Factorio Forums

Hello everyone!

I have a main base with a mainbus system. My next goal is to stretch the production into some outposts (smelting of my ores to plates is sourced out already).

My next step is to source out the production of green circuits.

But here is my problem: I need metal plates in my mainbase and of course metal plates in the planned green circuits-site too. Is there a way to manage my trains somehow, so they visit both places if they need more plates? Or is the only solution to predefine a train to visit only the planned outpost and some other trains to visit only the main station?

I know, you can activate/deactivate a train station, but what should i do with a train, is no station is actually need new plates? When i let them wait for a circuit condition, how can i assure, only one train is reacting on a circuit condition? Actually my trains drive to a waiting station, and in the moment the circuit sends the signal, all of them drive at once to the station.

Thx for every hint

Greetings, Ronny

there are a few ways to achieve this. What I find the simplest and easiest to setup is to have all your iron smelting in one place. Then at every outpost that want iron plates you can add one or more trains that go to 'Iron Plate Pickup' (or whatever you named your iron plates pickup). For your iron ore outposts you can have one or more trains per outpost all going to the iron ore drop.

I'll normally add 2 trains to any route. Sometime more if high throughput or long travel times. Just make sure that you have enough waiting bays or a stacker to cope with the additional trains.

As I said above there are other ways to set up what you want, but in my opinion that is the simplest to setup, easiest to understand, as well as being robust and easy to maintain.

Using 'mechanical back-pressure' is the easiest way. Simply have each place that needs Iron plates have it's own dedicated train(s) and stop, and what happens is, once the buffers at that place are full, then the train will wait there until it is actually able to be fully unloaded, thus said train is not taking any more iron plates from your iron plate production center, which means available plates are free to be taken by other trains to other things that need them. Such a system does tend to tie up a good bit of items in buffers (you can reduce this by limited how many slots of the chests may be used, but then your buffer is also correspondingly small, so if you hit a shortage you'll have little time to correct it before you run out of reserves and start having production slowed). You can even use the same loading station at the Iron plates facility for all outgoing Iron plates, provided you don't have enough trains to run into traffic throughput issues with the station.