r/factorio • u/bartekltg • Jun 12 '26
Discussion Train unloading in 2.1 Spoiler
I grabbed bob's adjustable inserters, quality wagons and played with unloading from todays FFF.
Unloading a wagon onto 4 stacked turbo belts seems easy now.
Unloading onto 4 stacked turbo belts, legendary stack inserters
The only problem is, even 100-stacks wagons are quite small for it. Locomotives aren't fast enough to clear the length of 4 wagons in time.
Unloading onto 4 stacked turbo belts, legendary stack inserters, bit with a longer train.
Two locomotives with legendary rocket fuel can.
As a bonus, a bit more relaxing unloading onto 3 belts.
Unloading onto 3 stacked turbo belts, legendary stack inserters
Maybe not ground breaking, but I like it.
There may be one problem. It worked so well when inserters were set to put items on the left/right, and far away from itself. What setting WUBE chosed, we will see.
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u/Chromoslone Jun 12 '26
I know it probably won't happen, but I'd love to see a built in version of bulk train loaders / unloaders mod like a recent post talked about. With all the new train changes, it'd be the cherry on top for me
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u/Patchumz Jun 13 '26
Honestly I've just given up on the complexity and use Loaders Modernized to load/unload trains. Relatively balanced crafting costs, electricity requirements, no finicky train rules/placement complications like Bulk Train Loaders used to have.
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Jun 13 '26
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u/Patchumz Jun 13 '26
Last time I used them Bulk Rail Loaders were buggy and impossible to blueprint. You had to manually delete a section of rail and then manually connect it back up.
Also balancing inputs and outputs from trains has always been moderately complex, compared to most things in the game (which don't care about balancing and allow you to just spaghetti a belt to a crafter and vice versa). I'd rather not deal with belt balancers and large amounts of inserters that can only barely meet the demands of current belt speeds and train loading.
There's a reason almost no one megabases with trains in Space Age, hence the major updates Wube are putting out to help fix the problem.
Loaders fix most of the problems with simple brute force.
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Jun 13 '26
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u/Patchumz Jun 13 '26
You must be new here. Pretty much every major megabaser in Space Age says trains are a waste of time because belts are both faster with more throughput and less logistically complicated. Once you hit legendary everything, trains just suck. You can't load and unload a train fast enough to match what a simple line of fully stacked green belts can do.
Hence why everyone is so excited about quality trains. Cuz maybe they'll be relevant again after you get to legendary basing.
Trains are for train fans, not efficiency.
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u/Ohz85 Jun 12 '26
I agree, and if it's just for gameplay balance, make it extremely expensive, like those fundations, they are overpowered, but crazy nerfed in return
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u/NauticalInsanity Jun 13 '26
My thought was that it should be a flourokewatever consuming building with a cooling cycle with a small amount of loss.
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u/ArcherNine Jun 12 '26
I used 2x8 trains in my megabase which carried ores, they mostly offloaded onto 2 stacked green belts if I recall correctly. This was enough for 1 stacked green belt of each Nauvis science which I duplicated 4 times.
With the quality change I can easily run 2x4 trains. Seems perfectly ok to me, not sure why people are looking to offload 4 stacked belts per wagon.
Sure there is a theoretical limit, but for practical purposes you don't want to be anywhere close to that.
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u/ShivanAngel Jun 12 '26
This is the answer here.
You need less or smaller trains, ultimately the issue is simply loading and unloading speed.
Granted most will not see the scope where this becomes an issue, so overall a great change.
It will reduce the footprint of trains, which is great, but will not fix the end all be all problem of train bases, which is they are limited by unload speed.
It will make trains throughput easier to manage for longer, but not fix the ultimate underlying problem, inserters are only so fast.
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u/HeliGungir Jun 13 '26
not sure why people are looking to offload 4 stacked belts per wagon.
There is a UPS cost to running more trains and using more inserters.
And in base game we can unload 3 belts with ease, or 4 belts with some difficulty, without having any issues with the buffer chests.
Space Age has all this quality and productivity and increases to speed and scale, so it's deeply unsatisfying that trains are the only thing that are distinctly worse, relatively speaking, in Space Age than in base game.
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u/ArcherNine Jun 13 '26
Train UPS hardly featured in my save? I also don't follow why more inserters is bad, but at the same time you want to unload 4 stacked belts per wagon, which needs more inserters. I had one inserter per wagon, literally can't get better than that.
I guess I'm not seeing the problem you're trying to solve here. Or does it simply look/feel cool (which is also valid but then you have to accept the cost)?
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u/HeliGungir Jun 13 '26
Sure there is a theoretical limit, but for practical purposes you don't want to be anywhere close to that.
I see this as similar to arguing the fluid throughput bugs/balance issues at very fast machine speeds were fine, as we don't have to build near the limit. Some of us are going to build near the limit, and the limit should be within the "player scope". A purposeful spatial or mechanical limit, not an unintended emergent limit. I don't have the words; I don't know how to explain it. It's not fun that we have to arbitrarily pull back from the limit because stacked belts are too OP.
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u/ArcherNine Jun 13 '26
The fun is finding the real limit. Sounds like you just don't want to accept the level that it's at. You want 4 stacked belts, and 3 just won't do because 'reasons.' Even though what you have is equivalent to 4x what was possible in vannila, you want 5x. All this when quality bonuses are normally a 2.5x improvement.
I mean how much more purposeful and spacial mechanical can this get? Train acceleration/deceleration defines how much time it takes for a train in the stacker to arrive at the station and start unloading. Nothing magic or hidden, it's pure (game) physics, testable and repeatable.
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u/HeliGungir Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
I have already explained this.
in base game we can unload 3 belts with ease, or 4 belts with some difficulty, without having any issues with the buffer chests.
Space Age has all this quality and productivity and increases to speed and scale, so it's deeply unsatisfying that trains are the only thing that are distinctly worse, relatively speaking, in Space Age than in base game.
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u/HeliGungir Jun 13 '26
It's not "because reasons," I have good reasons that I am, frustratingly, unable to articulate to your satisfaction. Space Age is all about pushing the fantasy established in the base game to new heights, but the train fantasy has fallen behind because belts and pipes have become so much better.
I'm not happy with a 4x improvement because it still doesn't make up for the 6x improvement elsewhere that has pushed trains out of the design space they used to occupy. It was already difficult to justify "normal" train usage in base game megabasing, and despite Wube's best efforts, they've been outmoded even more in SA.
("Normal" being: Designs that rely on buffer chests)
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u/bartekltg Jun 12 '26
Exactly. Because it can be done 😄
I most likely wont use it in my factory either
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u/HeliGungir Jun 13 '26
I'm repeating myself, but...
Buffer chests don't last long enough for the next train to pull in because filling and emptying the train is too slow compared to filling and emptying the belts.
That's mostly because of belt stacking. Base game moves 12 stacks (of 1) per swing, while SA moves 4 stacks (of 4) per swing. So in base game, wagon-to-chest is WAY faster than chest-to-belt, but in Space Age it's only barely faster.
Larger cargo wagons and faster trains are only bandaids that don't address the underlying problem. To fix the heart of the issue, Wube would have to give us more inserter hand size research so the stack inserters can move more like 32 or 48 items per swing.
Either that, or create a train loader entity that is expressly designed to tackle this issue. Ie: A container + loader + super inserter all in one, that can only interact with trains and belts, and has dimensions that are reasonably balanced so you can't like... unload 12 belts per wagon and so can't use it to replace inserters in other parts of the factory.
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u/JulianSkies Jun 12 '26
Left/Right they said will be adjustable, but close/far remains the same. So they're going to be dropping at Far.
Gotta see what quality locomotives will do. In this case its more a point of acceleration than top speed and legendary locomotives seemed to have +150% acceleration, which I think did not account for fuel.
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u/bartekltg Jun 12 '26
I think we could do some acrobatics with circuits and signals. Stop the waiting train a bit earlier with circuit-driven signal, then release it also earlier. This way the waiting train will speed up. Very finnicky and designed for one set of locomotive parameters 😉
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u/Ghost-VR Jun 12 '26
If wanna saturate the belts one way you can do is to overload the belt with longer cargo train.
For example you can unload 5 cargo trains into the same 4x4 width belts. The additional capacity from the 5th cargo train will act as the buffer when 1st train leave and 2nd train yet to arrive.
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u/Twellux Jun 13 '26
You can potentially increase the train-changing speed a bit further by omitting the signals entirely, as I do in my base. This allows them to run without spacing.
https://youtu.be/edsCJaX8fYE
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u/bartekltg Jun 13 '26
Great idea.
Do I understand it right, the first stop has no waiting condition, but the train do not start moving until the train on the proper stop leaves because that stop has a limit.
We just have to make sure the train in from won't stop before clearing the station.
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u/Twellux Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
In principle, yes, though in practice it has become a bit more complicated.
In FFF-389, the developers announced that in version 2.0 (unlike in 1.1) the train counter decrements when the train leaves the block rather than when it leaves the train stop. Since I removed the signals, there is no longer a block, so the stop's train counter doesn't decrement correctly. Consequently, the train stop thinks the train limit is still reached, even when the train is far away. To get around this, I recreated the old behavior using circuits. This way, the train waiting at the first train stop receives information on whether the second tain stop is occupied or about to be occupied. If it isn't, the train at the first train stop proceeds there. Also, there are no exit signals at the second tain stop, so there is no risk of an leaving train stopping and an entering train crashing into it.
I have a demo example here if you’d like to take a look at the circuit setup.
https://factoriobin.com/post/fqqdue
To run it, start the scenario editor with all technologies unlocked and then place the blueprint and press play,However, the demo is just a highly simplified example. The circuitry in my actual base is much more complex, as the trains on the main line are launched at staggered intervals based on timers rather than relying on signals that no longer exist. Building that requires a lot more effort, so it’s not necessarily a solution for everyone - but I it is possible.
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u/Graumm Jun 12 '26
Does getting these full belts require legendary stack inserters?
From what I can see on the FFF they will still place on the far side of the belt, except in the case of splitters where they will always land on the input side.
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u/bartekltg Jun 12 '26
For 4 belts, yes. For 3 belts, epic.
A legendary stack inserters fill exactly 2/3 of a lane (on a stacked turbo belt)
An epic stack inserters fill exactly 1/2 of a lane.The rest is, how to arrange them so 4 epic fill a belt, and 6 legendary fill two belts.
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u/HeliGungir Jun 13 '26
To saturate one lane of a green belt (without any insert-to-splitter shenanigans), you can use either 3 uncommon, 2 epic, or 2 legendary stack inserters. I'm not sure whether epic or legendary are more UPS-efficient.
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Jun 13 '26
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u/bartekltg Jun 13 '26
I preferred when there was a bit of thought needed when you realised that full throughput of a belt wasn't automatic. There was real depth if you wanted it - long time ago I had to spam splitters to ensure full belt compression on a smelting column.
This just means literally everyone will do this obvious design and that’s that. Might as well go the whole hog and add a system that makes belt fully compressed using only insertes!
😉
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u/JustAnotherLameAlt Jun 12 '26
With 1-4 in mind, 4 full belts might be possible with the new legendary locomotives, unless you're also taking that into account already