Factorio Forums

TL;DR

I suggest a station search functionality to search in a schedule of a single train.

What ?

Just not to be mistaken: I don't mean a search functionality for the process of adding stations to the schedule. That already exists and is of great help. I suggest a sf for stations in the active schedule of a train. Eg if a train has 50 stations in its schedule I would be able to search for a particular station within those 50.

Why ?

I have two half reasons:

1. My personal usecase. In my stretched out megabase I get around by taxi trains. Every production complex and location of interest has its own taxi station. And the schedule of the taxi trains has 30+ stations in it. (Edit to clarify: For each station in their schedule, the taxi trains are all setup with a "circuit condition" which has no condition set ("nothing < 0"). This way I can click a station and go there with the taxi and then the taxi will stay there.) But how to find a particular station in the schedule? Right now it is scrolling down the list and reading the names. A sf would greatly speed up the process of finding a particular station.

2. Scalability, completeness and consistency. This is a basic and fundamental argument. Although I recognize, that the average amount of stations in a train schedule most likely is slightly over 2. But fundamentaly the train schedule is a list that allows how many entries? Unlimited? Some integer boundary ( 255, 65k, 2.1 mrd, ...)? Some other boundary? I am pretty sure it is a high enough amount, so that it is not possible to keep an overview or finding something in a reasonable amount of time by scrolling the list alone. With a search functionality there would be an option to always find a particular station with the effort of O(1). In general and IMO every feature of any software application, that allows for large sets of items needs tools to allow for near O(1) operations on the sets. I think as software devs you probably agree in general.

You added searches to a lot of GUIs already, so maybe this is on your radar anyways and I am running in open doors. But maybe it also is not on your radar, because train schedules are short usually and I estimate a low percentage of other players have a use case like mine. I understand that as well.

Do I understand you right: you have taxi trains, which go round and round over 30 stations? Until you use them?

no no, I have taxi trains with 30 stations in their schedule, but they wait in the station where i drive them to.
the condition is "circuit condition" without anything set.

Going to clarify that in the op.

Maybe I am using taxi trains in a completely different way than others? I never CTRL-click or SHIFT-click on a track or station on the map. I have all the destinations in the schedule of the taxi and just set the desired station as the next one if i want to go there.

You found out yourself, why I think this will not be implemented: there is a solution to your problem.

The Shuttle Train mod does something similar: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ShuttleTrainRefresh

It doesn't search in the train's schedule since you don't need fixed schedules for it, but it brings up a search window when you enter a shuttle train

Thanks for the shuttle train mod mention. Sounds like it perfectly covers my usecase. Gonna check it out.