Factorio Forums

Hi. I've been slowly working on expanding a base. It has reached a "medium" size. I have separate areas for copper, iron, green and red circuit production. My off-site copper smelting (there is also some smelting directly adjacent to the base) is currently producing 16 blue belts worth of copper. I use 2-4 trains and my copper area has two stations for picking up plates. A recent expansion has caused my copper usage to out strip that capacity. Because I also recently switched to using Deadlock's Compact Loaders I know the issue is not a problem of insufficient belt unloading speed. I am loading the stations at a rate of 8 full blue belts each.

I realized there were two choices. One, I could rebuild my train station and smelting so that I could provide 16 blue belts of material to each station. This would for now, resolve the issue. Two, I could build more smelting and create additional stations. Four stations with the current capacity would also solve the problem. Okay, that's the setup. Here is the question:

How do people get trains coming in for product to cycle through the available stations? If I had four copper plate loading stations, all using the same incoming train parking lot, how do I keep trains from going to stations which are running low on plates? The easy thing would seem to be summing the chests and disable the station below a certain level. That would work, although it doesn't feel very satisfactory. I'm looking for something more elegant. A way to have the train directed to the currently available station with the most plates. Is there a way I could do that which isn't terribly complicated? I understand it would be somewhat complicated, I just want to be able to understand it.

Sounds like you might want larger trains

Opening the station with the lowest/highest count isn't the only option. You can also do averages (though that causes some issues too since trains will prefer closer stations):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVveM-QOORs

Don't disable the train stop though. That will mess with train pathing. Disable a signal in the station path. The the trains in the stacker will select a station that is not blocked.

This mod also has very nice options to help with dispatching trains as needed:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/train-pubsub
But you still to count the content in the chests to determine when to request a train

Ah... although off point of the question I asked -- I managed to find a simpler more direct fix, at least for the short term.

Since my green circuit area is being feed 16 blue belts of copper (and iron) I can simply duplicate my smelting area allowing it to feed the green circuit production directly off a smelting line, instead of being feed copper plates off trains. Hmm, I should probably do it for both copper and iron. Cool. That give me plenty to do for a bit. That will obviously significantly reduce the load on the current copper and iron producing locations.

I am still interested in smart station selection though. If anyone else can point to things others have done or discussed I'll check them out. Thanks.

Dedicated smelting for green circuits is always a good idea

Serenity wrote: ↑Wed Jan 09, 2019 6:04 pm Dedicated smelting for green circuits is always a good idea

My green circuit production area has more smelters than my science production and the science production has its own green circuit production.
this is ridiculous.

there is no maximum scale, you can always double it!