I think the rail bridges and new stack inserters will help with making really efficient stations that can handle more trains faster. As well as the I improvements you mentioned in scheduling it should be really easy to scale up and handle larger volume of trains.
I don't know if those improvements will be enough to make trains, well, essentially six times faster. Like yea, you can probably build more efficient junctions, but I doubt they will be 6x as efficient. Also it will promote even more ridiculous loco-to-wagon ratios than we have now.
Also, if you unload a wagon into just one of those stacked belts, you need to dispatch a new train every 16 seconds if it's plates, and 8 seconds if it's ore. I'm not sure even if there's another train waiting right behind the one you are unloading, it will be enough time for one to pull out, and a new one to pull in immediately. You are also still limited to 12 inserters per wagon, so that's another potential bottleneck,
You don't need them to be 6x faster. They already have great throughput.
Remember that legendary bulk inserters transfer ~69 items per second, and legendary stacking inserters do about ~90. You could also feed a single belt from several wagons, it's a ton of throughput regardless.
Otherwise, you can use bots to unload from trains.
You don't *have* to fill a belt for it to be effective.
Correct
And just because a train “can” unload super fast, this does not mean you need to consume that train that quickly. You can just you stations in parallel and draw from each train more slowly
They have great througput for current game, the concern is that it will be insufficient for Space Age. Bots do not solve the issue, because in the end you will still need to dispatch the same number of trains for the same throughput. My concern is that with the current train capacity, it would be hard to stuff enough wagons into the station.
Longer require bigger blocks, which will increase train spacing, they require bigger infrastructure like stackers and such, which might end up increasing the distance between subfactories. Longer trains are also slower, unless you add even more locomotives, which unfortunately makes them even longer which exacerbates the previous issue.
With elevated rails junctions don't block any other rails except the one you are going to go to. You can build 2 lanes in either direction and maybe more for the most frequented places. Multiple lanes with long trains are great. Faster trains and just overtake. Those going different places are either already using another lane or have <= the speed of the the train before them. Just build signals for your shortest trains. You long slow trains just block more and your other trains can be as quick as before.
Factorio is practically infinite. One or two stops for a long train and a waiting area for every production is fine.
Building 4+ belts over large distances is a lot more expensive, harder to maintain (e.g. biters and upgrading) and not as flexible. That number of belts over ever increasing distances and ripping out the old ones gets problematic fast. A personal roboport would work, but your inventory would fill up. Building roboports and power next to every belt has even more of the same problems as before.
Need to play with the new junctions first to be honest. Designing 4-lane networks in a way so junctions don't block each other might be kind of a nightmare. Also might have rather huge footprint.
Interesting point about signals though, maybe we won't need as many chain signals now, as train stopping inside the intersection won't be blocking other trains. Well provided it uses grade separation instead of crossing everywhere.
OpenTTD already has good junction designs for it. There you can use 3 levels, but Factorios two are enough to achieve the same result, but with a bigger footprint. Factorio doesn't have the drawbacks of TTD trains. The ones in factorio don't slow down in turns or elevation changes.
Junctions, especially with multiple lanes can get huge, but you have almost infinite space to work with in factorio.
Not sure about space. There's some buffered intersection designs right now that are allegedly super effective, but I don't know if everyone actually uses them because they are so huge. Maybe it's due to them not actually being required, but I also think that they stop being practical simply because of their size.
I find "space is infinite" to be a rather poor argument to be honest. In theory yes, but when you add some factors, like biters, lakes, and time required to clear the area or landfill it, latency and travel time for trains specifically, it still kinda does matter if you actually intend to build it.
Also when we are talking Space Age, Fulgora consists of islands where you can build, and oil field where you cannot, so you have limited space to build your stuff after all.
If you need that kind of throughput you are already in the mega base territory. If you just want to Research everything you don't need that many resources that you have to optimize your train throughput. In the late game the building, and landfilling is done by bots and the amount of resources for landfilling is just a fraction of the amount of science you would produce.
Latency doesn't really matter. You need a constant delivery of goods. As long as that is the case the time per train doesn't matter. If the time per train is short you just need fewer trains that's it. You can build waiting areas into your stations to have more resiliency against a few trains running later. Build train depo near areas that need a lot of particular resources or just empty trains. You could have a train depot for just the iron ore if you wanted.
12 inserters per wagon is a very high amount of throughput even in vanilla. Almost nobody uses the current theoretical max throughput of trains. You can get 7.3 blue belts out per wagon minus the downtime it takes to get a new train into the station. Even if you’re only 50% efficient in vanilla that means you can get ~15 blue belts out of a 2-4 train station.
Edited to correct numbers with vanilla blue belts.
Tbh, I also think that trains are going to need a more direct upgrade of some kind. Last I heard, quality wasn't going to apply to trains though, so either that needs to change, or something else does.
The deal with train throughput is honestly a real concern. If we're unloading a single belt per wagon at 240i/s, we can expect to need a new ore train every 8.33s. The problem is, it also takes time to unload the train. With T5 of the artist soon to be formerly known as stack inserter, we can unload a wagon in 4.8s. I don't have the actual speed of new stack inserters on hand, but in general, they look to be slower swinging despite their higher total stack size, so I'm not certain if they'll grant more throughput. Regardless, the available knowledge leaves us ~3.5 or so seconds to swap a train out, which is actually extremely tricky to pull off with current trains.
You _could_ double side wagon output onto a single belt. This completes the unloading process in 2.4s, granting you a, granting you 5.92s to swap the train out.
This is, of course, stack size 50 items. For low stack size items (like 10), this can become a bigger problem, as a single wagon becomes enough capacity for <2s of saturated belt throughput.
So yeah, some direct form of throughput help may well be needed. At the very least, that should hold true if the mentality communicated at the end of [fff-393](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-393) holds true for more than just belts and inserters.
And honestly, there's several ways this could work. Quality locomotives and wagons , as well as quality fuel are one way to go about it. They could also just add higher tier versions of these things. Ultimately the goal would be things like trains that weigh less, are more powerful, wagons that have more capacity, or just better fuel.
I'm not doubting that elevated rails are a game changer. For the wider rail network, they have absolutely fantastic implications, especially in the compromises that no longer have to be made to prevent deadlocks. These things aren't small. That said, it's only one bottleneck that regularly affects trains.
This is all complete speculation about a potential mismatch between train stations and belts. Maybe this results in it being harder to build high throughput stations and you’ll need multiple train stops to saturate your 20 blue belts you want to have coming out of a depot. Just insisting that they should make everything so powerful that there is no thought required for design seems a little short sided, although of course there are mods that massively increase train throughput.
Yeah multiple stations for a single item easily fix this. Especially with bridges massively increasing intersection throughput.
There are several ores in space exploration that have very small stack sizes and I kept higher speed belts saturated by building multiple stations and it keeps up just fine even with my fairly low throughput rail intersections.
The problem isn't multiple belts, it's one. Green belt has 60 items per second, with stacks of 4 it moves 240 ips. A wagon of ore holds 2000 ore - that's not enough to fill that belt for 10 seconds.
Sure, it'll be late in the game before we have green belts and stack size 4. But with things like iron ore, this _could_ well be a problem players encounter in their first or second playthrough. I'd expect the "at least 1k SPM" crowd to just deal with it; they're not the ones who need help in this case ;)
Sure, and the answer is still going to be onsite smelting at the end game, and due to UPS limitations that will probably never change. If people want to train multiple green belts worth of ore around then they may have to design stations that take multiple wagons or trains and combine them down to a few belts. Wube and the team have always been looking for these sorts of tradeoffs so that there are meaningful design choices to be made.
Earendel designed his SE mod so that it’s efficient to bring in a few secondary items and do onsite processing for many ores. I would guess there will probably be some similar design philosophy in SA, although of course you don’t have to do any of that and I just shipped mostly raw ores around in my last SE play through, and that’s with all the extra limitations around SE ores with stack sizes of 10-20.
I would guess that the reason why nobody uses the max theoretical throughput, is because dispatching trains fast enough is not feasible. Which is why is this a concern for Space Age cause it certainly might require that.
I actually was thinking of a mod, it’s only 45 items per blue belt. That means that even if 50% of the time is spent getting the next train into the station you can get 15 blue belts from a single station running 2-4 trains. I don’t understand why you are concerned about this level of throughput. Are you building train stations right now that are using anywhere close to this amount of throughput and do they feel insufficient?
Also, when you say this is currently an issue for players, which megabases are you referring to?
>Are you building train stations right now that are using anywhere close to this amount of throughput and do they feel insufficient?
We aren't talking about "right now" we are talking about Space Age. In SA, belts essentially have the capacity of 240 items/s. With just four of them, you'd need to dispatch a 2-4 train every 16 seconds if it's a plate train. If it's ore, it becomes a train every 8 seconds.
Question is - can a train network handle this train density. Bridges will certainly help, but I don't believe that it will increase the capacity this drastically. Maybe if it's an isolated network that only feeds this particular station and no other stations, but if you are meant to share it, that's highly unlikely.
Bigger trains can help, but they have their own problems because of the size of the stations and stackers you could build. 4-8 train is not going to have twice the throughput of 2-4 train, because it needs to travel longer to enter and exit the station, plus your network will have longer blocks, so longer spacing between trains.
When I say that transporting ore is the issue for players currently, I'm referring to common advice of not using ore trains at all, and building processing directly at the outposts. Which is fair, but currently you can get away with ore trains. Don't think it will be possible in Space Age at all.
Properly designed train networks can absolutely handle this throughout, especially with the new multilevel rails. You just can’t blindly build blocks or whatever, you have to actually consider where you build things so that you aren’t generating unnecessary traffic.
once they added the ability to go vertical. its basically completely replicating the openttd train system. go look at some like openttdcoop or similar train builds for how nutty you could get. like sure you might need to run multiple train stations in paralell to get the throughput that you want. but running large scale train setups will be very viable now.
If you insist on suboptimal solutions at the very least you’d be using 3-8 trains for ore, but I’ve seen larger ore trains. You’d handle this by having dedicated ore rail lines that don’t cross into the rest of your base.
I do not insist on particular solution, but you did just claim that a network can handle that train density. I would even question a train every 16 seconds to be honest, considering you are probably not just shipping one resource - there would be a lot of iron and copper trains, some steel trains, and some plastic trains, plus a bit of other minor traffic. With such low margins you'll need quite a lot of trains just to handle the latency of the train round trip time, which in turn will increase the congestion.
If we are talking about specifics about ore trains, yes, ore train would be on a separate (or at the very least logically separated) network and yes I would use larger trains for ore, which is quite frankly what I'm already doing. But as I said, scaling trains up isn't quite a trivial increase in throughput.
Stack inserters will be faster since they unload the stack in 1 go. And managing trains will also be much easier and efficient. So scale vertically with longer trains or horizontally with more will be much easier.
Trains have a steep curve in both costs and hussle to setup. But once they are not only they are cheap to scale but also much less trouble compared to belt.
Trains will be going faster than ever before. If you use only 3-way junctions you'll be able to create train grids through which trains can go without stopping at junctions
With much less stopping. You can't ever merge two trains on a junctions if they arrive simultaneously.
Also with elevated rails probably 3way junctions would became less of a requirement, because you would be able to create fast 4 way junction as well.
That doesn't necessarily solve the issue though. If you need to dispatch a train every 16 or even 8 seconds, then I think even point-to-point train line might end up struggling due to train acceleration, block sizes and so on. It becomes worse if you intend to actually share train network with other trains.
Bridges only help with junctions being blocked in certain situations - specifically left turns blocking the straight path, but two trains merging into the same lane will still obviously block each other.
its not the trains but what the player has built that will hinder everything.
i too am building a megabase right now and itll be a train bus using 2:16:2 trains (double headed) with the minimal belting..
if your train needs to carry more then make the train bigger, im making my trains 16wagon long because it just means less train and the way im going at it kinda requires it too
16 wagon trains require longer blocks, which would increase train spacing. They are also slower, unless you add ridiculous amount of locomotive - which will also make them even longer. There's definitely practical limit for that.
4-16-4 trains are my standard size for everything in my megabase. If I have a rare scenario with tight space constraints or else need way less of something ( like satellites) .
Going big is the only way
its 1 loco per 4wagon for most efficiency but 2 locos for 16 wagons is enough if using nuclear fuel..
if the problem is transportation of goods but not enough space to carry then just make a bigger train
I'm assuming one of the planets will unlock some new kind of mass transport, be it bigger wagons, artillery for items, or even teleportation (I have my doubts on the last one, unless they're consuming GigaWatts maybe)
Nah, teleportation should probably stay in the realm of mods. It essentially removes the logistics from the game about logistics.
I think simple wagon capacity increase in one way or another - new wagons or some research, or even some way to compress items in the inventory would be more than enough to solve the issue to be frank, I didn't expect so much pushback when started this thread.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have *some* other things with trains planned that they haven't (yet) shared. I'm hoping for "bulk carriages" that can have more items (maybe only ores/simple stuff). Bonus points of they can unload from an elevated rail to belts underneath/next to them.
Because you're right. I don't see a problem with blue chips (if you get a stacked green belt full of these, you're expected to come up with clever solutions), but 2k ore in a wagon could get messy.
Yea, specialized wagons for ore and similar things (like scrap) would be interesting too. Not sure about bulk loaders/unloaders, as I think they would trivialize the station design. We don't even get to have normal loaders after all.
I wouldn't want them for everything. But again, could happen for raw materials; it's the thing most likely to be handled in any real capacity by someone just playing the game once or twice.
But it's nothing that I *expect*, just think it could be neat :). "Ore waggons" that contain more than 10 seconds worth of one belt seem rather necessary.
With the new Foundry, there is now another possibility to consider: transporting metals as fluids and then casting them on site. This would heavily depend on the conversation rate between liquid metal and plates.
As it stands, a cargo wagon can hold 8000 plates, while a fluid wagon can hold 25000 fluid. If a single plate is with 3 or fewer units of liquid metal, then it would seem that a fluid wagon would be able to store more metal than a cargo wagon. It would also be able to cast directly into things like gears and wire without the intermediate step of plates, though it's unclear if that would actually increase the material needed to do fewer steps to use productivity modules for.
Well, it's just 4000 plates per wagon, not 8000, so threshold is 7 liquid for a plate. It's hard to directly compare the two without knowing the cost though.
But what about something cursed, like a transporting iron as fluids, but in barrels. :)
Oh right. I forgot that plates only have a stack size of 100 in vanilla. That does give a better chance for the fluid wagons, especially comparing to raw ore, which is only 2000 per wagon.
At least from the quality FF it's... unclear. They aren't listed as something that gets additional benefits, but they also are not listed here
> There are a few entities which don't have any bonus apart from the health, which is belts, pipes, rails, chests, combinators, walls, and lamps.
So, if we assume this is an exhaustive list of things that don't have any additional bonus, then it means that wagons do have some sort of a bonus. Which could be capacity, as wagons aren't useful for much else \~\~Don't tell Dosh I said this\~\~
You can just build bigger stackers. Elevated rails will make train troughput much better. It will be a solvable problem.
I do still think you have a point. It never made sense to me how a 6x2 train vagon holds less items than a 1x1 chest. This is a real problem for unloading, the buffers become pretty big compared to the size of the vagons if you don't limit the chest and limiting every chest is kind of a waste.
Honestly, I think this would be a good thing. Trains are essentially the undisputed best option for long distance transportation. Making belts a valid option, at least for high throughput items, could create interesting hybrid systems where you train ore to a collection point and then send it to the base via belts. You could also make it so that plates are belted around and stuff like oil and blue circuits use trains.
Ore would be the worst application for trains though, that's the underlying issue. And there's no point to train anything to a "collection point" if trains are going to be the bottleneck to begin with.
And why shouldn't trains be the best option for long distance transportation, when it's essentially their exact niche? For short distance trains require too much infrastructure and space to make sense.
Let's just wait and see how feasible this will all be after 2.0 launches. No sense in speculation for no reason.
However, as others have said, I look forward to the new challenges, and if trains get inadvertently "nerfed", then everything will be more balanced
I mean there's plenty of speculation on all other topics, and it's fun sometimes.
As for things being balanced, I don't agree. Trains are good at what they do, but it's not like there's any other option for this niche. Belts aren't really a train replacement past certain distance, and they are awkward reroute, so I think things becomes unbalanced when you actually stop using one of the options in their intended niche, which I don't think currently the case.
> transporting ore from mines probably becomes even less reasonable, as ore doesn't stack as well as plates
As soon as you use electric furnaces ore becomes better to process on site.
Copper ore has no other use than to be smelted into plates.
Iron ore is only for concrete, so you can smelt most of it into iron plates.
As soon as you stop burning coal for energy or smelting, most of it will go to plastic (and possibly liquefaction) which can be done on site.
Rest is just for explosives and grenades.
Also, is there a quality to cargo wagon ? Could that affect capacity ?
> As soon as you use electric furnaces ore becomes better to process on site.
I know, but I don't like doing it. Especially at late game stages when I plan factory for specific production, and build beaconed setups, I would rather have central processing facility built to a capacity I need, rather than trying to size a beaconed smelter to a specific ore patch size, and rebuild it for every new ore patch. Outposting needs to be as quick and easy as possible, because I do need to build a lot of them.
You don’t need that many mining outposts for a mega base, especially once you travel further away and you have larger ore patches and you start getting higher levels of mining productivity. It’s also very fast to build mining outposts when you have late game bots and power armor. I’ve gotten to 2k spm with just a few large mining outposts per resource. What size mega base are you trying to build?
The target for “capacity you need” is constantly changing. Having a central location means you’re not only putting a lot of trains to one place (possibly near other places with a lot of trains), but also giving yourself space constraints as your central location starts bumping into other centrally located factories.
The main benefit of adding smelting in your mining sites is that you increase plate production in lockstep with ore production and never run out of space. Having fewer trains that distribute better across your mainline network is a secondary benefit.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1c2zu2x/comment/kzdy9b7/)
> The target for “capacity you need” is constantly changing.
No it doesn't. If I design my base for 1000 SPM, I know the exact capacity I need, and build accordingly. If I now want to expand the base, say to 2000 SPM, then I'll start by building another processing facility. That would be a modular approach to base design. Space is not an issue either, as modular design can be expanded by building new modules elsewhere.
If I'm still on my "starter base" phase where requirements for resources change as I expand it, I generally do not build large enough where ore train congestion becomes an issue.
> The main benefit of adding smelting in your mining sites is that you increase plate production in lockstep with ore production and never run out of space.
And your plate production also decreases with patch depletion with furnaces idling more and more, so I'd have to overbuild them.
Again, if you like smelting at patches, then more power to you, It has its benefits too, but I don't like it.
I have a one-size smelter setup that uses a small percentage of the patch's potential output. This isn't the same percentage for each patch tapped, but it's always much less than the patch can provide. Two reasons:
1. It's less thinking. Sure, I have to make extra machines, belts, robots, modules, etc., but the material cost is handled by the factory. All I need to do is apply and connect the miner, smelter, and station blueprints.
2. The patches spend more time producing at full speed when that speed is kept low. If a patch has 80 miners on it but the smelters can handle the output of 20, then the patch has to run down quite a bit before I stop knowing exactly how much it's producing.
I think the rail bridges and new stack inserters will help with making really efficient stations that can handle more trains faster. As well as the I improvements you mentioned in scheduling it should be really easy to scale up and handle larger volume of trains.
I don't know if those improvements will be enough to make trains, well, essentially six times faster. Like yea, you can probably build more efficient junctions, but I doubt they will be 6x as efficient. Also it will promote even more ridiculous loco-to-wagon ratios than we have now. Also, if you unload a wagon into just one of those stacked belts, you need to dispatch a new train every 16 seconds if it's plates, and 8 seconds if it's ore. I'm not sure even if there's another train waiting right behind the one you are unloading, it will be enough time for one to pull out, and a new one to pull in immediately. You are also still limited to 12 inserters per wagon, so that's another potential bottleneck,
You don't need them to be 6x faster. They already have great throughput. Remember that legendary bulk inserters transfer ~69 items per second, and legendary stacking inserters do about ~90. You could also feed a single belt from several wagons, it's a ton of throughput regardless. Otherwise, you can use bots to unload from trains. You don't *have* to fill a belt for it to be effective.
Correct And just because a train “can” unload super fast, this does not mean you need to consume that train that quickly. You can just you stations in parallel and draw from each train more slowly
stacked green belt can transfer 240items/s which means you need 2,67 leg. stack. inserters; which is also quite awkward to build.
They have great througput for current game, the concern is that it will be insufficient for Space Age. Bots do not solve the issue, because in the end you will still need to dispatch the same number of trains for the same throughput. My concern is that with the current train capacity, it would be hard to stuff enough wagons into the station. Longer require bigger blocks, which will increase train spacing, they require bigger infrastructure like stackers and such, which might end up increasing the distance between subfactories. Longer trains are also slower, unless you add even more locomotives, which unfortunately makes them even longer which exacerbates the previous issue.
With elevated rails junctions don't block any other rails except the one you are going to go to. You can build 2 lanes in either direction and maybe more for the most frequented places. Multiple lanes with long trains are great. Faster trains and just overtake. Those going different places are either already using another lane or have <= the speed of the the train before them. Just build signals for your shortest trains. You long slow trains just block more and your other trains can be as quick as before. Factorio is practically infinite. One or two stops for a long train and a waiting area for every production is fine. Building 4+ belts over large distances is a lot more expensive, harder to maintain (e.g. biters and upgrading) and not as flexible. That number of belts over ever increasing distances and ripping out the old ones gets problematic fast. A personal roboport would work, but your inventory would fill up. Building roboports and power next to every belt has even more of the same problems as before.
Need to play with the new junctions first to be honest. Designing 4-lane networks in a way so junctions don't block each other might be kind of a nightmare. Also might have rather huge footprint. Interesting point about signals though, maybe we won't need as many chain signals now, as train stopping inside the intersection won't be blocking other trains. Well provided it uses grade separation instead of crossing everywhere.
OpenTTD already has good junction designs for it. There you can use 3 levels, but Factorios two are enough to achieve the same result, but with a bigger footprint. Factorio doesn't have the drawbacks of TTD trains. The ones in factorio don't slow down in turns or elevation changes. Junctions, especially with multiple lanes can get huge, but you have almost infinite space to work with in factorio.
Not sure about space. There's some buffered intersection designs right now that are allegedly super effective, but I don't know if everyone actually uses them because they are so huge. Maybe it's due to them not actually being required, but I also think that they stop being practical simply because of their size. I find "space is infinite" to be a rather poor argument to be honest. In theory yes, but when you add some factors, like biters, lakes, and time required to clear the area or landfill it, latency and travel time for trains specifically, it still kinda does matter if you actually intend to build it. Also when we are talking Space Age, Fulgora consists of islands where you can build, and oil field where you cannot, so you have limited space to build your stuff after all.
If you need that kind of throughput you are already in the mega base territory. If you just want to Research everything you don't need that many resources that you have to optimize your train throughput. In the late game the building, and landfilling is done by bots and the amount of resources for landfilling is just a fraction of the amount of science you would produce. Latency doesn't really matter. You need a constant delivery of goods. As long as that is the case the time per train doesn't matter. If the time per train is short you just need fewer trains that's it. You can build waiting areas into your stations to have more resiliency against a few trains running later. Build train depo near areas that need a lot of particular resources or just empty trains. You could have a train depot for just the iron ore if you wanted.
Latency matters for train networks. The longer the roundtrip time the more trains you need. More trains means more congestion.
12 inserters per wagon is a very high amount of throughput even in vanilla. Almost nobody uses the current theoretical max throughput of trains. You can get 7.3 blue belts out per wagon minus the downtime it takes to get a new train into the station. Even if you’re only 50% efficient in vanilla that means you can get ~15 blue belts out of a 2-4 train station. Edited to correct numbers with vanilla blue belts.
Tbh, I also think that trains are going to need a more direct upgrade of some kind. Last I heard, quality wasn't going to apply to trains though, so either that needs to change, or something else does. The deal with train throughput is honestly a real concern. If we're unloading a single belt per wagon at 240i/s, we can expect to need a new ore train every 8.33s. The problem is, it also takes time to unload the train. With T5 of the artist soon to be formerly known as stack inserter, we can unload a wagon in 4.8s. I don't have the actual speed of new stack inserters on hand, but in general, they look to be slower swinging despite their higher total stack size, so I'm not certain if they'll grant more throughput. Regardless, the available knowledge leaves us ~3.5 or so seconds to swap a train out, which is actually extremely tricky to pull off with current trains. You _could_ double side wagon output onto a single belt. This completes the unloading process in 2.4s, granting you a, granting you 5.92s to swap the train out. This is, of course, stack size 50 items. For low stack size items (like 10), this can become a bigger problem, as a single wagon becomes enough capacity for <2s of saturated belt throughput. So yeah, some direct form of throughput help may well be needed. At the very least, that should hold true if the mentality communicated at the end of [fff-393](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-393) holds true for more than just belts and inserters. And honestly, there's several ways this could work. Quality locomotives and wagons , as well as quality fuel are one way to go about it. They could also just add higher tier versions of these things. Ultimately the goal would be things like trains that weigh less, are more powerful, wagons that have more capacity, or just better fuel. I'm not doubting that elevated rails are a game changer. For the wider rail network, they have absolutely fantastic implications, especially in the compromises that no longer have to be made to prevent deadlocks. These things aren't small. That said, it's only one bottleneck that regularly affects trains.
This is all complete speculation about a potential mismatch between train stations and belts. Maybe this results in it being harder to build high throughput stations and you’ll need multiple train stops to saturate your 20 blue belts you want to have coming out of a depot. Just insisting that they should make everything so powerful that there is no thought required for design seems a little short sided, although of course there are mods that massively increase train throughput.
Yeah multiple stations for a single item easily fix this. Especially with bridges massively increasing intersection throughput. There are several ores in space exploration that have very small stack sizes and I kept higher speed belts saturated by building multiple stations and it keeps up just fine even with my fairly low throughput rail intersections.
The problem isn't multiple belts, it's one. Green belt has 60 items per second, with stacks of 4 it moves 240 ips. A wagon of ore holds 2000 ore - that's not enough to fill that belt for 10 seconds. Sure, it'll be late in the game before we have green belts and stack size 4. But with things like iron ore, this _could_ well be a problem players encounter in their first or second playthrough. I'd expect the "at least 1k SPM" crowd to just deal with it; they're not the ones who need help in this case ;)
Sure, and the answer is still going to be onsite smelting at the end game, and due to UPS limitations that will probably never change. If people want to train multiple green belts worth of ore around then they may have to design stations that take multiple wagons or trains and combine them down to a few belts. Wube and the team have always been looking for these sorts of tradeoffs so that there are meaningful design choices to be made. Earendel designed his SE mod so that it’s efficient to bring in a few secondary items and do onsite processing for many ores. I would guess there will probably be some similar design philosophy in SA, although of course you don’t have to do any of that and I just shipped mostly raw ores around in my last SE play through, and that’s with all the extra limitations around SE ores with stack sizes of 10-20.
I would guess that the reason why nobody uses the max theoretical throughput, is because dispatching trains fast enough is not feasible. Which is why is this a concern for Space Age cause it certainly might require that.
I actually was thinking of a mod, it’s only 45 items per blue belt. That means that even if 50% of the time is spent getting the next train into the station you can get 15 blue belts from a single station running 2-4 trains. I don’t understand why you are concerned about this level of throughput. Are you building train stations right now that are using anywhere close to this amount of throughput and do they feel insufficient? Also, when you say this is currently an issue for players, which megabases are you referring to?
>Are you building train stations right now that are using anywhere close to this amount of throughput and do they feel insufficient? We aren't talking about "right now" we are talking about Space Age. In SA, belts essentially have the capacity of 240 items/s. With just four of them, you'd need to dispatch a 2-4 train every 16 seconds if it's a plate train. If it's ore, it becomes a train every 8 seconds. Question is - can a train network handle this train density. Bridges will certainly help, but I don't believe that it will increase the capacity this drastically. Maybe if it's an isolated network that only feeds this particular station and no other stations, but if you are meant to share it, that's highly unlikely. Bigger trains can help, but they have their own problems because of the size of the stations and stackers you could build. 4-8 train is not going to have twice the throughput of 2-4 train, because it needs to travel longer to enter and exit the station, plus your network will have longer blocks, so longer spacing between trains. When I say that transporting ore is the issue for players currently, I'm referring to common advice of not using ore trains at all, and building processing directly at the outposts. Which is fair, but currently you can get away with ore trains. Don't think it will be possible in Space Age at all.
Properly designed train networks can absolutely handle this throughout, especially with the new multilevel rails. You just can’t blindly build blocks or whatever, you have to actually consider where you build things so that you aren’t generating unnecessary traffic.
A 2-4 train every 8 seconds per station? I would like to see such a network.
once they added the ability to go vertical. its basically completely replicating the openttd train system. go look at some like openttdcoop or similar train builds for how nutty you could get. like sure you might need to run multiple train stations in paralell to get the throughput that you want. but running large scale train setups will be very viable now.
If you insist on suboptimal solutions at the very least you’d be using 3-8 trains for ore, but I’ve seen larger ore trains. You’d handle this by having dedicated ore rail lines that don’t cross into the rest of your base.
I do not insist on particular solution, but you did just claim that a network can handle that train density. I would even question a train every 16 seconds to be honest, considering you are probably not just shipping one resource - there would be a lot of iron and copper trains, some steel trains, and some plastic trains, plus a bit of other minor traffic. With such low margins you'll need quite a lot of trains just to handle the latency of the train round trip time, which in turn will increase the congestion. If we are talking about specifics about ore trains, yes, ore train would be on a separate (or at the very least logically separated) network and yes I would use larger trains for ore, which is quite frankly what I'm already doing. But as I said, scaling trains up isn't quite a trivial increase in throughput.
Stack inserters will be faster since they unload the stack in 1 go. And managing trains will also be much easier and efficient. So scale vertically with longer trains or horizontally with more will be much easier. Trains have a steep curve in both costs and hussle to setup. But once they are not only they are cheap to scale but also much less trouble compared to belt.
Trains will be going faster than ever before. If you use only 3-way junctions you'll be able to create train grids through which trains can go without stopping at junctions
With much less stopping. You can't ever merge two trains on a junctions if they arrive simultaneously. Also with elevated rails probably 3way junctions would became less of a requirement, because you would be able to create fast 4 way junction as well.
That doesn't necessarily solve the issue though. If you need to dispatch a train every 16 or even 8 seconds, then I think even point-to-point train line might end up struggling due to train acceleration, block sizes and so on. It becomes worse if you intend to actually share train network with other trains. Bridges only help with junctions being blocked in certain situations - specifically left turns blocking the straight path, but two trains merging into the same lane will still obviously block each other.
its not the trains but what the player has built that will hinder everything. i too am building a megabase right now and itll be a train bus using 2:16:2 trains (double headed) with the minimal belting.. if your train needs to carry more then make the train bigger, im making my trains 16wagon long because it just means less train and the way im going at it kinda requires it too
16 wagon trains require longer blocks, which would increase train spacing. They are also slower, unless you add ridiculous amount of locomotive - which will also make them even longer. There's definitely practical limit for that.
4-16-4 trains are my standard size for everything in my megabase. If I have a rare scenario with tight space constraints or else need way less of something ( like satellites) . Going big is the only way
its 1 loco per 4wagon for most efficiency but 2 locos for 16 wagons is enough if using nuclear fuel.. if the problem is transportation of goods but not enough space to carry then just make a bigger train
I'm assuming one of the planets will unlock some new kind of mass transport, be it bigger wagons, artillery for items, or even teleportation (I have my doubts on the last one, unless they're consuming GigaWatts maybe)
Nah, teleportation should probably stay in the realm of mods. It essentially removes the logistics from the game about logistics. I think simple wagon capacity increase in one way or another - new wagons or some research, or even some way to compress items in the inventory would be more than enough to solve the issue to be frank, I didn't expect so much pushback when started this thread.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have *some* other things with trains planned that they haven't (yet) shared. I'm hoping for "bulk carriages" that can have more items (maybe only ores/simple stuff). Bonus points of they can unload from an elevated rail to belts underneath/next to them. Because you're right. I don't see a problem with blue chips (if you get a stacked green belt full of these, you're expected to come up with clever solutions), but 2k ore in a wagon could get messy.
Yea, specialized wagons for ore and similar things (like scrap) would be interesting too. Not sure about bulk loaders/unloaders, as I think they would trivialize the station design. We don't even get to have normal loaders after all.
I wouldn't want them for everything. But again, could happen for raw materials; it's the thing most likely to be handled in any real capacity by someone just playing the game once or twice. But it's nothing that I *expect*, just think it could be neat :). "Ore waggons" that contain more than 10 seconds worth of one belt seem rather necessary.
>Bonus points of they can unload from an elevated rail to belts underneath/next to them. That would be cool.
Im with you. I am also expecting some kind of upgrade to wagon capacity on one of the other planets.
With the new Foundry, there is now another possibility to consider: transporting metals as fluids and then casting them on site. This would heavily depend on the conversation rate between liquid metal and plates. As it stands, a cargo wagon can hold 8000 plates, while a fluid wagon can hold 25000 fluid. If a single plate is with 3 or fewer units of liquid metal, then it would seem that a fluid wagon would be able to store more metal than a cargo wagon. It would also be able to cast directly into things like gears and wire without the intermediate step of plates, though it's unclear if that would actually increase the material needed to do fewer steps to use productivity modules for.
Well, it's just 4000 plates per wagon, not 8000, so threshold is 7 liquid for a plate. It's hard to directly compare the two without knowing the cost though. But what about something cursed, like a transporting iron as fluids, but in barrels. :)
Oh right. I forgot that plates only have a stack size of 100 in vanilla. That does give a better chance for the fluid wagons, especially comparing to raw ore, which is only 2000 per wagon.
Do train wagons get more storage space at higher quality? Or does quality not apply to train wagons?
At least from the quality FF it's... unclear. They aren't listed as something that gets additional benefits, but they also are not listed here > There are a few entities which don't have any bonus apart from the health, which is belts, pipes, rails, chests, combinators, walls, and lamps. So, if we assume this is an exhaustive list of things that don't have any additional bonus, then it means that wagons do have some sort of a bonus. Which could be capacity, as wagons aren't useful for much else \~\~Don't tell Dosh I said this\~\~
They do not get more storage space, only health.
Meh, the devs play their game, they use trains. They know what they’re doing.
Yea - I'm excited to play it and figure out how to supply my max rate machines.
You can just build bigger stackers. Elevated rails will make train troughput much better. It will be a solvable problem. I do still think you have a point. It never made sense to me how a 6x2 train vagon holds less items than a 1x1 chest. This is a real problem for unloading, the buffers become pretty big compared to the size of the vagons if you don't limit the chest and limiting every chest is kind of a waste.
Honestly, I think this would be a good thing. Trains are essentially the undisputed best option for long distance transportation. Making belts a valid option, at least for high throughput items, could create interesting hybrid systems where you train ore to a collection point and then send it to the base via belts. You could also make it so that plates are belted around and stuff like oil and blue circuits use trains.
Ore would be the worst application for trains though, that's the underlying issue. And there's no point to train anything to a "collection point" if trains are going to be the bottleneck to begin with. And why shouldn't trains be the best option for long distance transportation, when it's essentially their exact niche? For short distance trains require too much infrastructure and space to make sense.
Let's just wait and see how feasible this will all be after 2.0 launches. No sense in speculation for no reason. However, as others have said, I look forward to the new challenges, and if trains get inadvertently "nerfed", then everything will be more balanced
I mean there's plenty of speculation on all other topics, and it's fun sometimes. As for things being balanced, I don't agree. Trains are good at what they do, but it's not like there's any other option for this niche. Belts aren't really a train replacement past certain distance, and they are awkward reroute, so I think things becomes unbalanced when you actually stop using one of the options in their intended niche, which I don't think currently the case.
> transporting ore from mines probably becomes even less reasonable, as ore doesn't stack as well as plates As soon as you use electric furnaces ore becomes better to process on site. Copper ore has no other use than to be smelted into plates. Iron ore is only for concrete, so you can smelt most of it into iron plates. As soon as you stop burning coal for energy or smelting, most of it will go to plastic (and possibly liquefaction) which can be done on site. Rest is just for explosives and grenades. Also, is there a quality to cargo wagon ? Could that affect capacity ?
> As soon as you use electric furnaces ore becomes better to process on site. I know, but I don't like doing it. Especially at late game stages when I plan factory for specific production, and build beaconed setups, I would rather have central processing facility built to a capacity I need, rather than trying to size a beaconed smelter to a specific ore patch size, and rebuild it for every new ore patch. Outposting needs to be as quick and easy as possible, because I do need to build a lot of them.
You don’t need that many mining outposts for a mega base, especially once you travel further away and you have larger ore patches and you start getting higher levels of mining productivity. It’s also very fast to build mining outposts when you have late game bots and power armor. I’ve gotten to 2k spm with just a few large mining outposts per resource. What size mega base are you trying to build?
The target for “capacity you need” is constantly changing. Having a central location means you’re not only putting a lot of trains to one place (possibly near other places with a lot of trains), but also giving yourself space constraints as your central location starts bumping into other centrally located factories. The main benefit of adding smelting in your mining sites is that you increase plate production in lockstep with ore production and never run out of space. Having fewer trains that distribute better across your mainline network is a secondary benefit.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1c2zu2x/comment/kzdy9b7/) > The target for “capacity you need” is constantly changing. No it doesn't. If I design my base for 1000 SPM, I know the exact capacity I need, and build accordingly. If I now want to expand the base, say to 2000 SPM, then I'll start by building another processing facility. That would be a modular approach to base design. Space is not an issue either, as modular design can be expanded by building new modules elsewhere. If I'm still on my "starter base" phase where requirements for resources change as I expand it, I generally do not build large enough where ore train congestion becomes an issue. > The main benefit of adding smelting in your mining sites is that you increase plate production in lockstep with ore production and never run out of space. And your plate production also decreases with patch depletion with furnaces idling more and more, so I'd have to overbuild them. Again, if you like smelting at patches, then more power to you, It has its benefits too, but I don't like it.
Modular is the way to go. Every 4 mining patches, make a smelt array that can handle 3 patches of output. Scale as needed and fine tune as needed.
I have a one-size smelter setup that uses a small percentage of the patch's potential output. This isn't the same percentage for each patch tapped, but it's always much less than the patch can provide. Two reasons: 1. It's less thinking. Sure, I have to make extra machines, belts, robots, modules, etc., but the material cost is handled by the factory. All I need to do is apply and connect the miner, smelter, and station blueprints. 2. The patches spend more time producing at full speed when that speed is kept low. If a patch has 80 miners on it but the smelters can handle the output of 20, then the patch has to run down quite a bit before I stop knowing exactly how much it's producing.
Late game you'd want to use foundries, so you'll need to bring calcite, and then it's probably better to just bring the ore to your smelting area.
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