The situation I described affects that case as well. Sure, you haven’t blocked the main line, but you’re losing efficiency if trains waiting for a free station always creep up to the station on the shortest path.
Each station is going to be its own entity on the timetable, so you’d need to manually route different trains to different stations (say, one for incoming material and another for outgoing). But considering how loading and unloading works in this game, you kinda have to do that anyways.
At least in Factorio, you can give multiple stations the same name and they’ll all be valid destinations for that entry in the timetable.
Also, you can use chained signals to create nice staging areas even if there’s just one station. You can sorta do the same thing if you just make a really long line off the main line (so the multiple lines just line up front-to-back), but it’s nicer and more compact just to have a bunch of parallel tracks to hold the waiting trains.
I just learned that you can automate the factory cart forklift thingy, and it can be loaded and unloaded at a truck stop.
I have stockpiled around 1500 nuclear grenades for spider pacification operations.
I’m developing a nuclear reprocessing cycle. I got up to encased plutonium pellets. I need to fly pressure conversion cubes up to make fuel rods. Some people just drop the rods into the sink at that point to be done with the waste problem (it’s the first part of the chain that can be dropped) but I want to do everything you can do in the game so I’m going to run the plutonium through power plants and then reprocess it into ficsonium. At that point you can burn it again with no waste. It’s a long chain of many stages to get there, but you do get to burn your fuel 3 times for massive power generation and eventually end up with no waste.
That’s funny. I used it for all of 10 seconds because it’s a silly little novelty item but it sounds like you can basically use it like a tiny version of a truck. It would actually be kind of funny if it could deliver to a storage box instead of a truck station – that would be wildly impractical because of course conveyor belts would be better, but it would be fun to create a factory that runs off a series of fork lifts instead of conveyor belts to move products around. It’d be fun to watch it run.
I’ve been spending all my play time working on this damned railroad. It now stretches from my main base all the way to the beach my plastic factory is on. And unlike the preliminary railroad I made (which is still running plastics to my computer factory and finished goods to my main base, mind you) this one is a thing of beauty. Smooth curves and elevation changes, two tracks running in parallel, much nicer looking supports that are actually present at regular intervals. (Not all of them fully reach the ground, though - extending the pillars is a later job.)
Now I just need to build some stations, off ramps, and on ramps. Then I should be able to get a variety of trains running between a variety of factories. And scale the system up on the fly, adding more trains or even new rail lines to new nodes on the fly.
Once that’s done…
The real prompt for this renovation was that my rail line was a single track with loops at both ends, meaning that to go any number of stations downstream is no problem, but going even one station upstream requires you to make the full loop. And my iron pipe supply was one stop downstream of where I needed iron pipes in my sulfur factory to make Nobelisks.
Then, it’s time for Crystal Oscillators and Heavy Modular Frames.
Yeah, I’m thinking it might be fun to set up forklifts to deliver liquid biofuel once I get that set up.
It is, finally, done - for now. Screenshots:
https://i.ibb.co/ZGZWpmz/Screenshot20241013-20542100000.png
https://i.ibb.co/q1Pcxxr/Screenshot20241013-20552900000.png
https://i.ibb.co/KVTShpW/Screenshot20241013-20571200000.png
https://i.ibb.co/98C76np/Screenshot20241013-20560000000.png
Spent the rest of the evening embarking on yet another overly ambitious project. Because I just finished the last one and can’t get to those Crystal Oscillators yet!
So, I’ve got a place I call Coal Crater. It’s a big lake with 4 coal nodes, a pure iron, some copper, limestone… The works.
With me wanting to set up heavy modular frames, I need lots and lots of iron based goods. And I decided, it’s time to up the ante. Let’s go for pure iron, solid steel ingots, absolutely massive build.
And there are 6 impure iron nodes just outside the crater, so I may as well bring those down too, since I’ll need lots of water to run refineries for pure iron, and piping water up the crater wall sounds miserable. (I briefly considered piping it DOWN from the red tree biome, but the water just above me was filled with uranium boulders and I didn’t feel like dealing with that).
So, I’m going to tear down the modular frame factory I have in the crater (consuming 240 iron and 120 copper [stitched sheets ftw!]) and replace it with a big iron refinery (and I can make quite a bit of pure copper, too, though I don’t necessarily have a use for it yet).
Water will come from a lake just outside the crater that waterfalls into the Crater lake. This will make pumping really easy.
With just these sources of iron and no overclocking, that’s over a thousand ingots per minute. And I can swing more iron over from my starter base (although I may just want a second refinery further south eventually).
Then, I can overclock my oil extractors to get more energy out of the oil nodes I have, and permeantly shut down the coal plants. That will free up the coal for making tons and tons of steel.
And then I can finally make those Crystal Oscillators!
I finally built my 72GW rocket fuel power plant and finished off T8, so I don’t have much excuse to put off finally launching the Phase 4 space elevator stuff. I wish pipes would give a running average flow instead of the snapshot amount.
Except I want to put together a mini-factory for fused modular frames. And supercomputers. And high-speed connectors. And turbo motors. And cooling systems. And radio control units. And electromagnetic control rods (which will double as useful for the nuclear power I’m definitely just about to start up). Once that’s done, P4 really shouldn’t be too bad, except for the copper powder. Seriously considering flying the pressure conversion cubes TO the copper for that - there’s three pure nodes right next to a lake that just SCREAMS “pure copper ingots”. Because each nuclear pasta requires 800 freakin’ copper ingots. And that one should definitely just run forever, because finishing phase 5 is another 1000 pasta.
Ah, the Coal Hole. One of my favorite places to build.
That’s what I’m working on. It’s a multi-hour project, I think. I’m very slow at building these satellite factories.
This one (and most of the rest), will be part of my P4/5 main factory, I think. With all of the materials already made elsewhere and brought in, it should take less than an hour to make it all pretty.
But now I’m going to be visiting Coal Hole, because I need more nobelisks. And it looks like a great place to make diamonds at the next level.
So I set up my refinery complex for the Coal Crater Heavy Modular Frame Factory. I also tore down the existing modular frame factory. This was accomplished by rerouting the input ore to the refinery and running any finish goods outputs into an awesome sink. Then once the machines ran dry, they could be demolished without filling up my inventory.
While I was waiting for the machines to empty out, I ran over to the oil fields and overclocked two of the 120 per second machines. They now give 300 oil per second, the maximum that fits through the mk1 pipes. The extra capacity, 180 oil per second, is being turned into heavy oil residue and then fuel. This is the most efficient thing I can do for now, although it sounds like diluted fuel will be a lot of fun once I can make it. The excess plastic is currently being sunk, but I’m using all the plastic I can make in my computer plant, so it’s good to have some extra capacity. I’m sure I will need it soon.
Got through setting up 12 foundries (480 coal in, 720 steel ingots out!) and some steel pipe infrastructure (no real reason to screw around with iron pipes now that I have so much steel, I think).
Then, worked on a big sloped train path that will go up the hill on the far side of the Coal Crater. This will connect to my main route. Then I can send some iron pipes to my weapons factory (and make iron rods > rebar ammo > send to factory > make various special rebar types).
Then, I’ll finish setting up my heavy metal frame factory, I should be able to run one of the machines at full efficiency.
I completed the nuclear fuel reprocessing cycle. It takes quite a lot of work with many steps. I was surprised to learn that ficsonium has less energy density than uranium or plutonium. Usually the pattern in this game is that you as you add things to a fuel it becomes more energy dense, and between that and the in-game descriptions of how ficsonium is extremely potent, I was thinking it’d be the end game fuel and burn maybe twice as long as plutonium, but no, each fuel rod burns for just one minute. I guess the developers decided that ending the waste chain is a benefit enough, it doesn’t have to be a good fuel in addition to that.
It would also give you the chance to double energy production twice using sloops I suppose. I’m currently slooping the plutonium fuel rods to double their output, and if ficsonium was twice as good as plutonium and you got to sloop it again, that’d be a lot of energy. But I don’t know if that would be that big a deal - sloops are very limited and you put in a lot of work to get to the ficsonium fuel stage anyway, I’d be okay with it giving a substantial amount of energy. At some point power generation becomes more hassle than fun.
The infrastructure I built for reprocessing could probably expand to handle the waste of 50 plants and I’m currently only using 5. I find creating uranium fuel rods is a bit of a hassle. You have to feed 4 ingredients into manufacturers and it involves liquids to generate the encased uranium - that makes it so that it doesn’t scale up that easily and takes a lot of work to run the belts and pipes to each one. I suppose if I give it some thought I could probably design something modular as a blueprint to help.
I have a mini rail network up and running, with exits leading to two places so far: a weapons factory and the Coal Crater factory.
At the Coal Crater I make steel pipes and ship them up to the Weapons Factory, where I make black powder.
Unfortunately, the weapons plant is nowhere near any oil, so I can’t really do smokeless powder yet.
But that’s where the trains come in handy. I already have the rail line running all the way to the plastics factory. All I need to do is build another stop, ship black powder there, combine it with heavy oil residue to make smokeless powder, and then ship that back to the weapons plant. No massive pipelines or belts. Just a train with two carriages running back and forth.
So, here’s a question.
I went through and added signals to my rail line (at least, the portions that are in use) to avoid any collisions. So now I can run either one, or multiple trains at once, with hopefully no collisions.
I’m left wondering whether I SHOULD run one of multiple trains. For example, with this current line, is it better to have one train get the steel pipes, drop them off at the weapon factory, pick up black powder at the same time, and take that to the oil factory before heading back to the steel mill?
Or does it make more sense to do what I’m doing now, and have one train for each pair of factories?
I think it’s a case by case basis. I only have one track that runs to 3 bases. There’s a three way trade situation going on where A delivers 2 cars worth of stuff to B and 2 to C, B unloads those 2 cars and then sends new products on to C, and then C sends some stuff back to A. I only run one train since that’s sufficient for the resources involved. It gets a lot more complicated if you’re running trains to multiple stations. You’d want to plan it out ahead of time and figure out what needs to send what else to where, and what the most efficient way to get it there would be.
Keep in mind that stations only allow one loading or unloading, but you can make a station and then make another station right after that one, one being the unloading station and the next being the loading station. That way you can both drop off and pick up new resources at the same base.
Incidentally I’ve never made a weapons factory. There aren’t turrets to feed like factorio. I do manufacture black powder as an easy offshoot of a compacted coal operation and smokeless powder from the coke in one of my plastic plants, but there’s just not that much need for weapons to automate the whole process. I just threw a bunch of ingredients in a slooped assembler once and ran off like 3000 of each type of ammo and I still haven’t burned through it.
Man, this final stage is killing me.
I’ve got all 1,000 nuclear pasta done, so that’s over with. Fused frames are taking me forever to accumulate.
On the bright side, I never shut down the space parts for phase 4, so I have trailers full of thermal rockets and assembly director systems and the like. Assuming those are all components of phase V, hopefully that’ll give me a head start.
I’ll get there, but it’s really slow going.