Friday Facts #263 - Trains in blueprints

[Lubricus]

When you make super UPS optimized factories and use assemblers with direct insertions between trains. Inserters and assemblers have all odd numbered width and rails can only bee and even amount of tiles between them, so you may need to use cars/tanks that have an even numbered width.

you can place 12 red inserters between two cargo waggons
not the most elegant solution but the best workaround for this problem

If you are moving items directly from one wagon to the other, you can use diagonal tracks and stack inserters.
On the other hand if f.ex. make circuits direct from trains (without bots nor belts). You get problems. its hard to fit beacons when using diagonal tracks and long-handed inserters is to slow.
This is a god problem when trying to optimize the game to the max with hacky solutions. That should be hard and have many gotchas as is. So I don't want an easy vanilla solution that kill the joy in coming up with strange designs that stretches the limit of the game.
Then stuff like using cars as chests can be part of an optimized factory as the circuit build in shaev's 10k >60 ups factory.

[pleegwat]

When you make super UPS optimized factories and use assemblers with direct insertions between trains. Inserters and assemblers have all odd numbered width and rails can only bee and even amount of tiles between them, so you may need to use cars/tanks that have an even numbered width.

you can place 12 red inserters between two cargo waggons
not the most elegant solution but the best workaround for this problem

If you are moving items directly from one wagon to the other, you can use diagonal tracks and stack inserters.
On the other hand if f.ex. make circuits direct from trains (without bots nor belts). You get problems. its hard to fit beacons when using diagonal tracks and long-handed inserters is to slow.
This is a god problem when trying to optimize the game to the max with hacky solutions. That should be hard and have many gotchas as is. So I don't want an easy vanilla solution that kill the joy in coming up with strange designs that stretches the limit of the game.
Then stuff like using cars as chests can be part of an optimized factory as the circuit build in shaev's 10k >60 ups factory.

You could re-insert into the same train, but that implies mixed trains and wagons filled to a specific level which gives its own challenges.

[factoriouzr]

• logistics trains and cargo wagons so the robots can take and put things into the trains when they are stopped

That would be overpowered and remove an fun part of the game.

I disagree. You can do it without robots if you want or with robots if you want. It doesn't remove anything. I don't find setting up supply trains to outposts fun. The wiring system and logic is too complicated and fiddly (and I have made a fully working setups multiple times that is very advanced) but it's tedious and cumbersome and I'm tired of dealing with it. You can't move entities without rewiring everything, it's hard to see the wires, it's not easily extensible, it's just a plain pain.

This feature is no different then having robots in the base game. By your argument, you would say that it removes the belt part of the game, and yet it didn't and doesn't. You are free to play with belts and not use robots. Same here. This feature is needed badly, along with a lot of other long time requested quality of life changes.

[factoriouzr]

>blueprintable cargo trains

are you trying to make the belts obsolete?
cause you're damn close to it

It's a quality of life change, it's not making belts obsolete.

[Seyeght]

Will this Upgrade Planner also work on Ghosts?

[Oktokolo]

Tbh, while using cars is a quirky mechanic, I think that speaks more of a need to figure out what problem cars are solving and get something non-hacky in to do the job.

The shown use case for cars/tanks as chest replacement seem to be about avoiding belts to avoid their UPS cost without replacing them with bots either. The devs already optimized belts a lot. I don't think, there is much more room for improvement...

Obviously, having even-sized chests in vanilla would also remove the need for using cars/tanks/wagons as replacement when needing train-grid-aligned non-bot, non-belt production. And getting such chests into vanilla should be rather trivial.

[Sloppyjosh]

Looks great

The last tweak I'm considering is to allow blueprints to contain the fuel insertion info

Also consider adding the cargo wagon filters

THIS. Do this

[mrvn]

If you allow fuel to be inserted by bots into blueprinted trains could we have the same for the contents of any container?

Cars and tanks should be blueprintable too and need fuel too.

Some circuit logic uses chests and belts with items as trigger, delay or memory cells. Would be nice if they could be blueprinted including the items too.

[DaveMcW]

Some circuit logic uses chests and belts with items as trigger, delay or memory cells. Would be nice if they could be blueprinted including the items too.

You can hack a blueprint to copy the contents of any container. Vanilla factorio just doesn't provide the tools to edit it.

[adam_bise]

Factorio is shaping up nicely, but can we have vanilla recursive blueprints before 1.0?

[burninghey]

Update Planner - what about this case:

edg.png (521.5 KiB) Viewed 7162 times

[Oktokolo]

Update Planner - what about this case:

Batter make sure to upgrade red to blue at the same time or before updating yellow to red.

[bobingabout]

Update Planner - what about this case:
edg.png

you're crazy.

[McDuff]

Belt weaving is one of those things that makes my eyes twitch. I am 50% on the side of "what an interesting and clever solution" and 50% on the side of "where do those bloody underground belts go that shouldn't work that way arrrgh!"

[mexmer]

Update Planner - what about this case:
edg.png

you're crazy.

not really, if you played chalenge scenarios in factorio, one scenario uses this solution.

[Oktokolo]

not really, if you played chalenge scenarios in factorio, one scenario uses this solution.

Yes, it is an officially supported craziness - just like using underground belts for splicing off a lane or always having two lanes to begin with. They are perfectly fine from a gameplay point of view and still are WTF when applying common knowledge of real factories (don't do that or your brain will explode).

[POPISowyNumer]

It's a quality of life change, it's not making belts obsolete.

If you think so, you probably don't know about greatest train trick of all time

the gap between two train cars is big enough for 4 inserters, and all four reach both cars, giving throughput equal to 138% of two blue belts, with probably even crazier increase in speed

[eradicator]

the gap between two train cars is big enough for 4 inserters, and all four reach both cars, giving throughput equal to 138% of two blue belts, with probably even crazier increase in speed

I'm still waiting for a megafactory based on that.

[Oktokolo]

I'm still waiting for a megafactory based on that.

It's so cheesy - even the all-bots players refuse to try that.

[POPISowyNumer]

I'm still waiting for a megafactory based on that.

i guess that pasting down seven billion train cars was quite burdensome
in 0.17 tho...