Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make trains able to build shit, while not sitting in the wagon.

What ?

Okay, so I am always building mega bases with drones (150mb+ map size), and I just tried to use a train with drones, robo ports, reactors, batteries and a, pardon my french, fuckton of materials. When I drove to a designated area, I stopped the train, but nothing happened, and i ended up using perosnal robots to put down a stooped amount of wall, turrets, belts and power poles.

It is worth mentioning that I play K2, and not vanilla. But I dont think that has anything to do with my inability to have the train build in its robo area. But I havent been playing vanilla for ages.

Why ?

I think this will increase the overall gameplay for most seasoned players, since you can get to a point in the game, where even the robots gets too slow, and you want to have more than just 2 options for construction. That is where trains come in play, because you can tell them to go to a part of the track, and then have them build something, without having to sit in the cargo wagon.

MichaelJCaboose wrote: Sun Aug 11, 2024 11:01 am pardon my french

Or, and hear me out here, if you notice yourself swearing, you could just remove that part before you post.

If you're playing modded, you may be interested in (NB: I've heard of these but haven't played much with them personally) Vehicle Grid and/or FARL.

All you need to build to bootstrap construction in addition to building just rails is a station that unloads into chests, then a filter inserter moves unloaded construction bots and optionally logistics bots from one chest into a roboport. Then building will continue from that roboport.

Tertius wrote: Sun Aug 11, 2024 10:06 pm All you need to build to bootstrap construction in addition to building just rails is a station that unloads into chests...

(Logistic chests, if the problem is getting materials train -> logistic network)

There's already a mechanism for increasing the robot worker speed an infinite amount (post-satellite launch technology). So really, if your bots are getting too slow, then you can just research this as much as you'd like to make them as fast as you'd like.

Also, I think that construction trains are an interesting idea.

Right now, I'm playing a vanilla marathon game, so I have to keep pushing out my borders for more resources much faster than a non-Marathon game would require. My bots are *super* slow, relative to the size of my base. I'd love to have some sort of construction train mechanism in my vanilla marathon game right now. Building things can take a very long time for me right now.

to avoid misunderstandings, here is a screenshot of my current progress. To get a comprehention of the size, the map is just over 130mb, there are 110 robo ports vertically and 126 horizontally (perfectly aligned for zero gap between them, in 114x114 grids, excluding those in the wall, as they are slightly closer to each other. Stations are roughly 114 by 228 in size (not 100% sure)

While I do understand that you can increase robot speed, build offgrid grids and all that, I was looking at a train specifically designed for construction. Something that would weigh enough to require at least 2 locomotives (nuclear or w/e) to even be moved, and have the ability to, after being loaded with the materials, go to a spot on the tracks and go crazy on comstruciton.
Ofcourse the wagon should be crazy expensive to make, and while that in itself would be enough, it should still have to have robo ports and its own powergeneration installed. like reactors, batteries etc. not forgetting robots

I think at this scale an group of spidertrons would be the answer in vanilla for a fire and forget solution to avoid having the material carried by drones.
I understand where trains could, if they had an equipment grid and their own sets of robots, carry the building material faster than the flying robots.
Spidertrons are slower and offer less possibility for automatisation than trains currently so it's not as good as the suggestion.

There is a mod by Klonan to add a research for bots battery It may also help in your case, if you can reach high levels, it's not that easy to gauge but you could have robots needing to recharge only once or twice after crossing the whole map, which would speed-up building time significantly depending on how much time bots lose currently trying to recharge maybe 6 or 7 times and creating zigzag and less efficient use of their battery.

This or having separate logistic network, that's changing the problem, no longer trying to make super large network works. There are different ways of tackling the problem in vanilla that is already "part of the game". With separated network, you could have a spidertron that only build a single robotport and a rail lane, and then the trains follows, and unload the rest of the building material near the existing robotport. You could have a blueprint to unload robots from a train into the robotport, and the rest in logistic chest, so as to try and do as much as possible remotely.