Factorio Forums

OK, I am banging my head against the computer screen on this one.

I am trying to link two rails separated by 1 space without making all kinds of crazy detours and loops and it just wont work. Whenever I have rails separated by 1 space in the middle, they won't link, as shown in the picture. If there is 2 or more spaces in the middle, it works fine.



The only thing that works is spreading the line so it is 3 wide then joining, or doing a complete loop ... neither of these options are great as it is really ugly and takes a ton of space.

Am I doing something wrong or is it just messed up?

You are doing it totally fine but with a spacing of one there is no way to join them. All equal or above 2 works.

Greetings, steinio.

steinio wrote:You are doing it totally fine but with a spacing of one there is no way to join them. All equal or above 2 works.

Greetings, steinio.

That is seriously lame.

Alternatively, bend the rail in the other direction first and then back again, that works too.

But yeah, there's a reason why many rail designs you will see leave exactly 4 tiles between parallel tracks.

Lav wrote:Alternatively, bend the rail in the other direction first and then back again, that works too.

But yeah, there's a reason why many rail designs you will see leave exactly 4 tiles between parallel tracks.

it just doesn't make any sense. why should it get harder to join rails when they are closer together? In real life, the exact opposite is true. It is illogical and doesn't seem to add anything to the game besides annoyance.

Cronie wrote:it just doesn't make any sense. why should it get harder to join rails when they are closer together? In real life, the exact opposite is true. It is illogical and doesn't seem to add anything to the game besides annoyance.

It makes a lot of sense, just of a different kind.

The game currently supports three type of placed rails: straight, diagonal and curved. For each 90 degrees turn there are 2 curved rails, each rotating the track 45 degrees.

With these constraints, there's a hard limit to how narrow you can make an S-bend, and that limit results in this 4 tiles gap.

Making smaller gap would require more rail types, which would complicate game code, rail placement/removal UI and reduce game performance. That apparently was determined to be a bad trade by the devs.

Lav wrote:

Cronie wrote:it just doesn't make any sense. why should it get harder to join rails when they are closer together? In real life, the exact opposite is true. It is illogical and doesn't seem to add anything to the game besides annoyance.

It makes a lot of sense, just of a different kind.

The game currently supports three type of placed rails: straight, diagonal and curved. For each 90 degrees turn there are 2 curved rails, each rotating the track 45 degrees.

With these constraints, there's a hard limit to how narrow you can make an S-bend, and that limit results in this 4 tiles gap.

Making smaller gap would require more rail types, which would complicate game code, rail placement/removal UI and reduce game performance. That apparently was determined to be a bad trade by the devs.

regardless of the reason, it makes for sloppy placement and I hope it is fixed in a future build

Im sure thats pretty low on the list of things to improve. Im not a dev but i think this would also take huge amounts of work to apply.

Cronie wrote:regardless of the reason, it makes for sloppy placement and I hope it is fixed in a future build

This rail configuration was here from the start and will probably never change. Just deal with it. This fine tuning will not improve gameplay even slightly.

I don't mind the, "you can't join rails which are too close to each other" as much as whatever it is that keeps rails from being placed on the exact tiles you want sometimes. For example, in this image: you can not place rails in the gap between the two belts, despite there being two tiles of open space -- they'll only go down on the tiles you see them on in the image.

PacifyerGrey wrote:

Cronie wrote:regardless of the reason, it makes for sloppy placement and I hope it is fixed in a future build

This rail configuration was here from the start and will probably never change. Just deal with it. This fine tuning will not improve gameplay even slightly.

I disagree, it would improve the gameplay for me at least