cargo lift questions

[Akita]

Im pretty new, and trying to get the cargo lift working. I really wish someone would expand the wiki page with better info. Its pretty sparse. Please explain the whole scanning, looking for rails stage it goes through forever.

1) I have rails that go down like 200m, but my lift only goes 61. There are no obstructions, so why is it stopping?

2) is there a way to ride the lift? I get on and fall right through. So do I need a lift and a cargo lift? Do people have side by side shafts everywhere? Seems kind of redundant.

3) are you suppsosed to take the lift out and put it back in after scanning? What exactly is the scanning doing? I assume its looking for obstructions, or is it looking for its own rails cause it lost track?

thanks

[steveman0]

Cargo lifts are still a bit buggy so they do odd things at times.

1. It probably got confused and needs to rescan the rails to find the bottom again. When it finishes, assuming it found no obstructions, it will go to the bottom.

2. Currently no, you can't ride it. You'll need regular lifts as well. But regular lifts are cheap and the platform is available on demand unlike the cargo lift.

3. If you take out the lift it might reset it. I don't remember how it handles that. Generally you'll want to leave the lift in and not touch it once built. The lift scans to find obstructions and verify that rails aren't missing.

[AlPhi]

IIRC you must have a flat solid floor under the whole intended bottom of the cargolift shaft or it will not know how far it is meant to go down to.

[steveman0]

Flat floor isn't required. It only looks for rails and air in the space where the lift will travel.

[AlPhi]

Ah thanks, it seems that I misremembered and that just a one block floor is required:

Originally posted by epgeek:

Make sure there is at least one solid block at the level you want the lift to stop, or the controller will determine a new depth the next time it runs a rail check (about every five minutes, as I recall). I've started making my lift shafts from the magma layer with a mk2 excavator and manually placing blocks where I want it to stop. One shaft I forgot to add the block, and now the rails descend all the way to my sulphur filtration minibase.

[Tenzek]

Originally posted by AlPhi:

Ah thanks, it seems that I misremembered and that just a one block floor is required:

No, it did used to be that way when cargo lifts were very new.

To the original comment - I would go down to that depth and check to make sure you did not place something by accident after the rails had been set. It might be that you misclicked and placed a hopper down there or some similar thing. Then it was a stop that the lift saw after the rails went in.

After you are sure that there is no obstruction, just scanning should fix the problem. You should not need to remove the lift if everything is working properly. It will reset and rescan if you do remove and replace the lift, so that has a chance to help if it is some kind of bug you are experiencing. Just remember that you can only remove a lift if it is empty. Even if you plan to send items down with a lift, let it do one run to the bottom empty first to make sure it is working.