Train Rip and Replace

Trains have always been a pain point for me when I play, but I think sometimes that’s normal for most players or it’s the fact that I don’t plan ahead enough. In the past few days while prototyping my filtering dilemma, I found that I needed the following things:

• Define the main loop for trains to enter and exit.
• Each set of items (2-4 items in total, 2 per wagon) needed to have it’s own drop off point that doesn’t interfere with the main loop.
• Each wagon needs to have Stack Filtered Inserters, filtered down to the item it offloads.

I tried really hard to use Balancers and the built-in filtering system to filter through any item that any train unloads. The problem is that due to the game systems, the input flow gets hung up a ton, thus causing items not to get through and into the main bus and modules. With a little hurt pride and a headache, I just decided to implement the train requirements above, reworked the signals, and brought in a single belt of items per item from the train depot. Filtering is already “done” at the time of unloading and things can just stay organized.

One other Proof of Concept that I tried was to have the input belts read to the circuit network and then “call” the train needed when items were low. There were issues with having a single train stop clogging up the other trains that needed to be brought in and then you needed a lot of Combinators to work out the signal, checking the conditions. It wasn’t working smoothly and I think it would have caused more problems the more I worked on it.

The good news is that the factory is back up and running again! The bad news is that I spent so much time on getting items to the new base, nuclear power has shut down, and many other things were ignored.

Time to move on to other issues and get them fixed.

This is day 21 of #100DaysToOffload.