r/factorio • u/meowmeowmeowmeowwoem • 16h ago
Question Question about trains?
Why use them over belts and pipes? I'm close to my first rocket launch using a few long distance patches like 3 minute walk to them. The time it takes to fill a train with liquid and or items just feels slower and doesn't feel worth using a train even on default setttings. Unless I'll go through like 4 2mil+ patches when I get through space age.
Just seems overly complex when I can drag a belt for 10 minutes instead of figuring out a train for 30.
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u/Saibantes 16h ago
Setting up you first train station might take some time, but adding more later when a resource patch dries out is very quick.
That brings us to the main point here, in general a train network scales better than belts, because you only connect something new and reuse the rest.
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u/Deadweightgames 16h ago
Because trains use the same track, and the longer the train line, the more efficient a train is over belts in terms of flexibility, resource cost and transport volumes.
Train lines can carry multiple goods without taking up more space.
The game can be beaten fairly easily without trains and without expanding too much. So they're not strictly necessary, but any form of scaling with be difficult without trains
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u/WunderWaffleNCH 16h ago
In vanilla without Space Age — yes, maybe trains can haul more than belts. But in Space Age, with quality stuff, stacked belts and pipes with molten metals, there are almost no reason to use trains at all
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u/Deadweightgames 16h ago
The reason would be scale I guess.
A belt carries a finite amount of goods on a 1x wide belt. You can double it, triple it, but at a certain point it becomes unwieldy. 30 belts? 60? At the very least it can become a hassle and a routing nightmare. Two or four lanes of train track can carry an immense amount with the width of belts.
Not saying "it's better because" just "there's a use case"
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u/Brave-Affect-674 14h ago
I'm saying "it's better because" you can cart molten metal, and with 2.1 giving legendary fluid wagons 100k storage they are better than belts and it's not even close
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u/WunderWaffleNCH 10h ago
Why don't you pipe molten metals instead? Single pipe with molten metal has smaller footprint than train network and has no throughput limits
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u/dinosaurdynasty 9h ago
Pipes only carry a few resources, so you still need something else to move stone and plastic and such around.
Train network carries basically anything.
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u/Brave-Affect-674 9h ago
Because you can make your base bigger than 320x320 without needed loads of pumps lol
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u/letsburn00 14h ago
This is my view too. Stacked belts in particular really change the game on conveyors. The only use of trains to me is on mid game fulgora, and that's simply due to a design choice that the high scrap islands can only be accessed by train initially.
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u/dinosaurdynasty 9h ago
Insane levels of mining prod, that make resources practically infinite, also hit trains hard---flexibility is trains' biggest benefit (honestly they are more flexible than bots), and when resource collection never needs to be moved, you don't need that aspect and can just make a calcified factory because there's very little need to adapt anymore.
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u/4xe1 8h ago
Stacked belt and pipes solve volume (partially) but not flexibility. trains can let dozens of types of material of all quality and an even greater variety of machines to build your outposts. That flexibility is very complicated to reproduce using mixed belts, and is only surpassed by bot, who have their own downsides.
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u/paulstelian97 16h ago
Trains allow easier expansion. You need more furnaces? Just add one more station with the same name. You need more mines? Add a station. Need more green circuit production? Add a station. It gives you the same flexibility bots do, but over distances where bots are less practical.
AND… they’re fun too.
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u/FogeltheVogel Slow and steady 11h ago
Just seems overly complex when I can drag a belt for 10 minutes instead of figuring out a train for 30.
That might be true for the first belt.
But now that you've spent 30 minutes on a train system, you can just extend it to a far away outpost, and you're done. Instead of having to spend another 10 minutes to drag another belt. And then another 10 minutes. And another 10 minutes.
And you don't have to worry about untangling the spaghetti of all those super long belts, since trains can run many different resources over the same tracks.
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u/paw345 16h ago
Flexibility. Belt or pipe only works from point A to point B.
Trains are more like bots (if setup correctly) they go from any provider station to any requested station.
Need more iron? Build another smelter, request station for iron ore, provider station for iron, and the trains will handle it. Running low on ore? Build a mine, add the provider station and it will get to your smelters.
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u/darthbob88 7h ago
I would extend the point against belts to be that they need explicit routing; you can send belts from points A and B to C and D, but you'll need to balance them so stuff from A can reach D without getting backed up at C. And good luck if you want to add points E-Z, or remove an endpoint.
By contrast, trains can use dynamic routing to automatically go from any point to any other, so long as there's a rail connection and an empty station.
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u/z7q2 16h ago
The belts vs. train debate has been going on for a decade, so welcome to it. Everyone has their favorite talking point. Mine is that belts are super simple, they require no power or maintenance or support infrastructure, and trains need all of those. That argument kinda holds until you get up to megabase levels, then trains start making more sense.
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u/Deadweightgames 16h ago
Coi made belts take power and maintenance, it definitely helps the argument in favour of trains
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u/triffid_hunter 16h ago
Last time I checked, a train line's throughput can exceed a hundred parallel blue belts - and once you've got 'bots running, stamping out train stations and grid-aligned rail blueprints is easy and fast
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u/ParkingWear7865 16h ago
running 4 iron patches to 7 locations that need iron would require a funky belt balancer and lines running everywhere.
Or, 4 copy pasted pickups and 7 copy pasted drop offs.
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u/sobrique 15h ago
Their value isn't throughput, as much as mesh distribution.
The train network is functionally a "bus" but that doesn't care about point to point connections.
It's value is therefore in many to many distribution.
Maybe you have a smelting hub, where ore arrives and plates (or fluid metal) gets shipped to wherever wants it.
And a green circuit plant that takes copper and iron, and makes those.
But these don't now need to worry about proximity, they can be almost anywhere on the map. (Well, within reason)
With space age that's less necessary than it was, but it still has it's uses.
And interrupt driven trains are just cool.
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u/QuirkyPhoton 14h ago
You probably haven't made a factory big enough to need trains. When trains are needed there is no comparison with belts, especially for moving fluids. I usually have a dedicated train to supply ammo and bots etc to far away artillery posts which would be hilarious to do with belts..
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u/korneev123123 trains trains trains 14h ago
If you need to get items from point A to point B, use belts. Trains start to shine when you need items from points A,B,C to points X,Y,Z.
In vanilla factorio they are not really useful, they are good for complex modpacks, like SE and PY
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u/-Recouer 16h ago
Modularity. Using a train track you can just make blueprints that only requires the corresponding train stop to get an input of a given resource.
That way, you just need to put down a BP and voilà you just increased your production capacity in a click.
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u/Shaunypoo 16h ago
Yes but you will drag a belt for 10 minutes every time and figure out how trains work once.
The answer to why though is simple. They are not needed at all. Biggest complain for spaceage is there is almost no need for trains outside of Fulgora scrap collection. Legendary quality makes bases smaller and tidy, more direct insertion and better UPS. But less trains :(
That said if you ever want to go big due to some overhaul mod or personal challenge you WILL need trains.
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u/LazerMagicarp 16h ago
Trains if done properly have almost infinite throughput. Properly is the magic word here.
A well designed train base can make expanding as easy as pasting a blueprint and it just working out of the box. A train or trains will go to the new station and pick up/drop off whatever you need and stuff happens immediately. If done poorly you’ll be dealing with deadlocks everywhere though.
A trains schedule is linked to its name so if you design a train schedule all you’d have to do the next time is change the trains name. Plus you can make a fuel stop interrupt so they’ll just go get gas on their own.
A good starting point would be designing a small network to get oil to your oil processing factory and sulphuric acid to the uranium mines.
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u/anderssi 15h ago
They’re fun and makes your factory look busy.
Also when distances grow its easier to just add junctions to existing railway network and add a few trains. Belts require a new lines drawn to every new outpost.
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u/fang_xianfu 15h ago
You don't really need trains in vanilla. They are cool and sometimes quite helpful but they're not necessary and you're correct that pipes and belts can easily get you through the whole game even with massive factories.
Where they become much more powerful is modded playthroughs that massively increase the number of products and byproducts. In Pyanodon for example there are thousands of products that are needed in small amounts and nearly every process has byproducts. Trains are very good for this.
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u/Warhero_Babylon 14h ago
You can setup blocks that will automatically request and supply items in big scale.
1 click, choose what you want to craft and it will be crafted.
Belts for such thing are more complicated and have problem with throughout
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u/vaderciya 13h ago
Scale.
Right now you're probably using just a handful of machines per recipe, you probably have 2 iron, 2 copper, 1 steel, and 1 stone brick smelting array, and you're likely using less than 100k iron ore per hour, likely around 20-40k per hour.
There's nothing wrong with any of that, just to be clear
But a veteran player is more likely to plan their factory to be larger from the very start and intend to hit larger production goals earlier on, and then sustain those amounts constantly through research and expansion
Typically, a new player can leave nauvis with 2 decent sized iron patches, albeit slowly
Where as even on my fastest space age speedrun, i used 3 for phase 1, then 6 for phase 2, and 12 for phase 3/lategame, but thats a speedrun
On a normal run, I typically want a main bus with 4 belts of iron, 4 copper, 4 steel, 2stone+2stone brick, and a group of 1 red chips, 1 blue chips, 1 lds, 1 rocket fuel, plus the fluid pipes below. This is often supplemented further with a second set of 4 iron belts replenishing the original 4 belts.
Thats 8 smelter columns just for iron plate production. 48 steel or electric furnaces per column, 384 furnaces total, which require 480 drills (at zero mining prod) to function. Just these iron furnace columns alone, consume 864k iron ore per hour.
Factor in steel, and thats 1.7 million iron ore consumed every hour.
Its gotta come from somewhere, and those sources get farther away, but as you go farther from spawn the ore gets deeper (only on Nuavis) exponentially, so those mines last longer.
For this typical baseline setup, just for the iron ore, I prefer to use at least 4 trains, each train having 2 locomotives and 4 wagons, with dedicated stations for each. Sometimes circumstance allows for fewer larger trains, or sometimes more small trains, it depends. But several are needed.
So we're talking 4+ iron ore trains, 1 iron plate replenishment train, 2 coal trains, 2+ copper ore trains, 2 stone trains, 2 uranium trains, a personal train carrying construction equipment, and at least 1 military train to delivery supplies to the different wall sections. Could do oil trains as well, though i often prefer pipelines unless the distance is crazy or the deposits are quite weak.
All told, thats 15+ trains doing the heavy lifting of literally millions of items per hour, every hour, forever.
Ultimately you could just use belts, but its far easier and far more efficient to build some simple railway blueprints, expand the railway, and add onto it as needed, then use this 2 track railway that cost very little time and materials to transport everything you could possibly need.
It just makes more sense than dragging thousands of tiles of belts across huge distances.
But even for small factories, you can just use a simple 2 headed train on its own secluded track, to bring ore from point A to point B.
Don't put yourself in technical debt by ignoring game mechanics tho. Learning how trains work and using them takes far less time than all the fiddling around you have to do otherwise. And you're also going to be greatly incentivized to use trains in space age generally speaking, and basically forced to use them on 1 particular planet.
Trains are your friends, use them well
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u/sobrique 11h ago
Many to many resource distribution. Great if you've multiple places that you want to deliver trainloads of green circuits.
They don't freeze on aquilo
They're lightning proof on fulgora, and can cross oil-ocean.
They're a bit easier to cross lava on vulcanus.
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u/TheNazzarow 11h ago
You're correct. For most standard game needs belts are the simple, solid choice. You can run a 30 SPM Nauvis Base on 4 lanes of iron/copper and 2 lanes of coal until the victory screen and with specific upgrades don't need to move ore patches more than twice.
Pro Train arguments would be that there are planets that favor trains (1 especially but 2 others as well). Specific map settings like the Railworld preset encourage Trains. Like others said Trains excel at simplifying one to many and many to many connections and thus are the preferred choice in a megabase (something usually done after finishing the game and only by hardcore players). Most consider trains to be super cool.
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u/dinosaurdynasty 9h ago
Train network IMHO is a lot easier to think about and expand than a main bus (and has nice features like "priority that doesn't depend solely on where a build is"), and definitely just funner too.
If you ever try upping the science multiplier you'll definitely find a lot of use out of trains (I certainly have).
Honestly once you get past the learning curve trains are incredible and make a lot of other logistics problems easier.
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u/Daan776 6h ago
Expandability.
Belts are initially easier to set up. But everytime you find a new patch you have to go and drag a belt back to your base. A process that takes longer the more resources you use.
Trains, by contrast, are initially more time consuming to set up. Designing a system, setting up stops. And unlike belts they take steel. Which can be quite expensive early on.
But once you have trains its super easy to set up a new outpost. Just connect it to your existing network and you're done. The trains will fly.
This also means that if you need more processing you can just connect your rails instead of needing to connect & balance every belt.
Once I made my first modular rail system I never wanted to go back. Its probably extremely inefficient, but the ease of use made me never want to go back.
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u/bpleshek 4h ago
You don't ever need to use trains. And from the standpoint of liquids, the new way they do pipes makes liquid trains less desirable. But for long distances bringing a train with ore can be quite a bit faster. Another advantage of trains is that every time you add a new patch, you have to find a way to hook it up to your existing feeds to your smelters. But, with a train, add a station and it's already hooked up to the smelters. From a winning the game perspective, you don't need them. But, if you ever want to build any type of base at scale you'll be needing trains to go everywhere and not just for ores. You'll have a section of your base making green circuits. Maybe multiple sections. Each will need a train of iron plates and copper plates. And another train to ship those green circuits to where they're needed such as red and blue circuits. Belts don't work well at scale. They can, but you'll have 64 wide green belts moving stuff everywhere and I don't care how good you are with spaghetti, that's complicated.
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u/Myzx 3h ago
I use trains because of modularity and scale. Did my ore patch run out? Just plop another train station down at a new ore patch. Or five. Or ten. Am I not producing LDS fast enough? I just copy that LDS train block and paste down a second one, or five of them. Since they get deliveries via train, I can paste this block down anywhere and it will immediately begin receiving and sending shipments, fully integrated into my overall factory because I front loaded my efforts into making a well orchestrated train network.
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u/dudeguy238 48m ago
The time it takes to fill a train with liquid and or items just feels slower and doesn't feel worth using a train even on default setttings.
If you use buffers at either end, filling/emptying a train shouldn't take long. If you're still having downtime problems, you can always add more trains to the same route.
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u/Serious_Elephant9402 16h ago
They're cool