Factorio Forums

Since cliffs are already considered natural elevations, wouldn't it make sense to also be able use them as natural rail elevators?
I just read FFF 378 and this popped into my mind. The cliffs are directional already, so likely most of this would be just some smoothed underlying sprite replacing the cliff and a transition rail from ground to elevated rail.
Please consider implementing this, as it would change the very meaning of cliffs, especially to the very players who oppose them.

This would be a cool feature to have.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure rail elevators have to be longer than the longest rail entity for them to work.

I'm very much guessing how they implemented elevated rails, but it seems like the obvious wat to do it for minimum effort.

How would a quick succession of two (or more) cliffs be handled in this context, knowing there are only two rail levels ?

Only thing that I can think of:
If you try to place a ramp over a cliff - without hitting the shift key - then it allows it - but only if you place it in the "correct" position.

Koub wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 9:43 am

How would a quick succession of two (or more) cliffs be handled in this context, knowing there are only two rail levels ?

Might have to be implemented as a cliff ramp item. Elevated rails themselves need to ignore cliffs as shown in the preview. So you'd have to do something janky like it only offers a cliff ramp when connecting to an existing terrestrial track, which would be counterintuitive when you could build into the air without changing items but have to stop and build into the air from the landing cliff on the other end.

Wasn't there an elevated rail support pillar that's cheaper than the ramp? Maybe placing it on a cliff converts it to a cliff ramp.

Chiming in again from here.

Koub wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 9:43 am

How would a quick succession of two (or more) cliffs be handled in this context, knowing there are only two rail levels ?

Any Cliff that is not aligned to the elevation will be considered deconstruction.

havarc wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 9:15 pm

Chiming in again from here.

Koub wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 9:43 am

How would a quick succession of two (or more) cliffs be handled in this context, knowing there are only two rail levels ?

Any Cliff that is not aligned to the elevation [/i]will be considered deconstruction.

You don't even have to do that. If you have 2 cliffs back to back facing the same direction (so it'd be seen as 2 up ramps in a row), the first one would cause the ground rail to go elevated, then the second would have no affect. There's no need for a second, third, or even forth cliff to affect the "level" of already elevated rails.

Wube, you can't be seriously building a Base like that without the urge to implement this idea. Even more so when other images show straight edges almost made for that purpose.

No.

Rail ramp (for 2.0) is so large because there is quite a lot of collision mask related magic happening while the train is moving on them and so cliffs cannot become place where rails would transition as they are simply too short.

Also this would also create a lot of projection issues because if cliffs would be considered natural elevators, then in my mind the rails would have to look like they are "flat height" (assuming the elevated side of cliff is already high) but trains have to be consistent in 2 cases: using standard projection while in game and using flat projection while in map. If rolling stocks would change layer on cliffs by not changing render position, then they would have to change position in the flat projection in map effectively causing them to misalign with rails.

I see, thank you very much for the notion and the clarification.