Factorio Forums

making the subject more distinct — ssilk
Hi,

I know one can shift-left click, shift-right click to copy orders between locomotives; I propose a way of copying orders within the actual order list for the train.
I love that you can now re-order them and AND / OR operations are far clearer visually. But I'd like to be able to copy them too; for example:

A Coal train.
1. Load at coal mine to x amount of product
Whatever else you want it to check
Wait time if you like
2. Unload at power plant
Includes checks of circuit condition and a time delay
3. Go back to the coal plant (This is the bit I would like to copy from order 1)
4. Unload some coal at a smelter.
Includes checks of circuit condition and a time delay.
5. Copy the coal loading order order #1 AGAIN
6. Unload some coal for military science, or another smelter, or a plastics plant. Whatever. The number of stops it feeds in turn may be long or short.
Repeat orders as usual.

Further to this, if your coal plant starts to run low, it'd be nice to copy and insert another "Order 1 - Load Coal" and "Order 2 - Service Power Plant" into the queue, for example between 4 and 5. This would mean more visits to the power plant in between other jobs.

As it stands one must create the same set of orders for a particular stop over again every time that your train is to visit it.

Thoughts?

It's actually a different suggestion @Koub. Original one was about copying conditions between trains, this is about copying conditions between stops in a single train's schedule.

And I'd like it as well, TBH. I do some Skyrim modding and one of the features I like most about (in an otherwise godawful mess of a UI) the CK for it is that you can copy & paste giant stacks of conditions all at once. It'd be handy if you're, e.g., swapping a train from Iron Mine #1 to Iron Mine #2.

Very much agreed here.

Just had the same Idea when I had to change the train-schedule for all my iron trains ("only" 9).
It would be really nice if I could change one, then go the train UI and just copy-paste it to all trains right there, instead of having to got to the map for each train individually.

I was just searching forums on how to copy paste stops in schedule and came across this.

Manually updating a single stop in the schedule of many trains is annoying. I take it you cant copy paste without re-writing the whole schedule.

Shift right / left click on drag bar would be nice.

TL;DR

When opening the train interface for a particular train, it should be possible to copy and paste a particular stop, including the wait conditions.

What ?

In the train interface for individual trains, there should be some sort of mechanism that makes it possible to copy and paste train stops together with their wait conditions. Optionally, this same mechanism could be used to make it possible to copy wait conditions individually.

Interface-wise, several possibilities are conceivable here, the simplest that comes to my mind is use the existing drag-and-drop functionality, such that when the Shift-key is pressed, a duplicate of the train stop is dragged instead of the original.

Why ?

I have the following situation (here somewhat simplified):

For each resource, I have one station, with a train limit of 1.

For each recipe, I have one station, with one train assigned to it, which goes to all the resources required for the recipe and then back to the recipe station.

If one of the resource stations is filled, I want the train to wait at the recipe station, not at another resource station - otherwise it would clog up that resource station. So, if we look e.g. at Automation Science Packs, a train schedule will look like this:



As you can see, the recipe station appears twice, with the same wait condition. It has to appear after every resource, so that the train will always return to the recipe station before waiting.

Setting up this schedule gets very tedious as the number of recipe ingredients goes up; for example, for 4 ingredients, I have to, every time, select the right station, and for all for ingredients select a waiting condition, select the ingredient, and select "=" (0 is already set by default). That's 13 selections in total - and since I can't copy and paste, I have to do this four times for a total of 52 selections.

Alternatively, this particular problem could be solved by allowing players to select an idling station to which the train will go if the next station is full - but making copying and pasting possible would likely still be a good idea.

nnotm wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 6:44 pm

What you really would like to say is:
Only go to the iron gear wheel or copper plate station when the train is low on the item.

Koub wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 7:30 pm [Koub] Merged into older thread with same suggestion.

Thanks for merging.

mrvn wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:34 pm

nnotm wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 6:44 pm

What you really would like to say is: [...]

Yes, conditional train stops would also be nice to have, albeit probably more effort to implement than copy-pasting train orders. I don't think they would fully solve my situation, since the train could still wait at (and thus render inoperable) the iron gear wheels station if the copper plate station is occupied and it's low on copper plates, which I don't want.

Note : There a LOT of suggestions ranging from copy-paste of condition within a schedule to virtually anything (while still in the train managing realm). I didn't do a compendium of all the links to the relevant threads because it would have taken ages, and chose not to merge all of them because most are somehow unique in their respective philosophies. Feel free to search and have a look at them.