Factorio Forums

Hi,

i am about to rebuild the central trainstop at my main base.
What i would like to do is to create multiple unload stations called "Base unload" and let the trains decide which station to use. I read on reddit (can´t find the link anymore) that the trains will choose the first free station they can find. But the users were not sure when the path decision is happening. At each signal or at the start station?

Also i wanted to create the loading outpost all with the same name like "copper" and let the trains then select the stations itself. But what happend is that a 2 trains were waiting at one outpost while 3 free outputs were waiting.
How is the decision making when multiple stations have the same name?

ALso, are there mods out threre that improve this handling? I really enjoy the optimazation part here

Thanks

at the start station only

kinnom wrote:at the start station only

• At the departing station
• When train tries reserving the next block on the path, but cant due to red light
• Randomly when the train feels like it (unavoidably at the worst possible moment)

I'm quite sure it recalculates every time it passes a signal. That's the logic behind "The Golden Train" in the Show Your Creations forum, it toggles access to the next train station so it's always forced to go to the further one and just keeps looping.

The actual calculation is reasonably straightforward. First it takes a list of all the available Train Stops, meaning those it can currently drive to without stopping. Of those stops it calculates the route that passes the least number of signals (which is used instead of distance), then picks the station with the route with the least signals.

As far as I'm aware there is one exception, if there is a route with an exceptionally high number of signals, a train will ignore it in preference of a shorter unavailable route, presumably hoping that it will become available. I don't know exactly how this is calculated, and I don't know how it picks a station with identical 'length' paths but that's the basics.