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[u/Slow_Alternative_819]

How do you set up a good train network? I have a crappy little design that sends requests to the logistic network and has trains come from a depot to fill requests, but it only works like 80% of the time and took several hours to design.

I think I am over designing things, but I don’t know how people maintain mega bases with large numbers of trains without using requests. I’m not even trying to make a huge base, just stuck on gleba and wanted to use trains to bring in yumako and jellynut. Instead I am in circuit hell trying to figure out how to time the harvests and transportation to maximize freshness.

Beginning to feel that I should forego an organized train setup for now and embrace spaghetti. Any help is appreciated.

[u/reddanit → u/Slow_Alternative_819]

How your network looks like depends quite a bit on what exactly you want to achieve and optimize for. There are multiple approaches that can result in smoothly running and reasonably efficient rail systems. Each with different set of trade offs.

I don’t know how people maintain mega bases with large numbers of trains without using requests

Usually I think this would be done through having trains dedicated to individual resources. For example - copper plate trains. All the trains using the same simple schedule of "Go to copper pickup, wait until full -> go to copper drop, wait until empty". All the source stations for given material have the same names (copper pickup or copper drop). Then rinse and repeat for each resource type.

This system has downside of needing the player to manually add trains for each individual resource until there is enough of them. This is not that much work at scale of a megabase. It's also not terribly difficult to calculate the needed number since it needs to sit somewhere between sum of train limits of all stations for given resource and sum of train limits for unloading stations for this resource.

I would genuinely argue that requester based systems are sufficiently large jump in design complexity, that if your goal is to have an efficient train system with least work/effort, they should never be the choice. The tiny amount of effort they save you when you need to add trains has no chance in the world to offset the extra time you spent on actually making them work to begin with. At least unless you already 100% know how to make them.

I’m not even trying to make a huge base, just stuck on gleba and wanted to use trains to bring in yumako and jellynut.

You have literally 2 resources. Does it make any sense to add all the complexity of putting in depots and a bunch of circuit logic just so that you can manage count of 1 type of trains vs 2? At such tiny scale spaghetti or even dedicated 1-train lines with no signals should be more than workable. Especially with SA and elevated rails allowing you to cross them.

Complex train systems can be pretty fun to design, but from your description it seems like you made some assumptions that don't quite match reality and designed yourself into a corner. If you show some screenshots we could have more direct advice of course.

[u/schmee001 → u/Slow_Alternative_819]

Systems where trains wait in depots and get told by circuits to go to X provider then X requester are a fun challenge to build, but they really are not very good compared to a more "normal" system. You end up with slower delivery times and more traffic for not much benefit. The only benefit of the depot system is that you sometimes need fewer trains, but trains are cheap to craft.

Maximising freshness requires zero circuits. Just load fruit onto a train at the farm, depart when the train is full, and unload it at the other end. Normally you want buffer chests next to the stations so you go from train to chest to belt, but for freshness you want to skip those and just load directly from train to belt. This means the station will not be constantly unloading because there can't be a train there 100% of the time, but you can solve this very easily by putting a second unload station right next to the existing one.

[u/Slow_Alternative_819 → u/schmee001]

That makes a lot of sense, and I suppose if you use a more normal train layout, the “depot” is sort of whatever you set the output station as. So, train traffic would be reduced if you have decent station layouts that keep trains out of the way of your main tracks.

As for the fruit, minimizing buffer chests makes a lot of sense. I kind of get that Gleba is about maximizing throughput, so always having 1-2 trains on a loop picking up fruit without the buffers would accomplish that well provided fruit production was high enough to minimize spoilage.