Unloading station - room for improvement

[realm174]

Hi all,
I'm doing this run with no logistics robots, for a fun challenge. I have a few trains that go and gather various raw material (Iron, Copper, Coal, Alien Ore (peace mod)) and bring it back to the train station. 2 cargo cars, generally speaking, one of them has copper, and the other one has a combination of Iron/Charcoal and Alien Ore. (I say generally, because every once in a while, some copper make it to the other car, or some of the other material make it to the copper car). Below is a picture of the unloading area where I sort the material to go on various belts. I've been trying a few different designs to try and get the most volume possible onto the belts. However, every once in a while my Iron belts gets fully loaded, stopping the entire flow of Alien/Charcoal.

Any suggestions (other than using robots) on how I can alleviate this problem? I already have (not on screen) a dozen or so steel chests to buffer some extra iron, but those are filled up as well.

thanks!

[Radioactive Pretzels]

Circuit condition on the inserters pulling from the train chest to your belt. Don't move iron onto the cycled belt when you have too much iron in your output buffer chests already. Once those output buffer chests fill, your cycled belt will jam, as you've found out.

[Hammerchief]

Condition on unloading will sure prevent sorting mechanism from becoming clogged, but in some time it will just result in train wagon being full of iron and having no room for alien ore. (If you don't have reserved cargo slots for it, which as I understand is not part of this challenge.) The proper way would be preventing excess ore from being loaded into train.
The easy way out (but again, not fun challenge and also not self-sustainable) is making buffer for iron big enough to hold all your excess ore.

[ssilk]

Moved from General to Gameplay help

[realm174]

ssilk: thanks.. sorry about that!

Circuits.. one of the thing I haven't touched yet.. I'll have to locate some good/simple tutorials.. The problem I can think of about the "preventing the loading" part, is that I would have to figure out at each outpost how to load only certain ores, based on what is in storage at the central unloading area... I'm not sure how to do either, but thanks for putting me on the right track. I'll go learn circuits now, in between launching rockets..

[Mehve]

Maybe I missed a a point of the challenge, but is there any reason you can't just use filter inserters right at the train wagons? Change the current stack inserters to filter stack inserters, set them to iron. This basically guarantees your main belt will only ever have iron on it. Then set up some other filter inserters on the other side of the wagon to grab specific things like alien ore, copper, charcoal, etc, and route them appropriately? Or am I missing something?

[realm174]

oh jeez! So simple! Make me ashame I didn't even think of that. That's a very smart idea, sort as it's pulling from the train instead of dump the train content onto belt and struggle with moving stuff around again. That's brilliant, thanks!!

[Hannu]

You should set filters in cargo wagons too. Open the inventory window and click a slot with middle button. Select what stuff you want to be in that slot and copy it by normal shift right & shift left operation to all slots. I use always filtered slots in wagons and and filter inserters in unload stations in all automated trains. Only my personal work train have no filters. Therefore I can run several tens of trains in one massive network (not necessarily the most effective way in Factorio by I like such traffic) and never get materials mixed.

[realm174]

Thanks Hannu. That's what I ended up doing as I was fixing things up, just so that I get the proper things in the proper car (train has 2 cars), with a "proper" ratio based on what I typically consume. The only issue I have yet to fix is that in some instances, the drills pick up more than one item. For example, say an iron patch, and there's a bit of copper tucked in there somewhere. It gets mined, belted to the buffer chests for loading, but then never gets onto the train since I use filters. So I do have a temporary fix, which is, I reserved 1 slot for the "incorrect" cargo in each car. (So, on the iron car, I have a slot for copper, one for stone, one for alien ore, one for charcoal, and the rest is filtered for iron. Same idea on the copper car). This works fairly well so far, the only way I could think of improving this would be to make sure I get the proper cargo in the proper buffer chests prior to loading onto the train, that way, everything is always in the right car.

I tried that at one of the mining station, which happened to be drilling for 3 different things in one area (Iron, copper and stone), using filter inserters to redirect each item into the proper chest, but even with the cargo bonus, it is still quite a slow process to first move the things onto a proper belt and then into the buffer chest.

What I really wish I could do is to have a loading area where the train would stop, load up the first car until full, then move forward one car length to load up the second car, and so on. Or the same thing at the unloading area. That way, I could ensure things get loaded in the proper car by using filters. I guess I could probably do that by setting up multiple train stops at each mining area, one car length apart, and have the schedule to go to each one of those one by one... or is there a better way to do that?

[Hannu]

The only issue I have yet to fix is that in some instances, the drills pick up more than one item. For example, say an iron patch, and there's a bit of copper tucked in there somewhere.

I sort everything before I put them on load chests. I try to avoid placing miners on spots where they can produce more that one product. But if I have mixed output I put stuff on a belt loop and sort them by filter inserters before loading to the train. However, such a system have tendency to clog if both items are not used continuously. I have handled the worst situations (galena ore in Bob's mods which produce lead and nickel) with circuit logic and void chest mod. I sort different products to chests. I have circuit logics to control the flow so that if the nickel chest is full and the lead chest is not, nickel is transferred to void chest to keep lead production running. But if both chests are full (so there is not load) nothing is done and miners will stop so that energy and ore is not wasted. Nickel is used much less and situation in which the lead chest is full and nickel chest is not is practically impossible, but it would be possible to transfer lead to the void chest in such a situation.

What I really wish I could do is to have a loading area where the train would stop, load up the first car until full, then move forward one car length to load up the second car, and so on. Or the same thing at the unloading area. That way, I could ensure things get loaded in the proper car by using filters. I guess I could probably do that by setting up multiple train stops at each mining area, one car length apart, and have the schedule to go to each one of those one by one... or is there a better way to do that?

It sounds slow. It is much faster to load and unload all wagons parallel. Your mixing problem sounds quite odd for me and my advice can be weak. I guess that you have some mods or special settings which cause excessive mixing of ores. I have sometimes two ore patches next to each other but I have never got three or more ores simultaneously. Can you give a picture from your mining outpost?

Miners produce normally about 0.5 items per second. A filter inserter can handle about 2.4 without bonuses and first bonus doubles the throughput. If you sort only those miners output which are placed on multiple ores you should not need for massive systems. You may need couple of inserters and messy belt spaghetti but it should not be exteremely expensive. Unfortunately there are not elegant solutions to separate mixed items on belts. Most players use robots in such situations. If you do not like inserter sorting systems probably your train loading one car at a time work too and you can increase throughput by using several trains on route between your base and the outpost. Later you will need separate trains for ores.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Hopefully the 0.15 update will allow trains to send the contents of its wagons to the circuit network so you can set your inserters to only load iron onto the train if it contains less than 2,000 or something. This will potentially cause pretty much the same problem at your loading area if loading more than one type of resource but as you can also read the contents of belts and disable them via the circuit network I'm sure there's some magic you could work out maybe disabling production or transport of that component or something.

Actually something I will note is for each wagon you unload into 12 chests, then those into two 3>2 belt combiners, one for each side of the belt. You can save a lot of space and belts by having (from top down) the second, fourth and sixth inserters unloading to a belt that merges with the belt on the north... Not explaining very well lol. Belts should look like this:

Code: Select all

< < < < < < ¬ | T |
        ^ < ¬ | R |
< < < < < < ¬ | A |
        ^ < ¬ | I |
< < < < < < ¬ | N |
        ^ < ¬ |   |

Where:
< is westbound belt
^ is northbound belt
¬ is inserter
|   | is train carriage segment

So what you're doing is each two inserters load a full belt between them, THEN it gets put into a single 3>2 belt combiner. You'll use a lot less belts and a lot less space.

[realm174]

Hannu: Sorry, no picture available as I've already cleared that area, but basically, it was an iron patch next to a copper patch, with a tiny coal patch in between. When I set my drills down, I forgot that they mine one tile around their actual size, so both my iron and my copper drills picked up a bit of everything.

That being said, I think I was going the wrong way about this, at the loading area. I was setting up a long belt from the drills to the train, stopping a bit short of it, then had filter-inserters on both sides of the belt trying to pick up everything and relocating it to adjacent belts. That only worked for a short while. So I changed it so that the inserters only pick off the belts the items that don't belong there, and leave the rest of the belt to flow onto the train loading. That seems to work a lot better. Sadly, I ran out of materials at that spot to do further testing. I haven't looked at the circuits yet, only watched a couple of videos to try and get a grasp on the concept. So far, I can't seem to brain it. IRL in the process of buying a house, so anything that requires heavy thinking/learning seems to be more difficult than usual..

You are obviously correct, my idea of a train that moves one bit at a time to unload cars would definitely be very slow compared to unloading everything all at once. Because I process Copper and Iron in slightly different areas, I originally thought I use that method, but that won't be much efficient. It'll be much better to just have longer belts that take things where they need to go (smelting area for iron and copper, storage for the rest of the stuff). I do have 1/2 dozen trains doing the rounds and picking things up from the different outposts. So their content is quite similar from one train to the other. The alternative might be to have specific trains going to specific outposts so that they have specific content. In which case, I would rearrange the unloading area so that there's a station for each type of ore to unload. Now that I think about it, this might be a better way to go. Have a specific train for each type of ores. The rail network (dual track, one way) is such that they do the entire circuit anyway. So I could have the trains visit all stations, stop until full or inactive, then move on to the next station, and in the end, come to the unloading area based on their content, which would be much simpler than trying to do any type of sorting at loading or unloading. Yes?

Deadly-Bagel: Yeah, that might not been overly obvious from the picture... That, however, has already changed. I still have 12 chests per car,but each chest is pulling a specific type of item.



First thing I notice from the screen shot, I guess I ran out of blue belts at one point and forgot to go back and finish that iron site.. LOL! That being said.. the way it is setup now, which works, mostly, is that on the left side, I pull out iron and copper, going directly to their own belt. On the right side, I pull the other things, sending them also directly to their own belt, with the exception of iron and copper which is redirected to the left-side belts. Here's a close up.



However, as I was telling Hannu, I think I will redesign the whole thing so that I have one train and one unloading station per type of ore. Maybe that'll be more efficient that way... At the very least, probably a cleaner belt system