Friday Facts #395 - Generic interrupts and Train stop priority

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-395

[Necronium]

Finally we got priority setting for train stations. Les goooooooooooooooo, gib me expansion now

[Sachertorte]

The new item icon placeholder effectively canonises using item icons in train stop names - that's good news for me because I already do that, but raises questions:

1. Could now be a good time to implement a more intuitive order for stops with icons in their names? I see that the list of interrupts in the FFF is manually ordered, but an automatic order for other UIs (like station selection dropdowns) could still use a better order, e.g. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=97719

2. What if there's other text in the stop name, such as the name of the item, written in the player's language? Can the placeholder match that? I don't want to lose readability by having the only unique part of the stop name being the icon, especially in modded playthroughs with lots of similar (or unfamiliar!) items.

[Justderpingalong]

The generic item parameter is such an elegant way of simplifying the orders. Though as with the last time you've shown this, there's still 1 issue: Trains are dispatched based on what is available to pick up, not based on what is needed to be dropped off. It'd be cool if we could somehow create something like this. That would complete the train rework for me. But this is already damn good.

[Ghoulish]

More great additions/changes. 2.0 needs to release already!

[Grob]

I am currently in the process of building a factory where some trains leaves their stop without knowing where they will go, and their actual destination is decided by the factory in mid-route.

Some kind of "well I have iron, and there is a huge need of iron here that wasn't made clear by the factory 3s earlier, so I will repath because I can give some" without the need of waiting for a train to go in iron station, fill, then come to the needing depot.

My actual use is more a "Okay, the train leaves the station, so now I will see where I want him to go... Calculating... Ok he shall go there." Which may seems irrelevant for some 1 big train system for the whole factory. But here I use it in a multi-cell system, with very tiny cell having its own trains, where the same pickup & depot moves different items ; where you can't afford to loose 1s of waiting + calculation time everytime a train mooves.

The change you made for the killed trains stop actually prevent this kind of behavior. There is becoming no way of changing the destination of a train while in mid-journey using logic.
I agree that it is a good thing for newcomers. But for advanced logicians that use some hundreds of combinators, it could help to have a proper way of automatically repathing trains in live-mode using logic.

[SnowZyDe]

The bad thing is that you don't run a test server to try out the changes.

[picklock]

These are further outstanding innovations that this FFF brings.

As I already suspected when FFF-0389 was released, I have a lot of work ahead of me in redesigning my existing Blueprints or generating new Blueprints.

I'm not a fan of having all trains transport everything. I prefer it when there are special trains for each task. But the fact that you can play the way you prefer is one of the things that Factorio offers.

The new priorities for the train stops finally allow me to balance my unloading stations in a relatively easy way, especially for ore.

A question about the wildcard signal "Any fuel". Did I understand correctly that I can, for example, define a condition that says that if "Any fuel" is less than 50 then go to the train stop to refuel and the name of the stop can be different from the used fuel?

[Hares]

Very nice changes. However, what if I want my train stops to have names like [item="iron-plate"] Iron Plates / Unload and not just [item="iron-plate"] Unload ? Is there a way to generalize item name, not only icon?

Also, is the "Trains with this stop" screen now gone?

[ccw18]

I wonder how to make use of ‘any fuel’ signal for a generic refuel station. For coal, I probably want to go refuel when theres 10-25 coal, but for nuclear fuel I want to refuel when theres 0-1 fuels. Those ranges don’t overlap thus cannot work together as a general refuel interrupt

[spiral_power]

I am not sure what the logic would be for Train stop priority. How will it change from the existing routing?
Currently it goes to the first station it finds, but in 2.0 it will search the network until it finds the highest priority station, and if not, it will go to a lower priority station?
In other words I am concerned about UPS drops. Well, I guess devs will do just fine.

[Hares]

I wonder how to make use of ‘any fuel’ signal for a generic refuel station. For coal, I probably want to go refuel when theres 10-25 coal, but for nuclear fuel I want to refuel when theres 0-1 fuels. Those ranges don’t overlap thus cannot work together as a general refuel interrupt

You just set the fuel type on refuel station only, and all trains those are low on fuel will head that way. As far as I get, tarin fuel works as queue, or "1st in -> 1st out", so the lower-quality fuel from the previous epoch is burnt first, slowly shifting to the new era of rocket fuel.

What I'm really concerned about is the fact different fuel types have different stack sizes and thus "any fuel < 50" will work for coal & solid fuel but will break for rocket fuel and nuclear fuel. Also, I don't get how "any fuel" will handle the case for mixed fuel type for the transition period I mentioned above.

[Etherblood]

Disabled train stops not being skipped is very nice, I previously had to add train stations with train limit 0 to get the same behaviour.
Also no need for the automatic trains mod anymore!

[FuzzyOne]

"dispatch your thoughts" ... that really routed my train!

[astroshak]

Honestly not too sure I like the change from “stop disabled = skip the stop” to “stop disabled = train stop limit set to zero”. Though the interrupts and/or station priority seem like they will make good replacements.

I currently use Enable/Disable for specific trains, such as my Crude Oil train. When I set up flamethrowers at the Walls I need fuel for them, and I just use the same crude oil train that delivers oil to the refinery for it. By disabling the wall oil stops they straight up get skipped and the train cycles between oil fields and refinery. But when there is a need for oil at the wall, the stop gets enabled and the train goes there first. Station priority will work as a very suitable replacement as it would send the train back to the oil fields when done rather than making the train carry on to the refinery with little to no crude in it.

[Qon]

2. What if there's other text in the stop name, such as the name of the item, written in the player's language? Can the placeholder match that? I don't want to lose readability by having the only unique part of the stop name being the icon, especially in modded playthroughs with lots of similar (or unfamiliar!) items.

Very nice changes. However, what if I want my train stops to have names like [item="iron-plate"] Iron Plates / Unload and not just [item="iron-plate"] Unload ? Is there a way to generalize item name, not only icon?

They could easily give us the option to show the name next to the icon, like it does in chat if you use rich text for a any item-like thing (not pure icon path). But taking name from free form text that isn't rich text tags own converting it into generic stops, that's just fragile and bad and won't happen.

[yura881]

After 2.0 on YouTube: 'Factorio Quick Basics Trains Guide' is only 4 hours long.
But I like this; all this new stuff should be tested during gameplay, it looks good.

[Qon]

Easier train dispatching

Another annoyance which becomes more clear with larger train systems, is the pain of creating and dispatching new trains. With the ability to blueprint trains, it is almost painless, but you still need to manually set them to automatic mode.

No Longer! Now when a train blueprint is fully built (importantly, including fuel requests), it will switch to automatic mode.

My mod "Do Robots Build Automatic Trains?" was vanillized!

[MEOWMI]

Great stuff. I hope that you can improve the existing train tutorials, because that will really be needed. Even with just the chain signals, the current tutorial feels a bit short. You could accidentally beat it, or beat it without really internalizing the meaning, and even right now it would need another level to it.

[Justderpingalong]

Just had an idea whilst thinking about this: I'm currently playing a Space Exploration playthrough using LTN so whenever I see train stuff I try to imagine 'will this let me do what I do in LTN without needing LTN'? And stumbled upon a particular use case: Many of my trainstops accept multiple different items. For my sanity, I name the requester stations something like [item:requester chest][item1][item2][item3][item4] etc. The generalised interrupts are brilliant, they truly are: But how will they work with this setup? I believe the generalised interrupts work GREAT so long as your usecase assumes trains will only ever load 1 item and unload 1 item. But this is simply not true for most people. So given we're this close to an LTN/Cybersyn/any other similar mod like system, I wish we could just embrace it.