Train Station Macros!

[GovtPlant]

TL;DR

A way to group stations in a series so that you can select them all at once from the train menu would be really nice and play well with the new interrupts

Motivation

The new train and station options in https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-403 and https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-395 make things a lot more ergonomic for us with train groups and interrupts. I really do appreciate the UI/QOL crusade they've been going on for 2.0, but while I was tinkering with some inline train stops I noticed a mild inconvenience that the changes wont cover: the station requires trains to wind around once to keep the cars off the tracks...

I'm very proud of this.

Screenshot (3).png (1.42 MiB) Viewed 615 times

...but doing that makes the train schedule look like this.

>:(

Screenshot (2).png (121.47 KiB) Viewed 615 times

This is an absolute pain to input every time, which sucks because using passthrough stations like this allow for some very unique and useful train networks. Train groups will help to alleviate this, but I think we could go further.

Solution

Originally I was going to suggest special rail signals that connect to a train station which a train has to path through before they park, but that solution felt messy, and besides, the team has said in previous blog posts that they don't wanna add too many new entities. If only we could add all these stations with a single button press. Then I remembered that macros exist, and I did a backflip.

Ideally, it would be in the stations tab of the train menu, and it would allow you combine stations and wait conditions and series to create a macro, which would then show up as an option in the train schedule, be renamed for clarity, and allow you to add complex routines to trains in just a single click. Possible features include:

• Calling macros from parameterized train schedules and interrupts, allowing trains to go to a series of stops instead of just one (unless you chain interrupts)
• Add an option to train stops which disables them from showing up outside of macros to reduce clutter (only on stops that are never visited with a wait condition)
• Form train behaviors from composition, allowing complex schedules to be made easily without a preexisting train with that schedule
• Reduce the possibility of missclicks sending your train to narnia when you were just trying to make it do a donut
• Plenty of other stuff I'm too dumb to think up

All in all I think it'd be a nice little QOL feature that wouldn't be too hard (thought don't quote me on that, I only kinda know the basics of what I'm talking about). Would love to hear some thoughts.

[Koub]

I'm pretty sure the recommandations are to build straight train stations, so I doubt your extremely specific use case will be taken into consideration for a new feature.
btw how does your design work with fluids ?

[GovtPlant]

Well the train station is admittedly poorly advised and does not work with fluids excepts for the 3rd and 9th cars, but that wasn't really the primary use case I had in mind for the macros. I was more interested in using them to have trains queue multiple stops from an interrupt, like telling a train to go pick up water, turn it into steam at a nuclear heating plant, and then train it across the planet to a local turbine generator at an outpost whenever that outpost's steam reserve was low.

I admit that's not the most practical either but I'm sure there are plenty of other cases where grouping stations together in a sequence that can be easily added and removed from schedules together would be beneficial, like forcing trains to take specific routes through railyards and allowing high-priority rail lines to be used exclusively for urgently needed materials.

[robot256]

The fact that you can share whole schedules and individual interrupts between trains solves a lot 9f your use case I think.

I don't think it's practical from a UX perspective to make fill-in-the-blank macros for generic schedule fragments. It will be much more useful when contstructing repetitive schedules to be able to copy schedule conditions from one entry to another.