you mine through layers of bedrock, you earn resources by destroying rocks to gather rare materials like gold. You can use this currency to upgrade your fuel tank, your drill or your engine’s cooling system, either when you boot the game up or after finishing a run.
Your primary focus should be your fuel tank and your drill – upgrading your cooler merely reduces the amount of time your rig takes to overheat and doesn’t actually let you drill down any further.
Progression
The game offers various boosters for watching ads, like gold triplers, free upgrades, or extra fuel. However, the vast majority of our playtime was offline and we progressed fairly quickly regardless.
Runs often give you enough gold for multiple upgrades, even without the ad boosters, and you move onto new levels fairly quickly. Oil Well Drilling is perhaps best enjoyed if you worry less about optimisation and take it easy, pairing it with a podcast or album for good measure.
Thanks so much for reading our guide of Oil Well Drilling, hopefully it helps you out!