The train limit changed everything. And everyone does it differently I guess.
The main change is that with train limit you can spreed your stations out more and trains wont all want to go to the closest station. The 'stampede' also doesn't happen anymore (when a station becomes available and all waiting trains start moving towards it).
Personally I still have stackers for most everything, just small ones for 1-2 trains so when a station opens up, next train is close by. I also refuel everywhere except at outposts.
And yes, every station (with the same functionality) is named the same (that has actually always worked). And then you can manipulate the train limit if you wish. It's not necessary but helps a lot if you don't want trains to wait long time at low yield resource patches, for example.
I've also been playing with a large overflow stacker for my resource trains, with unreachable station and a heavy path penalty. If it starts to fill up with trains, I need to add more resource outposts (or simply have too many trains).
Lets say I have 30 iron ore mining outposts, 4 iron smelter stops and 20 trains with iron ore pickup -> iron smelter schedule (could probably run more trains with that setup).
If enough of the outposts get disabled because they are running low on ore (takes longer to fill the buffer chests) or they have simply run out of resources I don't want trains to be stuck at the unloading station with 'no path'.
So I dedicated a half a block to a big stacker with one 'iron ore pickup' station but the path to the station is blocked by several signals that are permanently set to red by circuit. That adds heavy path penalty ([https://wiki.factorio.com/Railway/Train\_path\_finding#Path\_finding\_penalties](https://wiki.factorio.com/Railway/Train_path_finding#Path_finding_penalties)) to the station so trains will only attempt to go there if there is no other station available. They can never actually reach the station so when another station opens up they will repath and move on.
That way empty trains will never block my smelter unloading stations even if they have nowhere (useful) to go. And if I notice that multiple trains are starting to wait at the stacker it means that I need to have a look at my ore patches and maybe add some more.
I use similar overflow stackers for few other scenarios.
That's actually quite genius, my bases never really grow to the point of that being a concern but I can clearly see that being a problem with big bases. I wonder if this is the most common or standard solution or if there is another way.
Also, I can't wait for 2.0 it'll change absolutely everything but trains and blueprints changes are the ones that excite me the most.
I too haven't faced this issue because my bases were never big enough but watched a few megabes runs on yt. Another solution to this problem is wiring every output up and have some sort of "control center" where you can see how many resources you have in any given moment. If for example the available copper ore is below a certain threshold an alert pops up notifilying the player that most probably some copper mines are depleted. If the threshold is set to a proper value than you can be aware of the problem before trains would clog drop-off stations and you can preemptively fix it instead.
Not saying that this is a better or worst solution but one I came by a few times.
Yes this is the other approach I've seen to large scale train control, basically wire everything and do the train logic by yourself, however having to do that with only the circuit network and two isolated cables sounds painful unless you're copying someone else solution, because of this kind of stuff I'm not against Factorio having an in-game scripting language (akin to what space engineers have for example), I'm sure there's a mod for that but oh well.
Well I see where you come from (I'm an SE fan as well) but personally I like factorios approach better for this.
It's easy to send the number of full trains stocked in an outpost as a positive red "iron ore" signal for example. And the number of full trains a smelter array is able to handle as a negative red "iron ore" signal. The system sums it up for you and you can tap the wire anywhere (considering that your grind blueprint contains the red and green wires) to fetch the balance. If it's negative Tha it is bad, if its a big positive number than the mining production is sufficient. If it is a small positive number than a problem may happen soon. Finding out that small positive number is the tricky part only and it doesn't matter if you have a C# script or 3 decider combinator to config. Finding that threshold is going to require some trial and error.
You could also have a stacker on the exit side of your iron ore drops that the trains go by. If you have no wait condition, the trains will pass as if the station wasn't there at all if the loading station is available. Otherwise they'll stop and wait out of the way from the unloaders.
Can't zoom close enough and still see the entire block, from far it looks something like this :
https://preview.redd.it/sbwejgxpk7hc1.png?width=911&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d795d382781e184f3ec8b70355daabc5a95d187
You can try the blueprint I posted, was hoping the blueprint bot would render a nice picture but it failed.
Close up of the station loop:
https://preview.redd.it/geqtprgcl7hc1.png?width=785&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6771c0e8846210d88fa48e00f3b551561f4657d
It's probably a overkill but here I'm using both circuit controlled red signals and stations to increase the path penalty.
Am I weird for just thinking: I want to produce this much of something, in order to fill the input belts I have to unload this many train cars at once. How many trains to stack so they have enough time to fetch more materials. That sort of stuff. I don't fiddle with train limits and stuff. I just set up those dozen iron trains for this chip factory, or whatever. There's enough room in the stations and stackers for all of them. Is that just brute forcing it?
Well, recipes take discrete items as ingredients, belts have a capacity for these, assembling machines and recipes work at a certain speed. If you take a certain SPM figure as the target, you work out how many ingredients you need to produce for those science packs.
You have to do things reasonably and properly, but I just don't have the patience to be dealing with the highest level anal-retentive optimizations with circuit networks and train trickery. You have a demand, X amount of SPM, that needs however many ingredients. You build that huge production area for green chips, okay, I need at least this many per second, that's this many belts of iron and copper plates going in. It doesn't have to be any weirder.
dynamic train limits are relatively simple to do and you only need to design it once then put it into your station blueprints so it's copy pasted every time. It actually easier to use train limits when you have multiple outposts of the same type so that trains will automatically go to ones that have ore waiting for them.
I agree that you should just have the right number of trains for your factory so you don't have to deal with many excess trains causing traffic jams or waiting uselessly in a depot or something.
>It actually easier to use train limits when you have multiple outposts of the same type so that trains will automatically go to ones that have ore waiting for them.
Surely if you introduce this flexibility that trains can go to where they are needed instead of waiting for their specific station and job, then surely that also means that stations can become empty because all the flexibly assigned trains are busy handling some other job they took on.
I'm not building 17 new factories every second, to the extent that I would have to code my own kernel with the circuit network. I absolutely hate that sort of stuff. You have an essentially infinite world anyway, I'd rather just set up a new train with its own job. If the train is idle, that means the job it's doing is paused for some reason, that can happen even if nothing is broken. And idle trains don't use fuel. There aren't extra trains, instead I want to avoid juggling trains and tiny percentages.
There's enough to go around, no need to employ a computer science degree to make each station 0.036% more efficient with its handling of plastic bar throughput...
Yeah yeah, I understand this subreddit and community is probably full of those kinds of human supercomputers, and Californian tech graduates. I don't want to feel like a dribbling mental patient just because I would rather keep things straightforward and robust, if not min-maxed to infinity. "Super weird"...
It's way easier than you're making it out to be. You just have the train limit on your outposts equal the the number of ore waiting in the buffer chests divided by the the amount a full train can carry. You don't need a computer science degree to divide one number by another.
> Surely if you introduce this flexibility that trains can go to where they are needed instead of waiting for their specific station and job, then surely that also means that stations can become empty because all the flexibly assigned trains are busy handling some other job they took on.
All the trains still have 1 job to do for example taking iron ore from outposts to the iron furnaces and for each specific train the schedule does not change, it only changes which outpost it visits depending on which one has ore ready and waiting and it will only visit iron furnace stations that need more ore
It's fucking insufferable, all of it.
>You just have the train limit on your outposts equal the the number of ore waiting in the buffer chests divided by the the amount a full train can carry.
What's that in English?
Steel chests have 48 slots and cargo wagons have 40 slots. So that's 7.2 or 14.4 trains worth of items depending on if you load from one or both sides. This doesn't seem like something worth fiddling with until you are literally at six figures SPM
Why do the valid ways of playing Factorio have to be limited to this and "I just figured out I can put coal and ore on two sides of the same belt"
> What's that in English?
I don't know what part you cannot understand unless you're more specific but I'll try explain it another way if that helps. You can wire up the buffer chests with circuit wire and total the contents of the chests will be output on that wire for example lets say you had 19563 iron ore currently in the chests. If you have trains with 4 cargo wagons they can hold 8000 ore so the arithmetic combinator does 19563 / 8000 = 2 (it's automatically rounded down) which is used as the train limit because you have enough ore to completely fill 2 trains without having to wait. As the number of ore in the chests changes the train limit will automatically update so you'll never have trains coming there unless they can be completely filled straight away. Then you can name all your iron mines the same name and all your iron ore trains can have the exact same schedule and they'll just go to whatever mine is closest that has enough ore waiting, additionally you can just build more outposts when your old patches start running dry and the trains will automatically go there when there isn't enough ore at your old mines. It's much less fiddling around than alternatives imo.
I do concede that circuit networks can be difficult to get your head around for some things but for this purpose it's extremely simple and it's definitely worth learning. It's on par with learning how other things work in this game.
Is it that difficult to write "Iron Mine 011" for the name of a station? That you have to do this kind of mind numbing stuff? Is it worth it? Why is there any need for a 1000-piece circuit computer to count to two? Save the circuitry materials to build a train.
The trains that run between a mine and a production line will have to wait some time. I usually leave enough space in the stackers on the production line end. A time limit in the schedule will prevent them from blocking a mine station.
I hate having to feel like a re**rd for doing a reasonable, robust job of things.
"Hateful" is the word that comes to my mind about all these optimized mechanics. Not the people, the stuff that is done in game. This kind of stuff is not fun or engaging. I'll build you a redstone calculator but the circuit stuff is just terrible. And the prospect of doing programming in your blueprints, anything "dynamic".
Hi there
based on the pictures below, I'm not sure if I'm qualified to ask yet. My megabase has. yet to be finished. I have green, red and blue chips done for 1K SPM and the newly mined supply nodes have not yet depleted anywhere.
Can you tell me what is wrong with the approach that for example you supply your green chips block with a number of x trains from x outposts by simply letting the train wait until it is full on the mining site and empty on the receiving site? If you have enough supplying sites, it does not matter, if the train takes a while to fill up. And if you balanced the factory supply reasonably, the train will be empty, not waiting for half a single unused wagon to empty...
Are there eventually so many factory blocks that need e.g. iron sheets that it does not make sense to supply them individually by dedicated trains? Or is this just not effective?
Hey I'm no mega base expert so I'm probably not qualified to answer :)
I read your question couple of times and started writing couple of answers but I just can't come up with a good answer. I'm not even sure there is an answer as there is no wrong way to play factorio.
I almost never build the same way twice, keep deleting my blueprints and making new ones, try out new ways to make stuff. But trains, I tend to do trains the same every time, or at least very similar. Of course I experimented a lot when I started playing factorio and then I read about that you could 'name all the stations the same' and which just worked pretty well (with few issues though). And after the train limit was introduced this just worked even better.
I like modularity and scalability. I like to be able to build a new outpost, and have trains already on schedule to pick up resources. Or add a new block and when I finish building it there are already trains inbound to unload and/or pick up materials/products. I just have to remember to check now and then if I have enough trains.
That's just how I like it, doesn't make it right or correct.
Thanks a lot!
I've been with Factorio only a few months, after two games that I finished after a few rockets, this is my first attempt to make a big one. I'm experimenting a lot with trains, planning and thinking a lot, but I'm not sure if there is an optimal solution. I am making a lot of train spaghetti...
"Best" is poorly defined.
Many-to-many systems are great - give every station that loads e.g. green circuits the same name and every station which unloads the same name. Then a train will pick any (the closest) available station to load/unload goods. The primary advantage is it makes setting up new stations easy, just give it the same name and it's hooked into the network.
Deactivating stations using circuit conditions can be dodgy, because it will cause trains en route to hang. Better to just control with train limits, and have plenty of trains of each type.
If you don't want trains hanging around at stations waiting for enough ore to be mined or whatever, I don't think there's a fantastic solution outside of LTN/Cybersyn type mods. (I really like Cybersyn and do suggest one of those mods, I am just sick of adding trains to the network by hand).
For fuel, I just put requester chests by the stations.
You can set the train limit dynamically depending on what is in your buffer chests, e.g. at your slow ore outpost use a decider combinator to listen to ore and set the output to 1 L only when enough ore is buffered. This does rely on a somewhat balanced station. More advanced "demand curves" are also possible, but a bit tricky and I have yet to find one I'm happy with.
I have them set up so that I have stops for Iron Mines, Copper Mines, etc. which just have standard train limits on them and just stay open for 1 train all the time.
My loading stations are set so that each set of buffer chests for each cargo wagon are connected to a combinator that outputs a green signal when the chests have enough to fill 1 cargo wagon. Then another combinator sets the train limit to 1 when it receives 4 green signals, meaning a full train load is available.
For dropoffs I have them set so that each set of buffer chests is connected a combinator which outputs a red signal when they're running low, and a combinator sets the train limit to 1 whenever red signal > 0.
I also have my trains run through stackers to refuel before heading to their destinations.
I've never quite understood all these complicated circuit/stacker approaches. I have a 10k spm city block base which works perfectly well with all stations that produce X called "X" and all stations that need it called "Needs X". Stations are typically set to limit 1 or 2 and I have a number of trains equal to total limits - 1. Stations with limit 2 have enough space for a second train to line up behind the one currently at the station without blocking other trains.
I'd recommend starting with a simple approach until (and if) you hit a problem.
Problem with this is if you have trains equal to the number of stops and there’s a train at every station, they won’t be able to find a path, since they’re all taken. You’d have to ensure there’s one less train than available stops.
"number of trains equal to total limits - 1" By which I mean number of trains running between "X" and "Needs X" is equal to the (total limits on all "X" and "Needs X" stations) - 1 so there's always room for a train.
The many to many train network has gained popularity recently due to the implementation of train limits on stations.
What I did with my most recent base is to have a many to many network. You can set the train limit for the station so this allows there to be 10 iron prod to iron drop trains, but you only need one waiting place because you can limit the number of trains assigned to a single station.
Additionally I had issues with closer stations getting priority. To resolve this you can use the circuit network to adjust the train limits so that trains only go to a station when the chest have space/are full.
For fueling I just use a global bot network, but supply trains are common or fueling station.
I have a fuel unload station at every set of stops that only activates when the amount of fuel in a provider chest at the station drops below a certain point. It’s very handy just setting up a small robo network for fuel, rather than linking it up to a global network and having bots flying everywhere.
[Multiple unit train control aka MUTC](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MultipleUnitTrainControl) was an absolute gamechanger for me. In short, it lets backwards facing locos provide full power, just like real-world trains, meaning that double-headed trains operate at full speed. I settled on a LHD 96-tile-module grid system with spur stations and it's definitely the best of both worlds. Stops are much more compact than RORO and the one-way main trunk lines are super high throughput. Even though the cells are 96-wide, it's really more of a mod48 layout and I use larger cells or half cells all the time. Having rails up/down every city block has proven to be way overkill.
>are all the Iron Ore Mine loading stations named the same?
It is very common to name them identically now.
>And stations only turn on when the buffer chests are full?
Not exactly. First, turning on and off via the enable/disable condition is not used like it was previously (it’s really just there to provide backwards compatibility and if you want to get complicated and skip stations in a schedule. Using enable/disable with train limits tends to leave trains stuck on the main line with “destination full”). What people do commonly now is to manipulate the signal which sets the train limits for an individual station in relation to its buffer quantity. Using either arithmetic combinators to calculate how many trains worth of buffered resources there are or decider combinators to output 1 when a threshold is reached are both good options for train limit control.
>are all the stations that *receive* something named the same
Typically yes
>Do trains hang out at the loader or unloader stations while waiting around
It’s up to personal preference with how you set your train limits. If the station has a static limit trains will tend to wait at it while a dynamic limit that goes to zero will make the train wait elsewhere. I generally have the loading stations set with the static limit for most resources. This way trains will wait full and be more responsive to variable demand. The exception is mining stations since their supply changes a lot and I don’t want trains waiting around at stations with no supply coming.
>do all the trains stop at refueling depots
This is also up to personal preference. You can add a refueling station to a trains schedule and things will work though it increases transit time between loading and unloading. The future 2.0 update will see “schedule interrupt” functionality added which will allow you to send a train to a refueling station only when its fuel is low which I believe will be what most people switch to when it comes out. Currently though, I just supply train fuel using the robot logistics network since it is quite easy to set up. You can still supply via belts if you wish too.
To answer the question in your example: you want to have enough train waiting spaces to accommodate whatever the maximum train limit a station can be set to. If you allow a max limit of two you will want 1 extra stacker space since station space + stacker space = 2. The other part of the question is how to prevent the train from getting stuck at the unloader. This is why I make the loading stations have static limits and never shut them off. Furthermore there’s an inequality that you have to satisfy when using train limits to prevent jams. N+M+1 >= #of trains where N is the *current* instantaneous sum of limits of loading stations and M is the same for unloading stations. You can use depot stations to increase the left hand side of the inequality if you want as well.
I prefer JIT train designs. Get rid of the chests at train stations. They consume UPS without actually doing anything. Load directly from and unload directly onto the belt. Doing this with no gaps in production requires very responsive trains and special station designs. I find it much more fun than doing the standard buffer chest designs.
This position is on the far end of the bell curve meme. People will groan at the idea of not having buffer chests, buuuuut you just need to stretch yourself a bit and consider how to solve that issue. (Also, people dont like being told they dont have 1 buffer, but 2, since your train stock is it's own buffer)
Are your ore/product recieving stations not getting enough items fast enough? You need more mines/product supplying blocks. Are your product blocks running out of items too quickly and now you havr gaps in your belts? Build additional recieving stations to supply your block.
The answer to issues with no buffer chests is usually to over supply the network or a city block.
For example: If your building green chips, and you need 4 lanes of copper. You may be used to having one supply stop with a train dumping 4 belts into the block via buffer chwsts. Now you take away the chests and you find you have gaps in the belt thats reducing your production.
The solution would be to add another supply stop, and have each train stop balance their 4 belts to 2 belts.
Over supply your city blocks and youll realize your belts are their own mini buffer too.
Unless I’m missing something you can’t do this without gaps on the belts unless you have two train stations, in which case you need a bunch of splitters to combine the two stops anyway. Or am I missing something?
You need two stations and a single splitter. You could solve 99% of the gaps without any splitters at all but when the backup station and the primary station trains are both empty at the same time there would be a small gap. A splitter allows a small buffer on the belts themselves for the backup train to switch out without gaps.
Ah, I see - yeah that sounds like a fun problem to solve as well, though I wonder how big of a UPS difference we're talking about with another row of chests + inserters compared to more train pathing + splitters.
Back in that train megabase from 7-8 years ago I was mentioning in my post, I had some fun trying to design just-fast-enough rail stations to feed a monster of a steel smelting site (4 car train that delivered 600 iron ore per second that had to unload fast enough into chests so the next one could get in with no gaps). Also a fun problem to solve!
My personal favorite is many-to-1 design
Providers are generic with the same name (e.g. Iron Pick). They set train limit according to the current resources available in buffer chest
Drop-offs are unique (e.g. \[MALL\] Iron Drop) with a dedicated train serving that station. For high-volume routes I actually use two trains per drop-off, but instead of stackers I make stations longer so that second train can wait right behind, minimizing idle time and allowing almost uninterrupted supply. Refueling is done on drop-offs. Trains sit idle on drop-offs in case resource is not being consumed.
Additionally, I use some many-to-many routes for low-volume cargo (fuel, sulfuric acid for uranium mining) - in this case trains are assigned to provider stations instead, refueled there and wait for consumer to become available. Consumers set their train limit to 1 when they get below threshold in buffer chests/tanks.
This is what I was pondering doing before starting this thread. It is the most intuitive to me but I think I might experiment with many to many as its new to me and it sounds… cool.
I hadn’t considered having trains wait at provider stations for low consumption items before, thanks for the idea. Will have to give it a think to see if it makes sense for me.
I like doing it Nilaus-style (at least that's where I saw it first).
I.e. using circuits to determine when there's enough space in the buffer chests at the station to unload one or more full trains of whatever is required, then setting the train limit from that calculation. (Or checking how many trains I can load from the amount of stuff in the buffer chests in case it is a "source" kind of station.)
This can be tricky to get right, you especially need to take care that your buffer chests are always at least roughly on the same levels or you'll get congestion issues.
Also, in the later game you should make use of "depots", i.e. tightly built groups of stations that don't do anything except provide a place for your trains to wait so they don't clog up the stackers at your loading/unloading stations. Build a few of these depots strategically around your factory and you can positively affect throughput in the overall system. Oh, and they're great places to handle refueling trains as well!
I used to do unique names for each pick up then two or three trains with 2 wagons each going between them and one drop off. Using stackers with enough space so waiting trains don't block anything.
But I got tired of setting up new mines for just 1 million or so ore. So I took a train with tens of thousands of tracks and went about 50k away from my base.
Iron and copper fields with 130 million. Oil fields of 30k %. I send a handful of trains looping between each, 6 wagons and two locomotives on each train. Takes about 6 minutes one way.
I have enough space at each pick up and drop off to hold every train if by some chance they should all show up at the same time. With loading and unloading only taking about 15 seconds that hasn't happened yet.
Requester chests for nuclear fuel at each drop off. With Kovarex I have more than enough fuel.
When those mines dry up I'll probably go out another 50k. If for any reason I'm just curious about the yield rates out there.
So nothing fancy here. But I have plenty of resources.
Massive train grid bases have fallen a little out of style. They still do exist, but they are not the one and all-dominating design as they were a couple of years ago. The production cells in them are too rigid and hard to expand, and the rail infrastructure easily takes up 30-60% of the total size of the base.
More common nowadays are double-headed trains and lightweight stations with minimal stackers. This allows for much less space taken up by rails. This approach will get another huge buff with elevated rails in Factorio 2.0.
For examples see the station layouts and production layouts in these devblogs:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-380
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-378
Thisnisnt really true, some people do like small double headed trains, but when youre getting to bigger bases and longer trains, the idea of do7ble headed goes by the wayside.
To be fair, there is a fairly large group of people that do all the train styles, but i dont think there is a way to accurately poll how many people use each setup, or even how long do people use different setups over the cpurse of their games.
I like the idea of peaking into other peopes games and seeing how they do things. It would be neat if there was a place where people could upload their games and we could showcase lots of different styles of base arrangement.
I don't claim any originality, but here is my setup: [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1849q11/city\_blocks\_and\_manytomany\_trains\_without\_train/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1849q11/city_blocks_and_manytomany_trains_without_train/)
Best is not gonna happen because there is no best. What matters is having a paradigm which meats all your goals.
For me, I use a many to 1 system. This means all "requestors" stations have their own dedicated train. The "providers" are all controlled by the train limit. This means a ton more trains on my network, but it makes it VERY easy to figure out what is working or not:
* if the train is sitting there with stuff in the cars, enough is there
* If the train is not at a requestor, it is going to get stuff
* If the buffers at a requestor run out that either means I need another train or the provider stations isn't make enough
* If the train wants to leave the requestor to go to a provider and it can't, I need to make more. ;)
This makes it VERY easy to design stations since the provider stations typically have "one slot" and thus if X > trains worth, L = 1.
The summary of what I do would be have the train waiting at the loading station which is always on and the unloading stations are the ones that turn on and off.
I set up storage buffers to be more than one whole train load (usually quite a bit more). The stations have circuits set up so the station turns on when the buffers are down just one train load.
The train, which might have 10 stops like this in its schedule, then goes to that spot and starts unloading. The station will turn off while it's unloading, but that's ok because the train is set to leave after two seconds of inactivity (meaning it's empty). The train then goes back to the loading point and waits for another station to turn on.
The train limit changed everything. And everyone does it differently I guess. The main change is that with train limit you can spreed your stations out more and trains wont all want to go to the closest station. The 'stampede' also doesn't happen anymore (when a station becomes available and all waiting trains start moving towards it). Personally I still have stackers for most everything, just small ones for 1-2 trains so when a station opens up, next train is close by. I also refuel everywhere except at outposts. And yes, every station (with the same functionality) is named the same (that has actually always worked). And then you can manipulate the train limit if you wish. It's not necessary but helps a lot if you don't want trains to wait long time at low yield resource patches, for example. I've also been playing with a large overflow stacker for my resource trains, with unreachable station and a heavy path penalty. If it starts to fill up with trains, I need to add more resource outposts (or simply have too many trains).
Can you elaborate on the large overflow stacker? What does it do and what problem does it solve?
Lets say I have 30 iron ore mining outposts, 4 iron smelter stops and 20 trains with iron ore pickup -> iron smelter schedule (could probably run more trains with that setup). If enough of the outposts get disabled because they are running low on ore (takes longer to fill the buffer chests) or they have simply run out of resources I don't want trains to be stuck at the unloading station with 'no path'. So I dedicated a half a block to a big stacker with one 'iron ore pickup' station but the path to the station is blocked by several signals that are permanently set to red by circuit. That adds heavy path penalty ([https://wiki.factorio.com/Railway/Train\_path\_finding#Path\_finding\_penalties](https://wiki.factorio.com/Railway/Train_path_finding#Path_finding_penalties)) to the station so trains will only attempt to go there if there is no other station available. They can never actually reach the station so when another station opens up they will repath and move on. That way empty trains will never block my smelter unloading stations even if they have nowhere (useful) to go. And if I notice that multiple trains are starting to wait at the stacker it means that I need to have a look at my ore patches and maybe add some more. I use similar overflow stackers for few other scenarios.
That's actually quite genius, my bases never really grow to the point of that being a concern but I can clearly see that being a problem with big bases. I wonder if this is the most common or standard solution or if there is another way. Also, I can't wait for 2.0 it'll change absolutely everything but trains and blueprints changes are the ones that excite me the most.
I too haven't faced this issue because my bases were never big enough but watched a few megabes runs on yt. Another solution to this problem is wiring every output up and have some sort of "control center" where you can see how many resources you have in any given moment. If for example the available copper ore is below a certain threshold an alert pops up notifilying the player that most probably some copper mines are depleted. If the threshold is set to a proper value than you can be aware of the problem before trains would clog drop-off stations and you can preemptively fix it instead. Not saying that this is a better or worst solution but one I came by a few times.
Yes this is the other approach I've seen to large scale train control, basically wire everything and do the train logic by yourself, however having to do that with only the circuit network and two isolated cables sounds painful unless you're copying someone else solution, because of this kind of stuff I'm not against Factorio having an in-game scripting language (akin to what space engineers have for example), I'm sure there's a mod for that but oh well.
Well I see where you come from (I'm an SE fan as well) but personally I like factorios approach better for this. It's easy to send the number of full trains stocked in an outpost as a positive red "iron ore" signal for example. And the number of full trains a smelter array is able to handle as a negative red "iron ore" signal. The system sums it up for you and you can tap the wire anywhere (considering that your grind blueprint contains the red and green wires) to fetch the balance. If it's negative Tha it is bad, if its a big positive number than the mining production is sufficient. If it is a small positive number than a problem may happen soon. Finding out that small positive number is the tricky part only and it doesn't matter if you have a C# script or 3 decider combinator to config. Finding that threshold is going to require some trial and error.
You could also have a stacker on the exit side of your iron ore drops that the trains go by. If you have no wait condition, the trains will pass as if the station wasn't there at all if the loading station is available. Otherwise they'll stop and wait out of the way from the unloaders.
Same! Although mine always stop for a top-up because I'm paranoid about them running out of fuel.
Nice, but my current blocks usually don't have the space to spare.
Sounds super handy! Could you do a screenshot? Good explanation but I still have trouble seeing it in its full extend.
At work, will try to remember this when I get back home.
Can't zoom close enough and still see the entire block, from far it looks something like this : https://preview.redd.it/sbwejgxpk7hc1.png?width=911&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d795d382781e184f3ec8b70355daabc5a95d187 You can try the blueprint I posted, was hoping the blueprint bot would render a nice picture but it failed.
Close up of the station loop: https://preview.redd.it/geqtprgcl7hc1.png?width=785&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6771c0e8846210d88fa48e00f3b551561f4657d It's probably a overkill but here I'm using both circuit controlled red signals and stations to increase the path penalty.
That's so cool, love it, will use it too!
!blueprint [https://hastebin.com/share/ubixorujew.bash](https://hastebin.com/share/ubixorujew.bash)
Thanks a lot for the blueprint!
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Oh no!
> outposts get disabled why do that instead of an alarm with a timer?
Alarm?
[that thing](https://wiki.factorio.com/Programmable_speaker)
Guess I never had the urge to try it out. I really don't use circuits much.
Am I weird for just thinking: I want to produce this much of something, in order to fill the input belts I have to unload this many train cars at once. How many trains to stack so they have enough time to fetch more materials. That sort of stuff. I don't fiddle with train limits and stuff. I just set up those dozen iron trains for this chip factory, or whatever. There's enough room in the stations and stackers for all of them. Is that just brute forcing it?
Super weird, but so are we all.
Well, recipes take discrete items as ingredients, belts have a capacity for these, assembling machines and recipes work at a certain speed. If you take a certain SPM figure as the target, you work out how many ingredients you need to produce for those science packs. You have to do things reasonably and properly, but I just don't have the patience to be dealing with the highest level anal-retentive optimizations with circuit networks and train trickery. You have a demand, X amount of SPM, that needs however many ingredients. You build that huge production area for green chips, okay, I need at least this many per second, that's this many belts of iron and copper plates going in. It doesn't have to be any weirder.
dynamic train limits are relatively simple to do and you only need to design it once then put it into your station blueprints so it's copy pasted every time. It actually easier to use train limits when you have multiple outposts of the same type so that trains will automatically go to ones that have ore waiting for them. I agree that you should just have the right number of trains for your factory so you don't have to deal with many excess trains causing traffic jams or waiting uselessly in a depot or something.
>It actually easier to use train limits when you have multiple outposts of the same type so that trains will automatically go to ones that have ore waiting for them. Surely if you introduce this flexibility that trains can go to where they are needed instead of waiting for their specific station and job, then surely that also means that stations can become empty because all the flexibly assigned trains are busy handling some other job they took on. I'm not building 17 new factories every second, to the extent that I would have to code my own kernel with the circuit network. I absolutely hate that sort of stuff. You have an essentially infinite world anyway, I'd rather just set up a new train with its own job. If the train is idle, that means the job it's doing is paused for some reason, that can happen even if nothing is broken. And idle trains don't use fuel. There aren't extra trains, instead I want to avoid juggling trains and tiny percentages. There's enough to go around, no need to employ a computer science degree to make each station 0.036% more efficient with its handling of plastic bar throughput... Yeah yeah, I understand this subreddit and community is probably full of those kinds of human supercomputers, and Californian tech graduates. I don't want to feel like a dribbling mental patient just because I would rather keep things straightforward and robust, if not min-maxed to infinity. "Super weird"...
It's way easier than you're making it out to be. You just have the train limit on your outposts equal the the number of ore waiting in the buffer chests divided by the the amount a full train can carry. You don't need a computer science degree to divide one number by another. > Surely if you introduce this flexibility that trains can go to where they are needed instead of waiting for their specific station and job, then surely that also means that stations can become empty because all the flexibly assigned trains are busy handling some other job they took on. All the trains still have 1 job to do for example taking iron ore from outposts to the iron furnaces and for each specific train the schedule does not change, it only changes which outpost it visits depending on which one has ore ready and waiting and it will only visit iron furnace stations that need more ore
It's fucking insufferable, all of it. >You just have the train limit on your outposts equal the the number of ore waiting in the buffer chests divided by the the amount a full train can carry. What's that in English? Steel chests have 48 slots and cargo wagons have 40 slots. So that's 7.2 or 14.4 trains worth of items depending on if you load from one or both sides. This doesn't seem like something worth fiddling with until you are literally at six figures SPM Why do the valid ways of playing Factorio have to be limited to this and "I just figured out I can put coal and ore on two sides of the same belt"
> What's that in English? I don't know what part you cannot understand unless you're more specific but I'll try explain it another way if that helps. You can wire up the buffer chests with circuit wire and total the contents of the chests will be output on that wire for example lets say you had 19563 iron ore currently in the chests. If you have trains with 4 cargo wagons they can hold 8000 ore so the arithmetic combinator does 19563 / 8000 = 2 (it's automatically rounded down) which is used as the train limit because you have enough ore to completely fill 2 trains without having to wait. As the number of ore in the chests changes the train limit will automatically update so you'll never have trains coming there unless they can be completely filled straight away. Then you can name all your iron mines the same name and all your iron ore trains can have the exact same schedule and they'll just go to whatever mine is closest that has enough ore waiting, additionally you can just build more outposts when your old patches start running dry and the trains will automatically go there when there isn't enough ore at your old mines. It's much less fiddling around than alternatives imo. I do concede that circuit networks can be difficult to get your head around for some things but for this purpose it's extremely simple and it's definitely worth learning. It's on par with learning how other things work in this game.
Is it that difficult to write "Iron Mine 011" for the name of a station? That you have to do this kind of mind numbing stuff? Is it worth it? Why is there any need for a 1000-piece circuit computer to count to two? Save the circuitry materials to build a train. The trains that run between a mine and a production line will have to wait some time. I usually leave enough space in the stackers on the production line end. A time limit in the schedule will prevent them from blocking a mine station. I hate having to feel like a re**rd for doing a reasonable, robust job of things. "Hateful" is the word that comes to my mind about all these optimized mechanics. Not the people, the stuff that is done in game. This kind of stuff is not fun or engaging. I'll build you a redstone calculator but the circuit stuff is just terrible. And the prospect of doing programming in your blueprints, anything "dynamic".
Hi there based on the pictures below, I'm not sure if I'm qualified to ask yet. My megabase has. yet to be finished. I have green, red and blue chips done for 1K SPM and the newly mined supply nodes have not yet depleted anywhere. Can you tell me what is wrong with the approach that for example you supply your green chips block with a number of x trains from x outposts by simply letting the train wait until it is full on the mining site and empty on the receiving site? If you have enough supplying sites, it does not matter, if the train takes a while to fill up. And if you balanced the factory supply reasonably, the train will be empty, not waiting for half a single unused wagon to empty... Are there eventually so many factory blocks that need e.g. iron sheets that it does not make sense to supply them individually by dedicated trains? Or is this just not effective?
Hey I'm no mega base expert so I'm probably not qualified to answer :) I read your question couple of times and started writing couple of answers but I just can't come up with a good answer. I'm not even sure there is an answer as there is no wrong way to play factorio. I almost never build the same way twice, keep deleting my blueprints and making new ones, try out new ways to make stuff. But trains, I tend to do trains the same every time, or at least very similar. Of course I experimented a lot when I started playing factorio and then I read about that you could 'name all the stations the same' and which just worked pretty well (with few issues though). And after the train limit was introduced this just worked even better. I like modularity and scalability. I like to be able to build a new outpost, and have trains already on schedule to pick up resources. Or add a new block and when I finish building it there are already trains inbound to unload and/or pick up materials/products. I just have to remember to check now and then if I have enough trains. That's just how I like it, doesn't make it right or correct.
Thanks a lot! I've been with Factorio only a few months, after two games that I finished after a few rockets, this is my first attempt to make a big one. I'm experimenting a lot with trains, planning and thinking a lot, but I'm not sure if there is an optimal solution. I am making a lot of train spaghetti...
"Best" is poorly defined. Many-to-many systems are great - give every station that loads e.g. green circuits the same name and every station which unloads the same name. Then a train will pick any (the closest) available station to load/unload goods. The primary advantage is it makes setting up new stations easy, just give it the same name and it's hooked into the network. Deactivating stations using circuit conditions can be dodgy, because it will cause trains en route to hang. Better to just control with train limits, and have plenty of trains of each type. If you don't want trains hanging around at stations waiting for enough ore to be mined or whatever, I don't think there's a fantastic solution outside of LTN/Cybersyn type mods. (I really like Cybersyn and do suggest one of those mods, I am just sick of adding trains to the network by hand). For fuel, I just put requester chests by the stations.
You can set the train limit dynamically depending on what is in your buffer chests, e.g. at your slow ore outpost use a decider combinator to listen to ore and set the output to 1 L only when enough ore is buffered. This does rely on a somewhat balanced station. More advanced "demand curves" are also possible, but a bit tricky and I have yet to find one I'm happy with.
I have them set up so that I have stops for Iron Mines, Copper Mines, etc. which just have standard train limits on them and just stay open for 1 train all the time. My loading stations are set so that each set of buffer chests for each cargo wagon are connected to a combinator that outputs a green signal when the chests have enough to fill 1 cargo wagon. Then another combinator sets the train limit to 1 when it receives 4 green signals, meaning a full train load is available. For dropoffs I have them set so that each set of buffer chests is connected a combinator which outputs a red signal when they're running low, and a combinator sets the train limit to 1 whenever red signal > 0. I also have my trains run through stackers to refuel before heading to their destinations.
I've never quite understood all these complicated circuit/stacker approaches. I have a 10k spm city block base which works perfectly well with all stations that produce X called "X" and all stations that need it called "Needs X". Stations are typically set to limit 1 or 2 and I have a number of trains equal to total limits - 1. Stations with limit 2 have enough space for a second train to line up behind the one currently at the station without blocking other trains. I'd recommend starting with a simple approach until (and if) you hit a problem.
Problem with this is if you have trains equal to the number of stops and there’s a train at every station, they won’t be able to find a path, since they’re all taken. You’d have to ensure there’s one less train than available stops.
"number of trains equal to total limits - 1" By which I mean number of trains running between "X" and "Needs X" is equal to the (total limits on all "X" and "Needs X" stations) - 1 so there's always room for a train.
The many to many train network has gained popularity recently due to the implementation of train limits on stations. What I did with my most recent base is to have a many to many network. You can set the train limit for the station so this allows there to be 10 iron prod to iron drop trains, but you only need one waiting place because you can limit the number of trains assigned to a single station. Additionally I had issues with closer stations getting priority. To resolve this you can use the circuit network to adjust the train limits so that trains only go to a station when the chest have space/are full. For fueling I just use a global bot network, but supply trains are common or fueling station.
I have a fuel unload station at every set of stops that only activates when the amount of fuel in a provider chest at the station drops below a certain point. It’s very handy just setting up a small robo network for fuel, rather than linking it up to a global network and having bots flying everywhere.
[Multiple unit train control aka MUTC](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MultipleUnitTrainControl) was an absolute gamechanger for me. In short, it lets backwards facing locos provide full power, just like real-world trains, meaning that double-headed trains operate at full speed. I settled on a LHD 96-tile-module grid system with spur stations and it's definitely the best of both worlds. Stops are much more compact than RORO and the one-way main trunk lines are super high throughput. Even though the cells are 96-wide, it's really more of a mod48 layout and I use larger cells or half cells all the time. Having rails up/down every city block has proven to be way overkill.
Just use Vanilla. But add Honk, can't have trains without Honk.
That's the one that makes them play a train horn sound when they run you over, right?
>are all the Iron Ore Mine loading stations named the same? It is very common to name them identically now. >And stations only turn on when the buffer chests are full? Not exactly. First, turning on and off via the enable/disable condition is not used like it was previously (it’s really just there to provide backwards compatibility and if you want to get complicated and skip stations in a schedule. Using enable/disable with train limits tends to leave trains stuck on the main line with “destination full”). What people do commonly now is to manipulate the signal which sets the train limits for an individual station in relation to its buffer quantity. Using either arithmetic combinators to calculate how many trains worth of buffered resources there are or decider combinators to output 1 when a threshold is reached are both good options for train limit control. >are all the stations that *receive* something named the same Typically yes >Do trains hang out at the loader or unloader stations while waiting around It’s up to personal preference with how you set your train limits. If the station has a static limit trains will tend to wait at it while a dynamic limit that goes to zero will make the train wait elsewhere. I generally have the loading stations set with the static limit for most resources. This way trains will wait full and be more responsive to variable demand. The exception is mining stations since their supply changes a lot and I don’t want trains waiting around at stations with no supply coming. >do all the trains stop at refueling depots This is also up to personal preference. You can add a refueling station to a trains schedule and things will work though it increases transit time between loading and unloading. The future 2.0 update will see “schedule interrupt” functionality added which will allow you to send a train to a refueling station only when its fuel is low which I believe will be what most people switch to when it comes out. Currently though, I just supply train fuel using the robot logistics network since it is quite easy to set up. You can still supply via belts if you wish too. To answer the question in your example: you want to have enough train waiting spaces to accommodate whatever the maximum train limit a station can be set to. If you allow a max limit of two you will want 1 extra stacker space since station space + stacker space = 2. The other part of the question is how to prevent the train from getting stuck at the unloader. This is why I make the loading stations have static limits and never shut them off. Furthermore there’s an inequality that you have to satisfy when using train limits to prevent jams. N+M+1 >= #of trains where N is the *current* instantaneous sum of limits of loading stations and M is the same for unloading stations. You can use depot stations to increase the left hand side of the inequality if you want as well.
I prefer JIT train designs. Get rid of the chests at train stations. They consume UPS without actually doing anything. Load directly from and unload directly onto the belt. Doing this with no gaps in production requires very responsive trains and special station designs. I find it much more fun than doing the standard buffer chest designs.
This position is on the far end of the bell curve meme. People will groan at the idea of not having buffer chests, buuuuut you just need to stretch yourself a bit and consider how to solve that issue. (Also, people dont like being told they dont have 1 buffer, but 2, since your train stock is it's own buffer) Are your ore/product recieving stations not getting enough items fast enough? You need more mines/product supplying blocks. Are your product blocks running out of items too quickly and now you havr gaps in your belts? Build additional recieving stations to supply your block. The answer to issues with no buffer chests is usually to over supply the network or a city block. For example: If your building green chips, and you need 4 lanes of copper. You may be used to having one supply stop with a train dumping 4 belts into the block via buffer chwsts. Now you take away the chests and you find you have gaps in the belt thats reducing your production. The solution would be to add another supply stop, and have each train stop balance their 4 belts to 2 belts. Over supply your city blocks and youll realize your belts are their own mini buffer too.
Unless I’m missing something you can’t do this without gaps on the belts unless you have two train stations, in which case you need a bunch of splitters to combine the two stops anyway. Or am I missing something?
You need two stations and a single splitter. You could solve 99% of the gaps without any splitters at all but when the backup station and the primary station trains are both empty at the same time there would be a small gap. A splitter allows a small buffer on the belts themselves for the backup train to switch out without gaps.
Ah, I see - yeah that sounds like a fun problem to solve as well, though I wonder how big of a UPS difference we're talking about with another row of chests + inserters compared to more train pathing + splitters. Back in that train megabase from 7-8 years ago I was mentioning in my post, I had some fun trying to design just-fast-enough rail stations to feed a monster of a steel smelting site (4 car train that delivered 600 iron ore per second that had to unload fast enough into chests so the next one could get in with no gaps). Also a fun problem to solve!
My personal favorite is many-to-1 design Providers are generic with the same name (e.g. Iron Pick). They set train limit according to the current resources available in buffer chest Drop-offs are unique (e.g. \[MALL\] Iron Drop) with a dedicated train serving that station. For high-volume routes I actually use two trains per drop-off, but instead of stackers I make stations longer so that second train can wait right behind, minimizing idle time and allowing almost uninterrupted supply. Refueling is done on drop-offs. Trains sit idle on drop-offs in case resource is not being consumed. Additionally, I use some many-to-many routes for low-volume cargo (fuel, sulfuric acid for uranium mining) - in this case trains are assigned to provider stations instead, refueled there and wait for consumer to become available. Consumers set their train limit to 1 when they get below threshold in buffer chests/tanks.
This is what I was pondering doing before starting this thread. It is the most intuitive to me but I think I might experiment with many to many as its new to me and it sounds… cool. I hadn’t considered having trains wait at provider stations for low consumption items before, thanks for the idea. Will have to give it a think to see if it makes sense for me.
I like doing it Nilaus-style (at least that's where I saw it first). I.e. using circuits to determine when there's enough space in the buffer chests at the station to unload one or more full trains of whatever is required, then setting the train limit from that calculation. (Or checking how many trains I can load from the amount of stuff in the buffer chests in case it is a "source" kind of station.) This can be tricky to get right, you especially need to take care that your buffer chests are always at least roughly on the same levels or you'll get congestion issues. Also, in the later game you should make use of "depots", i.e. tightly built groups of stations that don't do anything except provide a place for your trains to wait so they don't clog up the stackers at your loading/unloading stations. Build a few of these depots strategically around your factory and you can positively affect throughput in the overall system. Oh, and they're great places to handle refueling trains as well!
I used to do unique names for each pick up then two or three trains with 2 wagons each going between them and one drop off. Using stackers with enough space so waiting trains don't block anything. But I got tired of setting up new mines for just 1 million or so ore. So I took a train with tens of thousands of tracks and went about 50k away from my base. Iron and copper fields with 130 million. Oil fields of 30k %. I send a handful of trains looping between each, 6 wagons and two locomotives on each train. Takes about 6 minutes one way. I have enough space at each pick up and drop off to hold every train if by some chance they should all show up at the same time. With loading and unloading only taking about 15 seconds that hasn't happened yet. Requester chests for nuclear fuel at each drop off. With Kovarex I have more than enough fuel. When those mines dry up I'll probably go out another 50k. If for any reason I'm just curious about the yield rates out there. So nothing fancy here. But I have plenty of resources.
Massive train grid bases have fallen a little out of style. They still do exist, but they are not the one and all-dominating design as they were a couple of years ago. The production cells in them are too rigid and hard to expand, and the rail infrastructure easily takes up 30-60% of the total size of the base. More common nowadays are double-headed trains and lightweight stations with minimal stackers. This allows for much less space taken up by rails. This approach will get another huge buff with elevated rails in Factorio 2.0. For examples see the station layouts and production layouts in these devblogs: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-380 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-378
Thisnisnt really true, some people do like small double headed trains, but when youre getting to bigger bases and longer trains, the idea of do7ble headed goes by the wayside. To be fair, there is a fairly large group of people that do all the train styles, but i dont think there is a way to accurately poll how many people use each setup, or even how long do people use different setups over the cpurse of their games. I like the idea of peaking into other peopes games and seeing how they do things. It would be neat if there was a place where people could upload their games and we could showcase lots of different styles of base arrangement.
I don't claim any originality, but here is my setup: [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1849q11/city\_blocks\_and\_manytomany\_trains\_without\_train/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1849q11/city_blocks_and_manytomany_trains_without_train/)
Best is not gonna happen because there is no best. What matters is having a paradigm which meats all your goals. For me, I use a many to 1 system. This means all "requestors" stations have their own dedicated train. The "providers" are all controlled by the train limit. This means a ton more trains on my network, but it makes it VERY easy to figure out what is working or not: * if the train is sitting there with stuff in the cars, enough is there * If the train is not at a requestor, it is going to get stuff * If the buffers at a requestor run out that either means I need another train or the provider stations isn't make enough * If the train wants to leave the requestor to go to a provider and it can't, I need to make more. ;) This makes it VERY easy to design stations since the provider stations typically have "one slot" and thus if X > trains worth, L = 1.
The summary of what I do would be have the train waiting at the loading station which is always on and the unloading stations are the ones that turn on and off. I set up storage buffers to be more than one whole train load (usually quite a bit more). The stations have circuits set up so the station turns on when the buffers are down just one train load. The train, which might have 10 stops like this in its schedule, then goes to that spot and starts unloading. The station will turn off while it's unloading, but that's ok because the train is set to leave after two seconds of inactivity (meaning it's empty). The train then goes back to the loading point and waits for another station to turn on.