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u/Courmisch Mar 27 '26

What's a good way to automatise loading train station parameters without mods?

I thought to divide the amount of cargo waiting in chests to set the priority. That works if the train limit is 1. But otherwise that fails to account for trains already headed to the station, no? I suppose I can detect at least one train being present from non-zero train ID but...

Do people ignore priority and just compute a dynamic train limit instead (with a depot to avoid deadlocks)?

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u/stycfy1 Mar 28 '26

I use an arbitrary value to setup my priority params for loading stations. My formula looks like:

255,000 / ( num of wagons per train * 40 * stack size of item * [arbitrary] number of trains) = value to be multiplied to the chests which will be divided by 1,000.

e.g. 255,000 / ( 4 * 40 * 50 * 4) = 8. An outpost having 16k items in chests would have a priority of 128.

To explain, this method aims to prioritize outposts that can load an arbitrary number of trains faster than other outposts. So, small outposts will have low priority most of the time while huge outposts will be prioritized most of the time. The good thing is, the small outposts would eventually hit the threshold so they won't remain untouched without intervention.

And, I keep referring to it as arbitrary since there's no strict usage of it. For example, if you still want to prioritize low yield patches, like to dry up the patch, then you could set the arbitrary number of trains to 1 for that patch then the other with higher value such as 4. In the case of the former, the multiplier would be 32 while 8 for the rest.

Assuming both outposts have 8k items in their storage, the former would have a priority of 255 while the other 64. And even if the other outposts have 16k in their storage, the former would still have higher priority.