Factorio Forums

I use service trains to haul small volume products to and from outposts and separate factories. Typically they are needed much more infrequently than every 200 seconds and they tend to be futile traffic. For example once in 15 minutes or 30 minutes would be enough. Would it be possible to put edit box to give an exact waiting time without limits? It would also serve practical stopping of schedule, if time was set to 2 billion.

Have you experimented with reserved slots, and the other train conditions?

It is possible to make a train wait until it has say, 1 rocket silo aboard.

The train would then wait forever until that rocket silo is loaded.

On the other end then, an inserter removes that silo from the train and holds onto it until the train is ready to depart again, when it is put back in.

The wait conditions for this would be 5 seconds AND 1 rocket silo, that way there is enough time to unload the token item so the train stays till you are done with it.


I usually base my train motions on seconds inactive, defined as X number of seconds with no items being added to or removed from the train. Works fairly well for most of what I use trains for, since the train will leave if the base has transferred all it can.

There's no real reason the trains can't wait 1 second, 5 ticks, or 5 hours except there's not a good way to make that work in the GUI. I'll see if I can think up something that would allow entering exactly what you want.

Rseding91 wrote:There's no real reason the trains can't wait 1 second, 5 ticks, or 5 hours except there's not a good way to make that work in the GUI. I'll see if I can think up something that would allow entering exactly what you want.

Why you can not use the same control to set exact number of seconds which you use to tell to the logistic bots how many items you want from logistic system? It is called edit box in windows. That slide control could also have non linear values, if edit box is not suitable for train UI. For example 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 75, 90, 120, 180, 240, 300, 450, 600, 900, 1200, 1800, 2700, 3600 instead of 0 to 200 with steps of 5 seconds. I think that no-one needs 5 second steps between 2 and 3 minutes.

OdinYggd wrote:Have you experimented with reserved slots, and the other train conditions?

I know that there are alternative solutions with combinators. As far as I know, they are Turing complete, so they can do everything that any computer (except maybe practical memory and execution time limits). However, I want to make relatively compact and practical railyards and do not want to have exotic combinator contraptions which takes room, are ugly and can lose their state for example if I remove an electric pole when I make construction works nearby. I also do not want to put ten stations one after another or put trains to make short separate loops between actual loops.