Minecart vs. Ore lift

[psusi]

I'm looking at moving beyond standard conveyors but can't decide whether I should go for a lift, or minecarts. How do they compare?

[Alpha]

Lifts are for vertical transport while minecarts are for horizontal transport. So use lifts for hauling up ore from the deep and then transport it around using minecarts or freight carts.

[psusi]

Carts also have sloped tracks and have a massive capacity, so I was wondering if they are worth using to haul up as well? Can their tracks also not be placed directly vertical the way conveyors and tubes can?

[Alpha]

Originally posted by psusi:

Carts also have sloped tracks and have a massive capacity, so I was wondering if they are worth using to haul up as well? Can their tracks also not be placed directly vertical the way conveyors and tubes can?

No they can't be placed vertically. Also they are really slow when going up sloped tracks. You can add booster tracks later in the game, but it is much easier and simpler to simply make ore lifts.

[psusi]

So what would you use carts for? It's not like you normally need to move ore very far horizontally. I was thinking of just using transport tubes to quickly unload a lift into a few hoppers to buffer before the smelters, and this would all be right next to the lift shaft.

[Wariat117]

Originally posted by psusi:

So what would you use carts for? It's not like you normally need to move ore very far horizontally. I was thinking of just using transport tubes to quickly unload a lift into a few hoppers to buffer before the smelters, and this would all be right next to the lift shaft.

they have only 1 use:
railgun

this thing build 1km long tunnel, you can speed it up with certain resources (but you are going to get cancer while building tracks)

[steveman0]

Originally posted by psusi:

Carts also have sloped tracks and have a massive capacity, so I was wondering if they are worth using to haul up as well? Can their tracks also not be placed directly vertical the way conveyors and tubes can?

I've seen people use ore freighters in place of lifts so there are at least some people that think it's worthwhile. I personally stick to cargo lifts but if you enjoy carts that much they are viable.

[Alpha]

I use minecarts extensively to haul large amounts of ore to my lifts. You would need many parallel lines of conveyors or tubes to be able to do what a single minecart track can do.

[Crazy9000.Eps]

Originally posted by steveman0:

I've seen people use ore freighters in place of lifts so there are at least some people that think it's worthwhile. I personally stick to cargo lifts but if you enjoy carts that much they are viable.

I tried to do that with minecarts but then all the carts get stuck because there's too many in one segment apparently. The throughput isn't high enough to feed a set of blast furnaces.

[steveman0]

Originally posted by Crazy9000.Eps:

Originally posted by steveman0:

I've seen people use ore freighters in place of lifts so there are at least some people that think it's worthwhile. I personally stick to cargo lifts but if you enjoy carts that much they are viable.

I tried to do that with minecarts but then all the carts get stuck because there's too many in one segment apparently. The throughput isn't high enough to feed a set of blast furnaces.

Yes, minecarts aren't that great for that reason. Freight carts aren't really susceptible to this issue though.

[Titanium Jesus]

Scrap track and scrap ore frieghters are an excellent stop gap to get iron and lithium up without having to worry about using energy to defend conveyors before you get far enough to get lifts set up and fully automated. The scrap mine carts and track "can" be used to create an artificially limited throughput to whatever you want as well. I do.

[psusi]

Originally posted by Wariat117:

Originally posted by psusi:

So what would you use carts for? It's not like you normally need to move ore very far horizontally. I was thinking of just using transport tubes to quickly unload a lift into a few hoppers to buffer before the smelters, and this would all be right next to the lift shaft.

they have only 1 use:
railgun

this thing build 1km long tunnel, you can speed it up with certain resources (but you are going to get cancer while building tracks)

Say what now?

[Wariat117]

Originally posted by psusi:

Say what now?

that was supposed to be joke ;d

but the machine really exists, it's part of adventures dlc.
players are supposed to shoot it as fast as possible, this 1km tunnel can be cooled down (aka speed up), and you can carry all those resources with minecarts, 1km track forward and 1km track to come back :P (optimistic numbers, if you don't want to mix carts which carry one resource with the ones which carry second then double the numbers :V)

[stub]

I had good success using mine carts instead of lifts a few patches ago. The tedious part was building the track all the way down to -1000, and now doubly so since you will need separate up and down tracks to avoid collisions. I will try out MadVandal's spiral track building mod to avoid this next time. Lifts might be more efficient, but it was good fun watching the things run around and designing systems to get the minecarts to distribute themselves. Now that mine carts can no longer overlap or go through each other, you will need to use the Adventure pack freight car system if you want to have a single track loop covering multiple mines. I'm not entirely sure if freight cars are viable over such distances though, where an empty hopper will be full of ore and the extractor blocked by the time a freight cart arrives; you might need to use a mass storage or lots of hoppers and stations at each extraction sight as an ore buffer, or perhaps a buffer every few hundred meters and have ore shuffled up in stages.

[steveman0]

Originally posted by stub:

I'm not entirely sure if freight cars are viable over such distances though, where an empty hopper will be full of ore and the extractor blocked by the time a freight cart arrives; you might need to use a mass storage or lots of hoppers and stations at each extraction sight as an ore buffer, or perhaps a buffer every few hundred meters and have ore shuffled up in stages.

You can play tricks by setting the stocking points really high. Carts don't care much about the quantity stored or the size of the storage. If you tell it to request 5000 ore, carts will continue to collect ore until there's 5000 total in storage or actively in transport. They don't care if the destination is even just a hopper with 100 storage.

This does mean that the system can never sleep. Carts will just queue up at the destination waiting to unload even if there's no need for more. So if you are willing to dedicate the carts to it, you can make it work. If you have constant demand though, the carts will continue flowing smoothly.