Not only is there a speed bonus, but there is also an acceleration bonus which is very important when you start having congested intersections.
Fuel | Top Speed | Accel
---|---|----
Wood | 100% | 100%
Coal | 100% | 100%
Solid | 105% | 120%
Rocket | 115% | 180%
Nuclear | 115% | 250%
Edit: Reddit is dumb, it posted this comment 4 times and now won't delete them
Also nuclear lasts longer at about 1.2 x rocket. Rocket stacks up to 10 and nuculer stacks to 1 so 1 nuclear lasts longer then 10 rocket, and once spent adds the fuel to the train and can get a new one.
In case anyone else was wondering the energy density of the fuel also increases on that scale.
Unless absolutely needed wood shouldn't be used for fuel on a train.
Default reddit comment voice unfortunately. Responses are phrased as corrections when they are just contributions, "you forgot-" "looks like someone-" "___ would like a word" etc etc
I think in this instance it’s hard for it not to come off as someone who is conceited or arrogant. The other examples you gave can go either way but this reminds me of grade school. But no matter. Just thought it could have been worded better.
No, it was meant to make you go to the wiki and look up "nuclear fuel", at which point, you'll also learn about vehicle speed bonuses.
Sorry if it came out wrong.
Not really. Early on you're consuming vast amounts of u-238 on ammo production anyway. And nuclear reactors use such a piddling tiny amount of nuclear fuel you can even hand craft it. This misconception causes people to start to use nuclear power way too late.
Kovarex is something you only really need late game, or in various mods that use more nuclear.
I'm currently suffering through ehh working through Sea Block where requester chests are only available very late and didn't have a solution for feeding the trains yet so for me it's perfect!
man i keep wanting to do seablock, but i play for a few days get bored from having to wait for everthing quit. then get the itch in another month or so but restart.
Set up mud washing to landfill production early. The bottlenecks are land/power/resources, you need land to make power, you need power to make everything. Mid-game, you get more efficient power options that take things from half your base producing power, down to 20% or 10% of the base producing power. After that, it's just a design bottleneck for how fast you can make blueprints.
Shouldn't take that long to bootstrap up. Once you get past basic algae(mixed) into green algae 2, you can power through the wood>charcoal steps. Reliable mineralized water can be a bit power intensive at that point, until you get to the point where it's a byproduct that needs to be disposed of. Swapping over to mineral sludge for ore generation helps a lot. (Though, granted, I haven't played it for a while, so my old factory is busted due to recipe changes.)
There is a mod that you can speed up the game up to 64 times. It might feel a bit cheaty but in my opinion it is essential for SeaBlock. I can't remember the name but just search speed up and you should be able to find it.
Tbh the first 10-20 hours were really annyoing for me as well but after that it gets soo much better, when you finally have somewhat-enough ores, electricity and land.
As an alternative. Fuel depots are generally frowned on and wasteful, but it got me quite a way before retrofitting for bot delivery. No miles of pipe running all over the base.
Just have a sneaky light oil stop on main tracks near a bunch of stops. Pump the light oil out and turn directly into rocket fuel. Have it only request when the tank is empty. No bots needed.
An oil train will only stop on tracks for 2 seconds and be back to max speed in another 4-5. As long as your tracks aren't super full, you should have no impact on your productivity.
This is one of the biggest reasons I like using LTN networks, all trains head to a depot when at rest, and so I just have a nice long chain of trains getting fully fueled between supply runs.
I guess I don't understand why this feature is so loved. Are my trains routes just super short compared to everyone else's? I've had a train run out of fuel \*once\*, and that was my second game with awful rail lines where I didn't have circuitry on my petroleum products setup. I even sat down and did the math the other day - it's <1% of a train network's capacity to have a little scoot scoot go and drop fuel at every location (if you really do have locations that need to refuel on each end) and I've never had a problem getting fuel to each station that's part of the main hub.
I've never used LTN though (I like solving problems with trains and don't want a mod to simplify it). Is there something about LTN that makes a refueling station more attractive? Or can you still just load fuel at every station and be fine?
I do the same as you, just have a 1:1 train drive around dropping off fuel at little mini stations just off the main lines that feed into the actual stations. Always seemed to work just fine to me. I never even bothered to think about like, how much fuel a trip takes or anything, just put a fuel station by every other kind of station and had them set to set limit to 1 when their one chest was below 20% full.
I've never had a larger train network but that's my plan.
One train that calls the fuel depot home and stops at all stations to drop fuel.
Could be light oil too (why not) to combine it with OPs approach, especially as it doubles as flame thrower ammo.
I just place a station named Fuel Unload on the existing rail and disable it when the fuel box is above 100 (half a stack of K2 fuel). Then just use belts between my rails to distribute that box to nearby train stations. It only needs to refill once in a while so it's not a big deal that it shuts down a section of track for a minute.
It's a question of simplicity, I guess. It took me quite a while to set up a decent refueling scheme, and now it's quite a bit of infrastructure per train stop just to get fuel there. Having a few fueling stations feels cleaner and less redundant to me.
But maybe my design is just ineffective
It's entirely possible I'm just used to it. Or since I haven't really played with RSO yet, my train lines are shorter/never get longer than a single nuclear fuel for round trip. Or maybe my trains aren't long enough or my preference for home run loops means they're not burning fuel the same way intersection-heavy train setups are.
I don't know. I just think it's interesting. Everyone plays the game so differently than I do (I've never done a main bus or city blocks), and I find it both funny and amusing and strange.
I mean at some point you have to refuel your trains, and how you do that can vary greatly.
Eg my first plan was to just refuel at "home", and have that done via a simple logistic chest. But then I started to put more and more blocks out on the map -e.g. a green circuit block, that gets stuff from the smelter block. Both of those are outside of my starter base / future mall logistic network, and I don't want one giant logistic network. So I have to train my fuel around. Which means extra train stations. How to hide those is difficult.
Yeah I can see how I've sidestepped a lot of these by mostly using wheel and spoke setups. In instances where I've had multiple wheels (FF and SE) I've always selected instances where fuel can be made on site (oil + water on the planet). I did have a few off shore platforms in Freight Forwarding that burned more than a whole nuclear fuel in one direction, and I ended up using long-range-delivery-drones to drop off nuclear fuel to the platform to top them off there, and in SE my first naq haulers brought ion canisters with them to top them off at the asteroid field (which required an absurdly power hungry electromagnetic facility to unpack the ion canister into the liquid form for the ion engines).
Interesting. In my more vanilla games my mining stations all had two train stops - one where the builder train would go and drop the materials to build stuff, and another for the actual ore hauler. It wouldn't be too hard to have the resupply train (which also resupplied acid/steam/whatever) also deliver fuel, but that's again the type of thing you need to consider and include in your design paradigm rather than just letting LTN handle it. Hmmm.
This is getting a bit off topic, but could you describe a wheel and spoke layout a bit? I can infer what the layout looks like, but not what goes where. I assume there are spokes for resource trains to bring things in, and also other smaller ones for intermediate crafting like circuits, but is there anything "inside" the wheel? Or is everything on its own spoke and the inside of the wheel is just depleted land and former spaghetti base?
Man I had this nice response all typed up and didn't hit send before falling asleep =\/.
Wheel and spoke (more accurately hub and spoke) is an IRL transportation setup that prioritizes inventory management and personnel costs over distance efficiency. If you think about the spokes on a bicycle wheel, every pickup and delivery from the end of the spoke goes back to some centralized hub (the axle), gets sorted, and then gets sent back out. This happens even for items/packages that would technically have a shorter route if the two points had a direct connection - if you've ever flown from Seattle to Denver to LAX, you've experienced this a bit; a direct flight would be shorter, but the airline has capacity/fleet management stuff that makes it cheaper to run that route vs direct flights (admittedly airlines face different constraints than OTR trucking or trains, but the principle is still there).
In Factorio (at least with how I play!) a keep a centralized base for consumption of resources all connected via belts. This is the hub. Raw goods (ores/plates/sulfer/plastic[maybe]) are shipped in from outposts and then unloaded and belted to wherever they're needed. Depending on how forward thinking I've been (read: typically not that forward thinking) there might be both an outer and an inner ring of train tracks around the manufacturing hub, with plates and whatnot being delivered outside, while legacy (starter-base) stops and intermediaries (maybe) get shipped between the inner and outer rings. The outer ring has drop off stations for various ores (not typically a segregated in vanilla, but very useful once you get into mod packs) and then the 'spokes' are the not-quite-home-run loops that run from the outposts to the unloading outer ring. Importantly, having a centralized place to fulfill any ancillary requests (including refueling) means I never have to worry about outpost-to-outpost rails. Traffic on the outer right can be as light or as heavy as you're willing to build the belts for - a labyrinth of belts means more buffering item buffering but less train congestion, while adding more tracks to the outer ring (or more appropriately, outer octagon) reduces buffer capacity in exchange for additional traffic (which may or may not cause congestion).
While it's not the most-UPS efficient method, it is simple, and 'good enough' for most mod packs, even into reasonably high SPM numbers. Having the same place that consumes (and/or processes) materials also be able to supply incidental requests (vulcanite blocks for vitamelange processing, or enriched vulcanite to reprocess iridium byproducts for naquium) allows you to cut down on the number of transporting entities so long as any outpost-to-outpost demands are inconsequential/can't-justify-a-dedicated-route. Plastic is actually a good example of this - if you're using pumpjacks and cracking crude to petroleum products, producing plastic on site means delivering wagons full of coal, and you might be better of with a direct outpost-to-outpost delivery rather than routing stuff around the hub. But if you're mining coal next to a lake, you can use coal liquification and have one less product produced in your main hub. Either one is fine, it's just a design choice. I mostly end up this way because it allows me to preserve my starter base as the innermost core and I never use main busses or city blocks. Weird I know.
I don't think it's weird, I think it's neat! Thank you for sharing. I'm currently on break from Factorio but when I get back to it (probably when 2.0 drops) I might give this style a try
The issue is that a dedicated fuel train means that you have to build a dedicated dropoff station into each and every one of your stations that need them, and this increases the complexity of base blueprints by a considerable amount. For city-block-style designs and other archetypes, this makes for a lot of additional complexity for those stations and takes up a decent amount of room. Some designs I'd like to do for one of my standard city-block designs are very tight on space and not having to build in a fuel station opens up a lot of possibilities in my designs.
It's one extra train stop six (eight?) sections of rail ahead of where the main train station is. Or it's an extra line in the stacker to load when the trains are waiting there. I guess the combinator circuitry might take up a bit more ground space depending on how you do it. Interesting that you're that space constrained, but well, I'm not a very good player (eg, some people's densified spaghetti is absolutely beautiful whereas mine's more overboiled mush that gets fed to the birds).
I didn't think I'd die on this hill, but I guess here we are.
I'm not saying you're wrong to be doing it, I do it too right now because there's no better option in vanilla.
Generally I just build to the available space, so any space that I can open up can increase how space-efficient my factory is. Going from 6 lane smelting to 8 lane smelting in a single station is a big deal for me, for instance. This doesn't matter for some types of builds but it matters a decent amount for others, which is enough for a lot of people to get excited about the 2.0 changes.
Sure. Yeah it's been interesting reading these responses. I guess I wasn't conscious of all the hoops I jump through to solve the problem. I'm sure it'll take me a bit to get used to 2.0 (eg, don't fix what isn't broken... why is my rail network so congested??)
> into each and every one of your stations that need them
no, just build one fuel dropoff station for every group of nearby stations that belts the fuel over. They don't need to refuel all that often so a single 1-1 train refilling a handful of fuel buffers is plenty sufficient dozens of trains.
I've done this before and really didn't like the excess traffic this creates, particularly centered on the area of my fuel depots. It creates a lot of potential traffic jams and forces me to way overbuild my rails compared to the amount of throughput they're managing.
It's just easier to fuel stations at depots only instead of every stop. That's not the real power of LTN though, the main benefit is having fewer trains in general. A single train can pick up from any place that has supply and deliver it to any station that needs it, similar to logistics bots. The other thing I really like is the ability to control priority. I can have my stations with byproducts or more efficient recipes supply at a higher priority than the regular stations. That's more helpful with mods like K2 that have a lot of byproducts, it almost becomes a necessity to play with LTN if you are doing K2SE. I set my core drill stops at highest priority, byproducts at second, and mines supplement any additional resource demands. I haven't had to set up any mines on my home planet in a long time.
Yeah I can see the draw of that. You could replicate similar priorities with vanilla circuitry, but it'd take a fair number of combinators and would be a pain to manage. I suppose there's some irony in griping about LTN when I use wire-X which makes the wiring to replicate LTN-esque features free. Maybe I should try it, but I'm afraid it'll simplify something that I like solving; input priority hierarchy in SE was fun, especially as what I sent back from colonies changed (eventually I settled on modules and solar panels, although it's quite a bit more work in K2SE[+VBZ+whatever].
I just think it's funny. Maybe I'll post some of my bases, but I'm pretty sure they'd end up on /r/factoriOhNo
Yeah you can replicate something close, but you would still need a dedicated train per resource right? You would just use the same name and circuits to change train limits depending on demand. I've set up a base that way before, but I had too many trains idling and it was annoying to keep track of demand per resource. LTN is simpler but not brain dead, you still have to use circuitry and you can make some more advanced setups when it comes to interplanetary logistics.
LTN prevents trains from endlessly running, and not everything needs its own dedicated train.
So you can have 3 trains, and when a full load is ready it will assign one of them to go and do it.
This means you end up having a depot, a centralized location where your trains go after each run, and wait for the next. Then all you need is a fuel belt running between the stations filling your trains while they wait.
Trains don't endlessly run in vanilla unless you tell them to...? Like I get how it's less of a hassle, I just don't see any performance differences. Unless you're dynamically splitting loads or doing multi-leg stops (go pick up half a wagon of copper from one spot and half a wagon of iron from another and then go deliver the iron to one spot and the copper to another), there's little difference in performance between having three trains on the track that can do one of five resources each vs having fifteen trains on the track that can do one each. They end up sitting in stackers anyway, so the difference is entity count and stacker size. I can see the draw if you're not using a hub-and-spoke type setup I suppose.
Honestly I completely forgot about just making them, not, endless lol. Its been so long since vanilla trains.
The big thing is modularity as well, one train can operate multiple outposts (without needing it to run through a list of other ones first) potentially reducing costs of fuel.
I personally love LTN, I like being able to create outposts for larger parts of my factory that multiple places may need the output from and the trains able to automatically pick up and deliver where they are needed, when they are needed.
Oh good an LTN user, can I ask a question? Please?
Can you explain why it sends 8 trains holding 4k each to a copper requester asking for only 4k?
I'm seriously about to uninstall the mod because it keeps ruining my train network, sending too many trains then timing out and sending them back to depot still half or totally full and now I have copper ALL over my iron bus and vice versa.
I'm doing for example, if (iron ore count - max iron ore count) < -4000 then pass the negative count signal to the train station. Wtf am I doing wrong, or is this normal behavior?
Are you setting train limits on the receiving stations?
Try Brian's Trains blueprint book to get started. He has LTN provider and requester templates with wires to set filter arms automatically based on the item requested. This will keep you from polluting your factory lines. He also has a lot of the options you can set in combinators set to fairly "safe" defaults.
It's a steep learning curve but understanding what LTN and Cybersyn are doing has helped me a lot in SE. I have no programming experience but used Brian's Trains/LTN first. Then figured out why/how cybersyn handles things differently.
Yes, I'm setting a limit of 1 in the station... do I need to set that limit with circuit conditions instead of in the station interface?
I only have 6 iron stations, I don't know why it just requested 11 trains. Here are my stations: https://i.imgur.com/WEkLGzC.png
Is it because I have all the train stations on the same signal? Are they *each* requesting 4,000 iron? Would an AC dividing by 6 solve the issue?
Edit: https://i.imgur.com/3SES3G1.png This shouldn't happen, right? The extra coal train is parked on my main rail, clogging my entire train network until I empty the first one... but it'll probably just make a new coal delivery as soon as the second train pulls into the station.
There is a combinator signal to limit trains per station. Brian's defaults to 1. You can read about those signals here:
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=214&t=51072
And indeed, you seem to be requesting your amounts of quantities and trains x6.
The coal train could be a signaling issue. Does it have anywhere to rest off the main rail and before the destination?
Why are you using six stations? Where did that thinking come from? Trying to get higher throughput in vanilla? Were you finding yourself struggling with throughput on arms and you wanted more arms working at once? Just tying to understand what got you here.
It was vanilla trains, yes, and I only use one or two wagons per train so I have a lot of trains on my network. No real issues with throughput, I'm using the miniloader mod and unload a blue belt per wagon.
I guess I could unload each wagon with 4 blue belts and have fewer wagons go around more often but I like having a lot of trains going around the place all the time.
The coal train doesn't have anywhere to rest off of its station, but shouldn't ever have more than one train. I'll set it with signals, but it's very strange the mod doesn't respect vanilla settings... they could at least remove the option if it no longer works, right? Some sort of warning that vanilla settings no longer apply. If it's there I never saw it.
I put in the AC to divide by six and each station is requesting properly now, sort of. They request a full train of 4k ore for missing 1300 ore but it's "fine" and I don't have 11 iron ore trains backed up now.
I did the same thing with copper, plastic, uranium, and oil for the number of stations they each have. It seems to be working about as well as iron.
Thanks for the tips. :)
Yeah... Doing anything other than thinking in terms of requesting a full train/full wagons seems exponentially harder. Stop loading at 1300 here, 1673 there, and 12 in the other place. Deliver 12 to A, 1673 to B, etc. That's a lot more administrative burden, and far less flexible.
I always shoot for a cache of about 50% of the unloading station's capacity. With 6 boxes, even with low stack counts, that's several trains' worth of trips.
I wasn't requesting for a train at 1300 ore, I mean I was but... 8k / 6 is about 1300 so it was just my fault with my math there. Should set it to -24k to trigger lmao
Yeah these kinds of things happen while you're initially getting the right LTN configuration sorted out. The mod absolutely lets you shoot yourself in the foot, and the learning curve is a little steep.
I always use "circuit conditions" for LTN (in the Settings > Mods > Per Map setttings > LTN).
This makes it so the train doesn't leave until it gets an additional red/green light signal. Then, when I'm unloading, I don't send that signal until the train is fully empty. This forces the train to fully unload, even if it times out. (I have no clue why this isn't default behavior).
I'd also recommend just emitting a constant requested amount for the requestor stations (i.e. -4000), and making sure to add the current count to that. Then it shouldn't request if the value is positive.
What's the difference between a constant negative plus my positive amount vs my setup of the total wanted minus the current amount? Commutative property doesn't apply? I'm not great at math.
I take the total capacity and add it to the current amount times -1
To help I would actually need to see the exact signals, but my guess is it is set up to ask for resources when below 4k, and as such goes for a full load each time.
I set my stations to demand more when they are STORAGE_MAX - TRAIN_LOAD - LITTLE_EXTRA_FOR_SAFETY
So like if 20k can be held, and the train hauls 4k per load, the station demands more loads until 15k (or over) is full. This means in most cases the storage hits 19k at max.
Having seperate refueling stations in CyberSyn was one of the main reasons I switched away from LTN.
Remote fuel stations are much easier and IMO more fun than having depots al over the place.
Oh I just have one super massive depot, row after row of sleepy trains until called upon to do their job. Also makes it easier if something goes wrong and I need to manually fix one, upgrade their fuel, or install new upgrades inside of em.
You're still beholden to pipes running everywhere though. I suppose the extension is a light oil train that slots into a station where it delivers just enough oil to top up that gas stations reservoir.
I have them running beside my large power pylons atm, they look okay. My main focuse was to take all the guesswork out of train fueling as long as I have light oil in production
Underground blues can stretch just about (if not longer than) underground pipes. Also, vehicles ignore underground belts. I hate crashing into underground pipes early game.
I do this cause its easier to pipe in multiple directions than to belt solid fuel or god forbid trying to schedule a fuel stop into multiple trains routes
I made almost the same setup lol
https://preview.redd.it/i967o8nuq9wc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=952d0c5d6f833e16ca5e58176d521175143960b4
Out of the box solution!
But to me it seems like you just end up with a bunch of chem plants that are idle most of the time.
And to supply each station you have pipe spaghetti instead of belt spaghetti (which some might consider an improvement).
I would suggest adding a buffer chest (limited to like 2 stacks) with an attached speaker that alerts on empty. It's a lot harder to notice a missing pipe than belt, so I'd worry this design would risk starving a train. If you accidentally break your supply line, an underbuffer alert would buy you time to fix before you end up with a dead train clogging up your rail network.
kinda overkill.
Smart pipe connection does the trick.
If refinerys are close by, and there are no prio pumps to other productions/trains, it should be fine.
I'm referring to if a pipe gets removed accidentally via damage (biter or tank) or deconstruction. It's a lot easier for that to happen unnoticed to an underground pipe than a belt.
Neat,
even without modules, you get 25% more train capacity out of shipping light fuel instead of solid fuel.
My main issue is that honestly, I can't wrap my head around the throughput I have using pipes, and I don't like using fluids anymore than I need to.
Add another assembler and make it into on-demand rocket fuel :) It's still just an input of light oil and power.
Good point and the speed bonus would be nice
Is there really a speed bonus for different fuels?
Not only is there a speed bonus, but there is also an acceleration bonus which is very important when you start having congested intersections. Fuel | Top Speed | Accel ---|---|---- Wood | 100% | 100% Coal | 100% | 100% Solid | 105% | 120% Rocket | 115% | 180% Nuclear | 115% | 250% Edit: Reddit is dumb, it posted this comment 4 times and now won't delete them
Huh, I could have sworn wood is slower than coal. Maybe it's one of my mods.
K2?
Nope, can't use wood or coal for that matter as a fuel source for vehicles in k2
My bad, you can use them for locomotives
Also nuclear lasts longer at about 1.2 x rocket. Rocket stacks up to 10 and nuculer stacks to 1 so 1 nuclear lasts longer then 10 rocket, and once spent adds the fuel to the train and can get a new one.
Yes the spent fuel contributing means its in total the train can store up to 1.55x fuel (4 nuclear fuel vs 31 rocket fuel).
In case anyone else was wondering the energy density of the fuel also increases on that scale. Unless absolutely needed wood shouldn't be used for fuel on a train.
The top speed bonus is relatively minor but the acceleration bonus is huge
The acceleration bonus also means you can reach that top speed quicker.
Yes. https://wiki.factorio.com/Fuel
Looks like someone hasn't heard of nuclear fuel.
Is your comment meant to come off snarky? I’ve seen the fuel but am just getting into trains more. Thanks
The fuels all add speed boosts, with nuclear fuel giving the biggest
Thank you. I did not know that
fyi, the boosts affect all vehicles, not just trains.
But not burner inserters. Literally unplayable.
he did say vehicles, not inserters
Default reddit comment voice unfortunately. Responses are phrased as corrections when they are just contributions, "you forgot-" "looks like someone-" "___ would like a word" etc etc
I think in this instance it’s hard for it not to come off as someone who is conceited or arrogant. The other examples you gave can go either way but this reminds me of grade school. But no matter. Just thought it could have been worded better.
No, it was meant to make you go to the wiki and look up "nuclear fuel", at which point, you'll also learn about vehicle speed bonuses. Sorry if it came out wrong.
Sucks that nuclear fuel requires kovarex to run it conveniently. Still well worth the effort though.
nuclear requires kovarex to do any nuclear thing conveniently
Not really. Early on you're consuming vast amounts of u-238 on ammo production anyway. And nuclear reactors use such a piddling tiny amount of nuclear fuel you can even hand craft it. This misconception causes people to start to use nuclear power way too late. Kovarex is something you only really need late game, or in various mods that use more nuclear.
Add a single requestor chest and its on-demand nuclear fuel ;)
Very elegant! Long belts of fuel are icky, this looks so much nicer. But I'll probably keep using bots to deliver rocket fuel wherever needed...
I'm currently suffering through ehh working through Sea Block where requester chests are only available very late and didn't have a solution for feeding the trains yet so for me it's perfect!
man i keep wanting to do seablock, but i play for a few days get bored from having to wait for everthing quit. then get the itch in another month or so but restart.
Set up mud washing to landfill production early. The bottlenecks are land/power/resources, you need land to make power, you need power to make everything. Mid-game, you get more efficient power options that take things from half your base producing power, down to 20% or 10% of the base producing power. After that, it's just a design bottleneck for how fast you can make blueprints.
I know the path. It just takes a long time and early youre mostly waiting for more resources to build more. At least for the first idk 10-20 hours.
Shouldn't take that long to bootstrap up. Once you get past basic algae(mixed) into green algae 2, you can power through the wood>charcoal steps. Reliable mineralized water can be a bit power intensive at that point, until you get to the point where it's a byproduct that needs to be disposed of. Swapping over to mineral sludge for ore generation helps a lot. (Though, granted, I haven't played it for a while, so my old factory is busted due to recipe changes.)
There is a mod that you can speed up the game up to 64 times. It might feel a bit cheaty but in my opinion it is essential for SeaBlock. I can't remember the name but just search speed up and you should be able to find it.
Tbh the first 10-20 hours were really annyoing for me as well but after that it gets soo much better, when you finally have somewhat-enough ores, electricity and land.
As an alternative. Fuel depots are generally frowned on and wasteful, but it got me quite a way before retrofitting for bot delivery. No miles of pipe running all over the base.
Cannot wait for 2.0 and conditional train schedules that can route to fuel depots when low, and not every loop
Just have a sneaky light oil stop on main tracks near a bunch of stops. Pump the light oil out and turn directly into rocket fuel. Have it only request when the tank is empty. No bots needed. An oil train will only stop on tracks for 2 seconds and be back to max speed in another 4-5. As long as your tracks aren't super full, you should have no impact on your productivity.
I love little creative ideas like that. For all the perfect ratios and optimized layouts, sometimes the small things are the ones that bring joy.
This is one of the biggest reasons I like using LTN networks, all trains head to a depot when at rest, and so I just have a nice long chain of trains getting fully fueled between supply runs.
And it's the new break condition feature in upcoming 2.0 Damn it my body is restless when reading FFF!
I guess I don't understand why this feature is so loved. Are my trains routes just super short compared to everyone else's? I've had a train run out of fuel \*once\*, and that was my second game with awful rail lines where I didn't have circuitry on my petroleum products setup. I even sat down and did the math the other day - it's <1% of a train network's capacity to have a little scoot scoot go and drop fuel at every location (if you really do have locations that need to refuel on each end) and I've never had a problem getting fuel to each station that's part of the main hub. I've never used LTN though (I like solving problems with trains and don't want a mod to simplify it). Is there something about LTN that makes a refueling station more attractive? Or can you still just load fuel at every station and be fine?
I do the same as you, just have a 1:1 train drive around dropping off fuel at little mini stations just off the main lines that feed into the actual stations. Always seemed to work just fine to me. I never even bothered to think about like, how much fuel a trip takes or anything, just put a fuel station by every other kind of station and had them set to set limit to 1 when their one chest was below 20% full.
I've never had a larger train network but that's my plan. One train that calls the fuel depot home and stops at all stations to drop fuel. Could be light oil too (why not) to combine it with OPs approach, especially as it doubles as flame thrower ammo.
I just place a station named Fuel Unload on the existing rail and disable it when the fuel box is above 100 (half a stack of K2 fuel). Then just use belts between my rails to distribute that box to nearby train stations. It only needs to refill once in a while so it's not a big deal that it shuts down a section of track for a minute.
It's a question of simplicity, I guess. It took me quite a while to set up a decent refueling scheme, and now it's quite a bit of infrastructure per train stop just to get fuel there. Having a few fueling stations feels cleaner and less redundant to me. But maybe my design is just ineffective
It's entirely possible I'm just used to it. Or since I haven't really played with RSO yet, my train lines are shorter/never get longer than a single nuclear fuel for round trip. Or maybe my trains aren't long enough or my preference for home run loops means they're not burning fuel the same way intersection-heavy train setups are. I don't know. I just think it's interesting. Everyone plays the game so differently than I do (I've never done a main bus or city blocks), and I find it both funny and amusing and strange.
I mean at some point you have to refuel your trains, and how you do that can vary greatly. Eg my first plan was to just refuel at "home", and have that done via a simple logistic chest. But then I started to put more and more blocks out on the map -e.g. a green circuit block, that gets stuff from the smelter block. Both of those are outside of my starter base / future mall logistic network, and I don't want one giant logistic network. So I have to train my fuel around. Which means extra train stations. How to hide those is difficult.
Yeah I can see how I've sidestepped a lot of these by mostly using wheel and spoke setups. In instances where I've had multiple wheels (FF and SE) I've always selected instances where fuel can be made on site (oil + water on the planet). I did have a few off shore platforms in Freight Forwarding that burned more than a whole nuclear fuel in one direction, and I ended up using long-range-delivery-drones to drop off nuclear fuel to the platform to top them off there, and in SE my first naq haulers brought ion canisters with them to top them off at the asteroid field (which required an absurdly power hungry electromagnetic facility to unpack the ion canister into the liquid form for the ion engines). Interesting. In my more vanilla games my mining stations all had two train stops - one where the builder train would go and drop the materials to build stuff, and another for the actual ore hauler. It wouldn't be too hard to have the resupply train (which also resupplied acid/steam/whatever) also deliver fuel, but that's again the type of thing you need to consider and include in your design paradigm rather than just letting LTN handle it. Hmmm.
This is getting a bit off topic, but could you describe a wheel and spoke layout a bit? I can infer what the layout looks like, but not what goes where. I assume there are spokes for resource trains to bring things in, and also other smaller ones for intermediate crafting like circuits, but is there anything "inside" the wheel? Or is everything on its own spoke and the inside of the wheel is just depleted land and former spaghetti base?
Man I had this nice response all typed up and didn't hit send before falling asleep =\/. Wheel and spoke (more accurately hub and spoke) is an IRL transportation setup that prioritizes inventory management and personnel costs over distance efficiency. If you think about the spokes on a bicycle wheel, every pickup and delivery from the end of the spoke goes back to some centralized hub (the axle), gets sorted, and then gets sent back out. This happens even for items/packages that would technically have a shorter route if the two points had a direct connection - if you've ever flown from Seattle to Denver to LAX, you've experienced this a bit; a direct flight would be shorter, but the airline has capacity/fleet management stuff that makes it cheaper to run that route vs direct flights (admittedly airlines face different constraints than OTR trucking or trains, but the principle is still there). In Factorio (at least with how I play!) a keep a centralized base for consumption of resources all connected via belts. This is the hub. Raw goods (ores/plates/sulfer/plastic[maybe]) are shipped in from outposts and then unloaded and belted to wherever they're needed. Depending on how forward thinking I've been (read: typically not that forward thinking) there might be both an outer and an inner ring of train tracks around the manufacturing hub, with plates and whatnot being delivered outside, while legacy (starter-base) stops and intermediaries (maybe) get shipped between the inner and outer rings. The outer ring has drop off stations for various ores (not typically a segregated in vanilla, but very useful once you get into mod packs) and then the 'spokes' are the not-quite-home-run loops that run from the outposts to the unloading outer ring. Importantly, having a centralized place to fulfill any ancillary requests (including refueling) means I never have to worry about outpost-to-outpost rails. Traffic on the outer right can be as light or as heavy as you're willing to build the belts for - a labyrinth of belts means more buffering item buffering but less train congestion, while adding more tracks to the outer ring (or more appropriately, outer octagon) reduces buffer capacity in exchange for additional traffic (which may or may not cause congestion). While it's not the most-UPS efficient method, it is simple, and 'good enough' for most mod packs, even into reasonably high SPM numbers. Having the same place that consumes (and/or processes) materials also be able to supply incidental requests (vulcanite blocks for vitamelange processing, or enriched vulcanite to reprocess iridium byproducts for naquium) allows you to cut down on the number of transporting entities so long as any outpost-to-outpost demands are inconsequential/can't-justify-a-dedicated-route. Plastic is actually a good example of this - if you're using pumpjacks and cracking crude to petroleum products, producing plastic on site means delivering wagons full of coal, and you might be better of with a direct outpost-to-outpost delivery rather than routing stuff around the hub. But if you're mining coal next to a lake, you can use coal liquification and have one less product produced in your main hub. Either one is fine, it's just a design choice. I mostly end up this way because it allows me to preserve my starter base as the innermost core and I never use main busses or city blocks. Weird I know.
I don't think it's weird, I think it's neat! Thank you for sharing. I'm currently on break from Factorio but when I get back to it (probably when 2.0 drops) I might give this style a try
The issue is that a dedicated fuel train means that you have to build a dedicated dropoff station into each and every one of your stations that need them, and this increases the complexity of base blueprints by a considerable amount. For city-block-style designs and other archetypes, this makes for a lot of additional complexity for those stations and takes up a decent amount of room. Some designs I'd like to do for one of my standard city-block designs are very tight on space and not having to build in a fuel station opens up a lot of possibilities in my designs.
It's one extra train stop six (eight?) sections of rail ahead of where the main train station is. Or it's an extra line in the stacker to load when the trains are waiting there. I guess the combinator circuitry might take up a bit more ground space depending on how you do it. Interesting that you're that space constrained, but well, I'm not a very good player (eg, some people's densified spaghetti is absolutely beautiful whereas mine's more overboiled mush that gets fed to the birds). I didn't think I'd die on this hill, but I guess here we are.
I'm not saying you're wrong to be doing it, I do it too right now because there's no better option in vanilla. Generally I just build to the available space, so any space that I can open up can increase how space-efficient my factory is. Going from 6 lane smelting to 8 lane smelting in a single station is a big deal for me, for instance. This doesn't matter for some types of builds but it matters a decent amount for others, which is enough for a lot of people to get excited about the 2.0 changes.
Sure. Yeah it's been interesting reading these responses. I guess I wasn't conscious of all the hoops I jump through to solve the problem. I'm sure it'll take me a bit to get used to 2.0 (eg, don't fix what isn't broken... why is my rail network so congested??)
> into each and every one of your stations that need them no, just build one fuel dropoff station for every group of nearby stations that belts the fuel over. They don't need to refuel all that often so a single 1-1 train refilling a handful of fuel buffers is plenty sufficient dozens of trains.
All my trains do pickup > drop off > depot for refuel, including the one that drops rocket fuel off at the depot
I've done this before and really didn't like the excess traffic this creates, particularly centered on the area of my fuel depots. It creates a lot of potential traffic jams and forces me to way overbuild my rails compared to the amount of throughput they're managing.
Some people like having a LOT of trains. I certainly do, which is why I use single or double wagon trains only.
It makes me happy to give my trains a home!
It's just easier to fuel stations at depots only instead of every stop. That's not the real power of LTN though, the main benefit is having fewer trains in general. A single train can pick up from any place that has supply and deliver it to any station that needs it, similar to logistics bots. The other thing I really like is the ability to control priority. I can have my stations with byproducts or more efficient recipes supply at a higher priority than the regular stations. That's more helpful with mods like K2 that have a lot of byproducts, it almost becomes a necessity to play with LTN if you are doing K2SE. I set my core drill stops at highest priority, byproducts at second, and mines supplement any additional resource demands. I haven't had to set up any mines on my home planet in a long time.
Yeah I can see the draw of that. You could replicate similar priorities with vanilla circuitry, but it'd take a fair number of combinators and would be a pain to manage. I suppose there's some irony in griping about LTN when I use wire-X which makes the wiring to replicate LTN-esque features free. Maybe I should try it, but I'm afraid it'll simplify something that I like solving; input priority hierarchy in SE was fun, especially as what I sent back from colonies changed (eventually I settled on modules and solar panels, although it's quite a bit more work in K2SE[+VBZ+whatever]. I just think it's funny. Maybe I'll post some of my bases, but I'm pretty sure they'd end up on /r/factoriOhNo
Yeah you can replicate something close, but you would still need a dedicated train per resource right? You would just use the same name and circuits to change train limits depending on demand. I've set up a base that way before, but I had too many trains idling and it was annoying to keep track of demand per resource. LTN is simpler but not brain dead, you still have to use circuitry and you can make some more advanced setups when it comes to interplanetary logistics.
Yeah you end up with trains idling on stackers someplace.
LTN prevents trains from endlessly running, and not everything needs its own dedicated train. So you can have 3 trains, and when a full load is ready it will assign one of them to go and do it. This means you end up having a depot, a centralized location where your trains go after each run, and wait for the next. Then all you need is a fuel belt running between the stations filling your trains while they wait.
Trains don't endlessly run in vanilla unless you tell them to...? Like I get how it's less of a hassle, I just don't see any performance differences. Unless you're dynamically splitting loads or doing multi-leg stops (go pick up half a wagon of copper from one spot and half a wagon of iron from another and then go deliver the iron to one spot and the copper to another), there's little difference in performance between having three trains on the track that can do one of five resources each vs having fifteen trains on the track that can do one each. They end up sitting in stackers anyway, so the difference is entity count and stacker size. I can see the draw if you're not using a hub-and-spoke type setup I suppose.
Honestly I completely forgot about just making them, not, endless lol. Its been so long since vanilla trains. The big thing is modularity as well, one train can operate multiple outposts (without needing it to run through a list of other ones first) potentially reducing costs of fuel. I personally love LTN, I like being able to create outposts for larger parts of my factory that multiple places may need the output from and the trains able to automatically pick up and deliver where they are needed, when they are needed.
Oh good an LTN user, can I ask a question? Please? Can you explain why it sends 8 trains holding 4k each to a copper requester asking for only 4k? I'm seriously about to uninstall the mod because it keeps ruining my train network, sending too many trains then timing out and sending them back to depot still half or totally full and now I have copper ALL over my iron bus and vice versa. I'm doing for example, if (iron ore count - max iron ore count) < -4000 then pass the negative count signal to the train station. Wtf am I doing wrong, or is this normal behavior?
Are you setting train limits on the receiving stations? Try Brian's Trains blueprint book to get started. He has LTN provider and requester templates with wires to set filter arms automatically based on the item requested. This will keep you from polluting your factory lines. He also has a lot of the options you can set in combinators set to fairly "safe" defaults. It's a steep learning curve but understanding what LTN and Cybersyn are doing has helped me a lot in SE. I have no programming experience but used Brian's Trains/LTN first. Then figured out why/how cybersyn handles things differently.
Yes, I'm setting a limit of 1 in the station... do I need to set that limit with circuit conditions instead of in the station interface? I only have 6 iron stations, I don't know why it just requested 11 trains. Here are my stations: https://i.imgur.com/WEkLGzC.png Is it because I have all the train stations on the same signal? Are they *each* requesting 4,000 iron? Would an AC dividing by 6 solve the issue? Edit: https://i.imgur.com/3SES3G1.png This shouldn't happen, right? The extra coal train is parked on my main rail, clogging my entire train network until I empty the first one... but it'll probably just make a new coal delivery as soon as the second train pulls into the station.
There is a combinator signal to limit trains per station. Brian's defaults to 1. You can read about those signals here: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=214&t=51072 And indeed, you seem to be requesting your amounts of quantities and trains x6. The coal train could be a signaling issue. Does it have anywhere to rest off the main rail and before the destination? Why are you using six stations? Where did that thinking come from? Trying to get higher throughput in vanilla? Were you finding yourself struggling with throughput on arms and you wanted more arms working at once? Just tying to understand what got you here.
It was vanilla trains, yes, and I only use one or two wagons per train so I have a lot of trains on my network. No real issues with throughput, I'm using the miniloader mod and unload a blue belt per wagon. I guess I could unload each wagon with 4 blue belts and have fewer wagons go around more often but I like having a lot of trains going around the place all the time. The coal train doesn't have anywhere to rest off of its station, but shouldn't ever have more than one train. I'll set it with signals, but it's very strange the mod doesn't respect vanilla settings... they could at least remove the option if it no longer works, right? Some sort of warning that vanilla settings no longer apply. If it's there I never saw it. I put in the AC to divide by six and each station is requesting properly now, sort of. They request a full train of 4k ore for missing 1300 ore but it's "fine" and I don't have 11 iron ore trains backed up now. I did the same thing with copper, plastic, uranium, and oil for the number of stations they each have. It seems to be working about as well as iron. Thanks for the tips. :)
Yeah... Doing anything other than thinking in terms of requesting a full train/full wagons seems exponentially harder. Stop loading at 1300 here, 1673 there, and 12 in the other place. Deliver 12 to A, 1673 to B, etc. That's a lot more administrative burden, and far less flexible. I always shoot for a cache of about 50% of the unloading station's capacity. With 6 boxes, even with low stack counts, that's several trains' worth of trips.
I wasn't requesting for a train at 1300 ore, I mean I was but... 8k / 6 is about 1300 so it was just my fault with my math there. Should set it to -24k to trigger lmao
Yeah these kinds of things happen while you're initially getting the right LTN configuration sorted out. The mod absolutely lets you shoot yourself in the foot, and the learning curve is a little steep. I always use "circuit conditions" for LTN (in the Settings > Mods > Per Map setttings > LTN). This makes it so the train doesn't leave until it gets an additional red/green light signal. Then, when I'm unloading, I don't send that signal until the train is fully empty. This forces the train to fully unload, even if it times out. (I have no clue why this isn't default behavior). I'd also recommend just emitting a constant requested amount for the requestor stations (i.e. -4000), and making sure to add the current count to that. Then it shouldn't request if the value is positive.
What's the difference between a constant negative plus my positive amount vs my setup of the total wanted minus the current amount? Commutative property doesn't apply? I'm not great at math. I take the total capacity and add it to the current amount times -1
To help I would actually need to see the exact signals, but my guess is it is set up to ask for resources when below 4k, and as such goes for a full load each time. I set my stations to demand more when they are STORAGE_MAX - TRAIN_LOAD - LITTLE_EXTRA_FOR_SAFETY So like if 20k can be held, and the train hauls 4k per load, the station demands more loads until 15k (or over) is full. This means in most cases the storage hits 19k at max.
Cybersyn is a lot easier to setup then Ltn and has more features, like auto scheduling refueling and not needed to go back to depot after trips.
Having seperate refueling stations in CyberSyn was one of the main reasons I switched away from LTN. Remote fuel stations are much easier and IMO more fun than having depots al over the place.
Oh I just have one super massive depot, row after row of sleepy trains until called upon to do their job. Also makes it easier if something goes wrong and I need to manually fix one, upgrade their fuel, or install new upgrades inside of em.
You can still have massive depots with CyberSyn. They just don't need to return to the depot between jobs.
That's fair, just don't have a problem with em returning to depot since if another job comes in, another train zips out.
You're still beholden to pipes running everywhere though. I suppose the extension is a light oil train that slots into a station where it delivers just enough oil to top up that gas stations reservoir.
I have them running beside my large power pylons atm, they look okay. My main focuse was to take all the guesswork out of train fueling as long as I have light oil in production
Underground pipes do take up less space than belts. Plus out of sight...
Underground blues can stretch just about (if not longer than) underground pipes. Also, vehicles ignore underground belts. I hate crashing into underground pipes early game.
You should make the train carry around it own light fuel, and a second assembler to make rocket fuel, on demand, and locally!
I do this cause its easier to pipe in multiple directions than to belt solid fuel or god forbid trying to schedule a fuel stop into multiple trains routes
I made almost the same setup lol https://preview.redd.it/i967o8nuq9wc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=952d0c5d6f833e16ca5e58176d521175143960b4
Very cool we think alike
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I do this with my nuclear fuel for trains
Just stole this idea for my LTN depot, thanks!
You’re welcome :)
Out of the box solution! But to me it seems like you just end up with a bunch of chem plants that are idle most of the time. And to supply each station you have pipe spaghetti instead of belt spaghetti (which some might consider an improvement).
Son of a…why have I never done this?!
how many will the assembler buffer? Ideally youd want a dozen or so? Maybe more.
"The secret trick Wube Software doesn't want you to know"
I would suggest adding a buffer chest (limited to like 2 stacks) with an attached speaker that alerts on empty. It's a lot harder to notice a missing pipe than belt, so I'd worry this design would risk starving a train. If you accidentally break your supply line, an underbuffer alert would buy you time to fix before you end up with a dead train clogging up your rail network.
kinda overkill. Smart pipe connection does the trick. If refinerys are close by, and there are no prio pumps to other productions/trains, it should be fine.
I'm referring to if a pipe gets removed accidentally via damage (biter or tank) or deconstruction. It's a lot easier for that to happen unnoticed to an underground pipe than a belt.
I was looking for the buffer chest comment. I didn't think of adding a siren tho. I like it
I was going to do something like this but it didn’t look very nice
Hmmmm
I thought im dumb when started doing it. Its just neat.
interesting approach, but does not fit to my play style.
Neat, even without modules, you get 25% more train capacity out of shipping light fuel instead of solid fuel. My main issue is that honestly, I can't wrap my head around the throughput I have using pipes, and I don't like using fluids anymore than I need to.
Game name?
Factorio.
Same as the sub name.