How do you get trucks working?

[x_equals_speed]

I'm finding it a real pain, but I'm wondering if I'm missing something in the interface.

Long routes with lots of stops seem to work badly. It takes ages to record and then has to be done again if you want to add one stop (and if you make a new truck for adding one stop you wind up adding lots of short routes which defeats the point). Also if something backs up then the truck'll dump the wrong sort of thing in the next unload station it visits.

Short routes where a truck just ferries things from a source node to a few stops that need it also seem to work badly. It means lots of trucks which wastes a lot of fuel because they'll do the route over and over rather than waiting until they're full before doing the trip once. There also seems to be no way to get them to take a load and divide it between a few different sites instead of dumping it all in the first unload station and having nothing left for the others. I guess I could also record a route that involves going back to the source after each trip and sitting still for five minutes but that'd get old fast.

I started again for V6 and figured I'd try some different things, but the more I work with them the more trucks seem to just be not very helpful.

[Husker_85]

Trucks are an early game mode of transport so you don't wanna get too complicated with them. Just set individual routes from your hub to your remote factories. I set a 300 second delay right at the start of the run so that the truck will go out and come back once and then I can turn it off since my modular frame factory takes a long time to fill up it's depot. I actually wish there was a way to set this up normally so that the trucks will just go out, come back, and then shut down again since there's really not much reason to have one running nonstop before you unlock trains anyways imo.

[x_equals_speed]

How do you set a delay? Being able to manually specify a delay would solve a lot of problems.

[PaulbarRY123]

Yeah i agree. Once you set up the route its kinda ok, but they use alot of fuel and continually run. I found myself always making biofuel for my trucks and Generators, it was a lost cause. Kinda sad you really gotta ignore trucks and move straight to Coal power and rush Trains.

If trucks where more economical, and didnt use so much biofuel. I would love to run a truck routes early game. Then transition specific routes to trains later.

[kahukura]

Originally posted by x_equals_speed:

How do you set a delay? Being able to manually specify a delay would solve a lot of problems.

Interact with the yellow pause symbol node thing on their route and you can change it. In my experience there's one at each stop they make.

[x_equals_speed]

Thanks for that. As long as they don't consume fuel while they're not moving, delays could make many short routes really viable.

[Husker_85]

If you're quick about exiting the menu and starting your run after you start recording then you might not get an initial pause to edit and you can't just place them down. Any time you take a pause on a route while recording a pause marker will be placed.

[chronobomb]

Originally posted by =|K|T|= I Øut rànk yõu:

Yeah i agree. Once you set up the route its kinda ok, but they use alot of fuel and continually run. I found myself always making biofuel for my trucks and Generators, it was a lost cause. Kinda sad you really gotta ignore trucks and move straight to Coal power and rush Trains.

If trucks where more economical, and didnt use so much biofuel. I would love to run a truck routes early game. Then transition specific routes to trains later.

Trucks use coal too for fuel. You can set them to auto refuel by loading coal in the second intake.

[God of Snacks]

I think they designed the game for trucks to operate off of petroleum coke. When you first unlock oil, the nodes are far away, and you also end up with your first recipe that has a "waste product." Petroleum coke at that point is either used as fuel or sunk. And you end up with ALOT of it. You can very easily bring all that coke back and distribute it to your truck stations for fuel. This assumes you have all your trucks traveling to some centralized hub.

[kLuns]

Originally posted by God of Snacks:

I think they designed the game for trucks to operate off of petroleum coke. When you first unlock oil, the nodes are far away, and you also end up with your first recipe that has a "waste product." Petroleum coke at that point is either used as fuel or sunk. And you end up with ALOT of it. You can very easily bring all that coke back and distribute it to your truck stations for fuel. This assumes you have all your trucks traveling to some centralized hub.

When you build this always keep enough space to switch to packaged fuel.

[x_equals_speed]

The delay thing is working great and I'm successfully over to truck logistics.

I don't try to keep fuel at all of the stations. Instead I've got a truck doing runs to take fuel to a fuelling-in station, which takes all of its fuel and adds it to the fuel section of the fuelling-out station. Every other truck's route goes past this station (in the same direction without stopping at fair speed) after dropping off whatever they're dropping off so they get a refuel then.

It also is set as a dropping off station so if their delivery target was backed up and they've still got goods they drop of the excess there, which feeds into an awesome sink.

It should be scalable to other fuel types as I go up the tiers without worrying about leaving space because there's no need to modify the refuelling station in any way. I just create the new fuel wherever it's most convenient and switch the fuel delivery truck to use the new source.

I had forgotten coke existed though, in my last playthrough it all fed straight into generators, I don't think I ever used it as a fuel source for vehicles or personal equipment.

[Remnar]

Trucks are a janky and buggy mess. I have watched them fall through the platforms, drive like they are drunk, and get stuck on invisible collision blocks. Recording their path is a waste of time if you make a mistake. A lot of this ♥♥♥♥ could have been avoided if the devs used an editable spline path. I understand if that is not easy to do, when you need it to be on the surface of platforms and the ground, go up or down, etc.. It requires some understanding of algebra to make bezier curves. Hell I'm sure they did that with the train tracks.

[Hammer Of Evil]

trucks are very easy and amazing, its best to use them due to the ease and amazement.

[DrNewcenstein]

You have to work within the limitations of trucks, and have some common sense. They're not long-haul 18-wheelers bringing 1,000 different goods to multiple Wal-Marts where busy little bees unload and separate the bread and tampons from the eggs and hammers.

If you want multiple deliveries of the same item to multiple points, then set up multiple source points, one for each receiving station.

Trucks are the sensible alternative to long conveyor belts, not the cross-country hauling solution. Trains do long-range hauling, not trucks. You're not supposed to burn one tank of fuel with each round-trip. You can, but that's not their purpose. If it takes a tank of fuel, you need a train for that run, or you need waypoint stations, or you need to not be so gung-ho about that specific run until you have trains.

[x_equals_speed]

The fuel problem was more that they'd consume as much in super long runs as doing a short run constantly without ever stopping.

Being told how to set a delay has saved trucks for me, my truck logistics work very well now I can tell each truck "Do this once an hour". They carry so much stuff in a trip even if the trip was long enough to burn a full tank of fuel the cost is minimal because I'm producing it at a fuel/minute rate and the trucks spend so many minutes idle it's stacking faster than they can use it up.