[Mod Request] Narrow Gauge Railway

[Gnuxie]

Why

This would be a game changer, recently while playing timberborn, i realised how little technical debt I acquired as I played. The only ways to acquire debt in that game is through where dams have been built and sometimes where you have planted trees. Reworking dams and water courses in timberborn is very easy (the game is designed for this), and changing the site of an orchard is just a waiting game for the trees to grow, so these aren't major issues. All the other buildings can be demolished and rebuilt without much change to workflow, and without disrupting dependant buildings in the resource chain. This is because beavers have more autonomy than robots do in factorio, and items can flow from any assembler to any other assembler. While not entirely relevant, districts and district crossings in timberborn also provide a natural way to modularise setups. Not having a magic flow of items in Factorio is part of the game (logistics management). I am going to argue it is harmful on a macro scale, such as with the bus. This this is already proven in why we have trains to begin with. Pretty much everything that's connected to the early game bus is technical debt as soon as it has been built in factorio, and it is a major challenge to rework any part as usually assemblers are very interconnected and interdependent along the bus. This is because the bus and belts are the only way to move items in this phase of the game, and the direction and flow cannot be changed without physically changing the belts on the ground. I don't want to learn how to make the perfect starter base, as this knowledge is entirely static and tied to vanilla, and is not adaptable to new situations.

TLDR: In my opinion, and I know others will disagree, that is fine: buses are awful architecture, anything built on the bus becomes technical debt. Moving parts of the factory is stressful. City blocks are mostly how mega bases are organized because railways provide a better way to modularise a factory. I find playing the early game is stressful, I actually don't play this game very often anymore because of how stressful this part of the game is.


The proposal

A primitive narrow gauge railway (1x1) that can be accessed very close to the start of the game would fix a lot of the woes with buses, and potentially make finding the perfect starter base formula mostly redundant.
Access to early rails made from iron plates with simple locomotives could be done in the very early game. These could be speed restricted.
A simple slow early game locomotive with ore and coal hoppers would be an improvement (and look cute). These could even be as basic as minecarts in minecraft if it is found that having the full autonomy of factorio's vanilla locomotives is too over powered.
Later, narrow gauge railways could be updated with newer technologies so more compact and interesting variety could be added to bases. But I'm less interested in this aspect.

The limits

I don't think the game engine can currently support narrow gauge rails?

Alternatives

Tiny Trains https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TinyTrains/discussion has tried narrow gauge track before but suffers some major issues. There are no signals or stations, and the track is still laid on a 2x2 grid. This mod is abandoned and from what I can gather from the discussion is because of limitations in the game engine?

Mini trains https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Mini_Trains partially addresses some concerns, and there is even a mod to bring them into the early game https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Early_Mini_Trains (although this is after green science and with steel production already available). Again though, these trains are still relatively space inefficient because they are bounded by the track size and grid.

Thank you.

[EustaceCS]

I'd take a liberty to ask a really hard question about whole concept.

Since "early bus" have finite lifespan anyway (because starter resource patches are slim)
and as proper base building starts after unlocking most key technologies (advanced oil processing, nuclear / solar energy, etc-etc) anyway,
isn't it more simple to just keep said "early bus" "good enough" to rush towards key technologies (or, at least, to preferred logistics combination of player's choice), keep "early bus" provide surplus science packs afterwards and start building proper factory somewhere else?
Construction Bots can demolish it in one sweep after it depletes available resources just fine.

Unless said mini-locomotives are electricity powered, these just trade possibility to move things around in bulk for extra mess with fuel delivery to said locomotives. Resulting in either further tech debt increase or redundancy of "proper" locomotives (which can be unlocked VERY early anyway), depending on how exactly it's balanced.

[BraveCaperCat]

Not possible. The game forces all rails to be placed on a 2 by 2 grid, regardless of their actual size. So unless you want a smaller rail which is centred in between 2 tiles this very much isn't possible. You will have to ask the developers why the limitation is there and if it can be removed. If they remove the limitation, I can make the mod, provided some textures.

As described on the documentation, all rails have to be placed on a 2 by 2 grid, as shown here. Other entities can be made to follow this grid but rails have to use the 2 by 2 grid whether you like it or not (until it is changed of course!)

build_grid_size :: uint8 optional
Default: 1

Supported values are 1 (for 1x1 grid) and 2 (for 2x2 grid, like rails).

Internally forced to be 2 for RailPrototype, RailRemnantsPrototype and TrainStopPrototype.

This should be moved to modding interface requests, since this is about removing the limitations for build_grid_size which only apply to rails.

[FuryoftheStars]

Not possible. The game forces all rails to be placed on a 2 by 2 grid, regardless of their actual size. So unless you want a smaller rail which is centred in between 2 tiles this very much isn't possible. You will have to ask the developers why the limitation is there and if it can be removed. If they remove the limitation, I can make the mod, provided some textures.

As described on the documentation, all rails have to be placed on a 2 by 2 grid, as shown here. Other entities can be made to follow this grid but rails have to use the 2 by 2 grid whether you like it or not (until it is changed of course!)

build_grid_size :: uint8 optional
Default: 1

Supported values are 1 (for 1x1 grid) and 2 (for 2x2 grid, like rails).

Internally forced to be 2 for RailPrototype, RailRemnantsPrototype and TrainStopPrototype.

This should be moved to modding interface requests, since this is about removing the limitations for build_grid_size which only apply to rails.

To further this, you also can't modify rail bounding boxes. So even if you could narrow them down and center in 1 tile, the bounding box would still be bigger: viewtopic.php?f=221&t=73180
There are a lot of rail change requests in the Won't Implement section....

But I also have to put this out there (in regards to the OP's request for Narrow Gauge) just because: the existing rails are already narrow gauge. Standard gauge is roughly 1.4m, whereas these are ~1m (it might be a bit less, even... I can't find my spreadsheet from my (unreleased) train mod where I already made the measurement to verify at the moment). Actual locomotives and railcars are typically >3m in width for standard gauge. Ours in game are <2m.

[BraveCaperCat]

Not possible. The game forces all rails to be placed on a 2 by 2 grid, regardless of their actual size. So unless you want a smaller rail which is centred in between 2 tiles this very much isn't possible. You will have to ask the developers why the limitation is there and if it can be removed. If they remove the limitation, I can make the mod, provided some textures.

As described on the documentation, all rails have to be placed on a 2 by 2 grid, as shown here. Other entities can be made to follow this grid but rails have to use the 2 by 2 grid whether you like it or not (until it is changed of course!)

build_grid_size :: uint8 optional
Default: 1

Supported values are 1 (for 1x1 grid) and 2 (for 2x2 grid, like rails).

Internally forced to be 2 for RailPrototype, RailRemnantsPrototype and TrainStopPrototype.

This should be moved to modding interface requests, since this is about removing the limitations for build_grid_size which only apply to rails.

To further this, you also can't modify rail bounding boxes. So even if you could narrow them down and center in 1 tile, the bounding box would still be bigger: viewtopic.php?f=221&t=73180
There are a lot of rail change requests in the Won't Implement section....

But I also have to put this out there (in regards to the OP's request for Narrow Gauge) just because: the existing rails are already narrow gauge. Standard gauge is roughly 1.4m, whereas these are ~1m (it might be a bit less, even... I can't find my spreadsheet from my (unreleased) train mod where I already made the measurement to verify at the moment). Actual locomotives and railcars are typically >3m in width for standard gauge. Ours in game are <2m.

You could make a regular vehicle, but snap it to rails or destroy it if it isn't near a rail at all, returning the item. Then you could theoretically make a rail block by making some sort of structure, but this would be like implementing rails and trains again from scratch.

[Illiander42]

Have you tried Klonan's Transport Drones?

They might cover what you're after.