LTN trains are a valid approach to build a PySuite base

[Arfarazon]

Hi everyone, just looking to dive back into pymods soon, with a full release of PyAL probably, so i decided to share my approach to some of the concerns and issues people seem to have with their bases.

I was playing a full Py suite of mods last year, started on 0.16 and migrated to 0.17 sometime in the process. I managed to get to purple science fully, and almost reached the yellow one. Unfortunately the savegame is now totally broken because of all the mod compatibility issues and changes, when i load it, pretty much all of the modded entities get removed so i decided to just show it as is.

Save Info:

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.24.09.png (322.8 KiB) Viewed 1992 times

A lot of people seem to have concerns with trains and LTN/TSM, is it viable or not and how to approach it.
My take on this is - YES, LTN or some automated trains are the perfect and probably even mandatory way of playing Py mods. BUT dont constrain yourself with some kind of rigid train grid, dont make your train "cells" fixed in size. some of the stations will only have one input and one output, while some will have 20+ inputs and 3/4 outputs and the factories themselves can be close to hundred+ chunks in size also.
When planning and thinking what to do i decided that i want at least some form of train grid, but the cells would be huge and could contain variable number of stations and factories in them, so i went with this freeform train grid:

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.39.01.png (648.25 KiB) Viewed 1992 times

Max zoom out screenshot to get the scale of everything:

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.25.16.png (337.22 KiB) Viewed 1992 times

The stations themselves are super-simple stacker + ltn providers/requesters:

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.27.56.png (629.18 KiB) Viewed 1992 times

Starter base:

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.26.53.png (548.16 KiB) Viewed 1992 times

I built up my starter base up to circuits T2 to be able to make LTN stations, i started training in the resources from various patches before i made LTN stations, so the train grid was getting built long before automated trains. For the starter base i used a combination of belts and bots to get things done, and for the love of god do use barrels transported around with bots, otherwise a tangled mess of piping will get you eventually.

The mall from map view:

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.31.23.png (620.4 KiB) Viewed 1992 times

Please save yourself a metric ton of headaches and do make a centralized mall, for all the building needs, yes it will have a ton of inputs, yes it is still worth it.
I also used a set of "tram" stops all over the train grid and my personal train that had all those tram stops in its schedule so i could zoom around the map fast enough. but with addition of ctrl-clicking a train to go to any spot, its not THAT necessary but still quite helpful.

For trains I initially made 1-2 trains, but the hassle of managing even loading/unloading of two wagons got me, and i decided that 1-1 trains are plenty, so i went with that. At the time i stopped i had around 5 train depots for liquid trains and 5 or 6 for solids, each depot has 19 trains it supports

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.32.18.png (4.9 MiB) Viewed 1992 times

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.38.06.png (4.73 MiB) Viewed 1992 times

I also strongly suggest making a separate trash burning/reprocessing station because a lot of the chains and factories produce excess stone/dust/stuff. In the trash station i used manual trains with a few stops each to go around and collect trash from various factories and dump it all in one place, where bots would bring usefull stuff to LTN providers on the spot, and burn the excess off to ash (and ash would get compressed into coal dust and used to fuel the burners itself, with excess dust being reprocessed further into nothingness)

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.40.05.png (4.64 MiB) Viewed 1992 times

Factorio 0.18.8 2020-02-25 11.40.22.png (3.38 MiB) Viewed 1992 times

So thats my approach to Py suite, just felt the desire to brag a bit and also share my thoughts.
Of course huge thank you goes to Pyanodon for allowing us to dive into all of this in the first place, the base game and most of other mods seems too simple and boring after this PyAdventure
Looking forward to finishing up my current project outside of games and being able to immerse into updated PySuite once again

Also here is the link to imgur album with these and a bit more of screenshots for the base:
https://imgur.com/a/hjxSNJq