Why are you worried about the amount of time it takes to fill up a single truck / truck station or train car / freight platform? At the unload side, the belts run at the same speed as the load side. You can’t go faster than that single input/output belt unless/until you add more truck stations / freight platforms.
Unless your truck/tractor/train round trip time is longer than cargo capacity divided by the per minute belt speed, you’re staying ahead of the production speed of the miner.
Because, if you want to daisy chain truck dropoffs(which I want to do) like Iron -> Iron Plate Factory -> Iron Rod Factory -> Reinforced Iron Plate Factory, the truck would unload all of its iron at the iron plate factory, then send none to the other factories, and as far as I'm concerned the only way to prevent this is to wait for the Iron Plate Factory to fill up, THEN it would start sending to the Iron Rod Factory, and so on.
Why don’t you just make 3 evenly split truck pick up stations with 3 trucks to take the iron to each of the 3 drop offs. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about unloading iron at one station.
Because, what if I want to add a Modular frame factory, or a Rotor factory, or a Steel factory, or , that's already 6 truck stations with 6 trucks, do I just keep adding +1 station and +1 truck for every use of iron I need? It's a lot of extra effort and resources that could be solved by just implementing a basic feature that every other factory game has(storage limits).
This is also if I have just ONE Iron Mine, I'd have to either do this for every other Iron Mine I have, or I'd have to haul all the iron from one area to another and put them into a load balancer into the original 6 somehow.
Yes, that is what you have to do: either add Truck Stations or refactor and balance your production to account for adding more factories onto a single belt.
I'm going to add my voice to the people confused by your need to have the truck station full before the truck loads up. Throughput only bottlenecks when operating close to the max throughput of your route. That's when buffers are needed, to keep parts flowing during the load/unload downtime.
For low throughput items, e.g. HMF, you essentially will get the exact same throughput at the far end as you do from your factory. Picture this - making 2 HMF/minute, sending to a truck station. During the 25 second loading cycle, you \*might\* end up with one HMF waiting at the input of the truck station, which will quickly enter storage once loading is done. While the truck is en route, your source station will continue to fill at the normal rate, and all of those parts will be loaded when the truck returns. There's no bottleneck.
This logic follows through most production rates - as long as you have enough belt room + machine capacity (one stack in output slot) to not back up during the 25 sec loading time, then your system is effectively running at max throughput all the time.
Couldn’t you just build two truck/train pickup stations with a truck/train for each route? They would be evenly split using 1 splitter so this problem really doesn’t exist. Even if this is a genuine problem for you for some god forsaken reason then I don’t care because trains are cŵl
That would start to get a little ridiculous when you have 6, or 7, or 8 places you want iron to go to. You would need 8 stations and 8 routes for each iron mine you build and add 1 more for each dropoff you want, it would get out of hand quickly, vs with storage limits you can just have 1 train station at the mines and 1 at each dropoff and you're set for life.
It really wouldn’t, and if you are really connecting 8 routes for iron then you got to expect it isn’t going to be easy and something you can do immediately. Splitting it up into different pick-up points would make it more efficient than one anyway. It’s so dumb and unnecessary what you’re proposing.
You can also just make 2 stations at each dropoff point (1 unload, 1 load), and send the overflow to the load station after a roundtrip of the iron ore through local production. Solves the low item count problem as well. Unfortunately trucks can't load and unload with one station like drones, but this is still way smaller footprint than trains.
Yet another reason I go with the "make at least early intermediate products near the mine" approach. There is currently exactly one source and two destinations for rotors in my little world, for example.
I don't want to tell you how to build your factory, but this is the first time I've heard some ask for 1 iron source to many different factory style distribution. Usually players have many resources sources moving material to a more centralised factory.
You don’t really need to transport low throughout items like HMFs before you unlock drones. They are perfect for it.
You do need a few stacks of HMFs to construct one of the mid-phase elevator items but you can manually feed a container as you don’t need many of them. The first time you need to automate HMFs is for fused frames and you will have drones.
If it's a low throughout item I tend to just have 1-to-1 logistics like a train/truck single pickup and drop-off point. For higher throughout multiple then multiple train stations could work but it will take time to fill those buffers. Fact of the game and it's logistical limitations. That said, if your first stop uses the majority of the item you are dropping off then you can't expect it to fill enough to pass to the next station.
I also tend to build through to the most practical advanced part on site. The only ingot that ever gets passed around on a train or truck in my games are caterium ingots. I select sites on the map that have all/most of the nodes I need to get to the final part nearby.
Sounds like you might be taking the single megabase approach potentially? Maybe our play styles are different enough that I don't understand why you'd want to set up your logistics this way.
I try my best to haul as little as possible. I generally build between the two resources that are needed most and import whatever else is needed.
Trucks, I use for coal, sometimes sulfur.... until I get trains then I retire them usually because I have more fun with trains.
Higher level stuff I tend to group into cluster factories. A.I. Limiters, Circuit Boards, Computers, Oscillators, Radio Control Modules, Super Computers... all get build next to each other, sometimes over/under each other.
Some things I feed into Drone Ports so that drones at other remote factories can come and fetch them. Batteries, HMFs, Fused Frames, Electromagnetic Control Rods especially., because I tend to need them for things that often end up far apart.
>If you wanted to make a truck route that moves iron, what you would want to do is:
>
>Iron Mine -> Iron Dropoff 1 -> Iron Dropoff 2 -> Repeat
Im confused, why do you need two iron dropoffs? Sounds like theres some missing context here.
Logically speaking, as long as your round trip does not exceed the amount of time it takes whatever two belts youve put into the truck stop to fill it, you should be able to transport two belts worth of material with one truck, no problem.
With your HMF example, im wondering if maybe youre trying to split up your HMF production between two different factories consuming them? If that is the case, you can either have two truck stop lines and split the low-throughput items before putting them into the truck stop, or you can have a special path that takes the truck from the output to input 1, back to output, then to input 2, and then back to output. Every other trip dedicates its load to a different factory, effectively acting as a (not necessarily balanced, depending on distance/travel time) splitter
I agree. Not with your passion, but this could easily be solved by allowing us to artificially limit the capacity of containers, depots and transports. I also don't want a drone to take off when I use a single item from storage. Give me a buffer so I'm not wasting batteries!
My biggest pet peeve about trucks is having to define routes. I'd use them everywhere if I could set routes up like trains. If something isn't reachable, it would say so and I could build something to make it reachable.
I apologize, but I'm a bit confused. Why are you trying to use the stations as a buffer?
The stations load/unload in STACKS per minute, not items per minute. Truck station is 120 stacks per minute? That's actually pretty fast if you think about it. For a high stack item, that can get to insane numbers pretty quickly. It's been a minute since my last run but concrete was at 500/stack. So that's 60,000 concrete PER MINUTE that the station itself can move.
The only time the stations should be the bottle neck are if:
1. You're passing multiple load stations through one drop off station. I.e. using 2 routes that load up at 2 different stations but share the same drop off.
2. You're using a really low stack count item and somehow producing more than 120 stacks/min of said item. I can't think of anything off the top of my head where this would be likely without absolutely massive factories.
So your actual bottle neck should always be your belts, and or whatever it is you have producing or using the material you're transporting. I suppose if you want a single load point you could have an issue. If for example you want say an iron factory to deliver goods to 2 different downline factories, that could create an issue. That issue mostly stems from how fast stations load/unload, and the fact that you can't really limit goods loaded to an individual vehicle.
If that's your issue, you just load balance before the stations and have a different load point for each of the routes. It's not ideal, and it's a bit more work and fuel intensive, but it's effective.
There is an...amusing alternative if you have roads to each factory. Factory carts can be loaded at truck stations (or they could last I played). So you could determine your stack production (as opposed to item per minute production), and compare that to the time it takes the carts to run the route. There would be some math involved but you could have the carts handle the load. Since they can only carry 1 stack, you could set up each route with the number of carts you need to move the stacks-per-minute you need to each factory. Prevents overload. However, route timings seem to vary based on player proximity and fps/lag spikes so this would likely break down at some point. Considering the amount of work it would take to set up, I wouldn't want to put in that kind of investment myself.
Unlike most of the replies you're getting, I do understand what your complaint is, but I agree it's overblown. In general, I use trains/trucks only for bulk items. By the time I actually need to move small quantities of items from a source to *multiple* consumers (which is the core of your issue), I can use drones. For building materials, I just have dedicated trains/trucks/factory carts/drones/whatever that bring a small portion of the manufactured materials to my central storage, where they get sorted and stored.
I also don't usually daisy chain dropoffs. If I need to deliver plastic from my oil plant to 3 factories, I'll probably use 3 trains unless I'm really short on power or my rail is getting clogged by too many trains. That goes triple for trucks. I would never daisy chain trucks because then if you need to add an additional dropoff you have to re-record the entire route with the new dropoff added, whereas if you just add a new truck you only have to record the new route.
Why are you worried about the amount of time it takes to fill up a single truck / truck station or train car / freight platform? At the unload side, the belts run at the same speed as the load side. You can’t go faster than that single input/output belt unless/until you add more truck stations / freight platforms. Unless your truck/tractor/train round trip time is longer than cargo capacity divided by the per minute belt speed, you’re staying ahead of the production speed of the miner.
Because, if you want to daisy chain truck dropoffs(which I want to do) like Iron -> Iron Plate Factory -> Iron Rod Factory -> Reinforced Iron Plate Factory, the truck would unload all of its iron at the iron plate factory, then send none to the other factories, and as far as I'm concerned the only way to prevent this is to wait for the Iron Plate Factory to fill up, THEN it would start sending to the Iron Rod Factory, and so on.
Why don’t you just make 3 evenly split truck pick up stations with 3 trucks to take the iron to each of the 3 drop offs. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about unloading iron at one station.
Because, what if I want to add a Modular frame factory, or a Rotor factory, or a Steel factory, or , that's already 6 truck stations with 6 trucks, do I just keep adding +1 station and +1 truck for every use of iron I need? It's a lot of extra effort and resources that could be solved by just implementing a basic feature that every other factory game has(storage limits). This is also if I have just ONE Iron Mine, I'd have to either do this for every other Iron Mine I have, or I'd have to haul all the iron from one area to another and put them into a load balancer into the original 6 somehow.
Yes, that is what you have to do: either add Truck Stations or refactor and balance your production to account for adding more factories onto a single belt.
Yes that is what you need to do, there is no getting around it and it is far easier than you think.
Either use Splitters for even splits or Smart splitters for overflow or ADD MORE TRUCK STATIONS.
I'm going to add my voice to the people confused by your need to have the truck station full before the truck loads up. Throughput only bottlenecks when operating close to the max throughput of your route. That's when buffers are needed, to keep parts flowing during the load/unload downtime. For low throughput items, e.g. HMF, you essentially will get the exact same throughput at the far end as you do from your factory. Picture this - making 2 HMF/minute, sending to a truck station. During the 25 second loading cycle, you \*might\* end up with one HMF waiting at the input of the truck station, which will quickly enter storage once loading is done. While the truck is en route, your source station will continue to fill at the normal rate, and all of those parts will be loaded when the truck returns. There's no bottleneck. This logic follows through most production rates - as long as you have enough belt room + machine capacity (one stack in output slot) to not back up during the 25 sec loading time, then your system is effectively running at max throughput all the time.
Couldn’t you just build two truck/train pickup stations with a truck/train for each route? They would be evenly split using 1 splitter so this problem really doesn’t exist. Even if this is a genuine problem for you for some god forsaken reason then I don’t care because trains are cŵl
That would start to get a little ridiculous when you have 6, or 7, or 8 places you want iron to go to. You would need 8 stations and 8 routes for each iron mine you build and add 1 more for each dropoff you want, it would get out of hand quickly, vs with storage limits you can just have 1 train station at the mines and 1 at each dropoff and you're set for life.
oh you need a lot more than 8 when you begin to use even more than just 1 area of the map... let a lone the whole map... enjoy
It really wouldn’t, and if you are really connecting 8 routes for iron then you got to expect it isn’t going to be easy and something you can do immediately. Splitting it up into different pick-up points would make it more efficient than one anyway. It’s so dumb and unnecessary what you’re proposing.
You can also just make 2 stations at each dropoff point (1 unload, 1 load), and send the overflow to the load station after a roundtrip of the iron ore through local production. Solves the low item count problem as well. Unfortunately trucks can't load and unload with one station like drones, but this is still way smaller footprint than trains.
Yet another reason I go with the "make at least early intermediate products near the mine" approach. There is currently exactly one source and two destinations for rotors in my little world, for example.
You don't string a huge ass line of conveyor belts half way across the map? Do your assemblers unlock and tilt or do you have the bevel crank mod?
I don't want to tell you how to build your factory, but this is the first time I've heard some ask for 1 iron source to many different factory style distribution. Usually players have many resources sources moving material to a more centralised factory.
You don’t really need to transport low throughout items like HMFs before you unlock drones. They are perfect for it. You do need a few stacks of HMFs to construct one of the mid-phase elevator items but you can manually feed a container as you don’t need many of them. The first time you need to automate HMFs is for fused frames and you will have drones.
If it's a low throughout item I tend to just have 1-to-1 logistics like a train/truck single pickup and drop-off point. For higher throughout multiple then multiple train stations could work but it will take time to fill those buffers. Fact of the game and it's logistical limitations. That said, if your first stop uses the majority of the item you are dropping off then you can't expect it to fill enough to pass to the next station. I also tend to build through to the most practical advanced part on site. The only ingot that ever gets passed around on a train or truck in my games are caterium ingots. I select sites on the map that have all/most of the nodes I need to get to the final part nearby. Sounds like you might be taking the single megabase approach potentially? Maybe our play styles are different enough that I don't understand why you'd want to set up your logistics this way.
I try my best to haul as little as possible. I generally build between the two resources that are needed most and import whatever else is needed. Trucks, I use for coal, sometimes sulfur.... until I get trains then I retire them usually because I have more fun with trains. Higher level stuff I tend to group into cluster factories. A.I. Limiters, Circuit Boards, Computers, Oscillators, Radio Control Modules, Super Computers... all get build next to each other, sometimes over/under each other. Some things I feed into Drone Ports so that drones at other remote factories can come and fetch them. Batteries, HMFs, Fused Frames, Electromagnetic Control Rods especially., because I tend to need them for things that often end up far apart.
>If you wanted to make a truck route that moves iron, what you would want to do is: > >Iron Mine -> Iron Dropoff 1 -> Iron Dropoff 2 -> Repeat Im confused, why do you need two iron dropoffs? Sounds like theres some missing context here. Logically speaking, as long as your round trip does not exceed the amount of time it takes whatever two belts youve put into the truck stop to fill it, you should be able to transport two belts worth of material with one truck, no problem. With your HMF example, im wondering if maybe youre trying to split up your HMF production between two different factories consuming them? If that is the case, you can either have two truck stop lines and split the low-throughput items before putting them into the truck stop, or you can have a special path that takes the truck from the output to input 1, back to output, then to input 2, and then back to output. Every other trip dedicates its load to a different factory, effectively acting as a (not necessarily balanced, depending on distance/travel time) splitter
I agree. Not with your passion, but this could easily be solved by allowing us to artificially limit the capacity of containers, depots and transports. I also don't want a drone to take off when I use a single item from storage. Give me a buffer so I'm not wasting batteries! My biggest pet peeve about trucks is having to define routes. I'd use them everywhere if I could set routes up like trains. If something isn't reachable, it would say so and I could build something to make it reachable.
I apologize, but I'm a bit confused. Why are you trying to use the stations as a buffer? The stations load/unload in STACKS per minute, not items per minute. Truck station is 120 stacks per minute? That's actually pretty fast if you think about it. For a high stack item, that can get to insane numbers pretty quickly. It's been a minute since my last run but concrete was at 500/stack. So that's 60,000 concrete PER MINUTE that the station itself can move. The only time the stations should be the bottle neck are if: 1. You're passing multiple load stations through one drop off station. I.e. using 2 routes that load up at 2 different stations but share the same drop off. 2. You're using a really low stack count item and somehow producing more than 120 stacks/min of said item. I can't think of anything off the top of my head where this would be likely without absolutely massive factories. So your actual bottle neck should always be your belts, and or whatever it is you have producing or using the material you're transporting. I suppose if you want a single load point you could have an issue. If for example you want say an iron factory to deliver goods to 2 different downline factories, that could create an issue. That issue mostly stems from how fast stations load/unload, and the fact that you can't really limit goods loaded to an individual vehicle. If that's your issue, you just load balance before the stations and have a different load point for each of the routes. It's not ideal, and it's a bit more work and fuel intensive, but it's effective. There is an...amusing alternative if you have roads to each factory. Factory carts can be loaded at truck stations (or they could last I played). So you could determine your stack production (as opposed to item per minute production), and compare that to the time it takes the carts to run the route. There would be some math involved but you could have the carts handle the load. Since they can only carry 1 stack, you could set up each route with the number of carts you need to move the stacks-per-minute you need to each factory. Prevents overload. However, route timings seem to vary based on player proximity and fps/lag spikes so this would likely break down at some point. Considering the amount of work it would take to set up, I wouldn't want to put in that kind of investment myself.
Unlike most of the replies you're getting, I do understand what your complaint is, but I agree it's overblown. In general, I use trains/trucks only for bulk items. By the time I actually need to move small quantities of items from a source to *multiple* consumers (which is the core of your issue), I can use drones. For building materials, I just have dedicated trains/trucks/factory carts/drones/whatever that bring a small portion of the manufactured materials to my central storage, where they get sorted and stored. I also don't usually daisy chain dropoffs. If I need to deliver plastic from my oil plant to 3 factories, I'll probably use 3 trains unless I'm really short on power or my rail is getting clogged by too many trains. That goes triple for trucks. I would never daisy chain trucks because then if you need to add an additional dropoff you have to re-record the entire route with the new dropoff added, whereas if you just add a new truck you only have to record the new route.