Fuel Trucks

[Quality House]

Hi everyone,

I have an idea for vehicles in this game, and the issue I'm facing with supplying fuel to my truck stations.

Fuel trucks are pretty straight forward IN THEORY:

-They only store items that can be used as fuel sources (from Leaves to Turbo Fuel).

-These vehicles do not fuel up from Truck Stations, they fuel up from their own inventory.

-When they are near a Truck Station, they deposit fuel into the station's fuel tank.

-They only store items from Truck Station's that have been set to interact with them.
(This would also include modifying Truck Stations to include a switch at the bottom, making it a 'Fuel Station' that will only interact with Fuel Trucks. Fuel Stations only store fuel sources, but can fuel any vehicle like a normal station.)

[Waldorf]

This seems easy to do without any changes to the game. Just have a truck follow this:

-Pickup Fuel at Point A
-Drop off fuel at Point B
-Pickup Fuel at Point A
-Drop off fuel at Point C

and so on and so forth with each station. It would have to have its own recording of where to go, but that shouldn't be an issue considering that's what you do for all trucks, and the only other issue is that it would be dropping off all of the fuel at B before C, and may run out near the end like at D or E, However once you have confirmed that there is enough fuel going into the system to cover all of the trucks plus some, the stations would eventually fill up and this wouldn't be an issue.

Thats just my take though.

[DaBa]

I am so confused. Why not just use a normal truck to transport fuel to the stations? And normal Truck Stations to refuel them? Why would you need a brand new form of a truck to accomplish this? In fact, what you're suggesting sounds like it would only complicate things and create confusion, just like I am confused right now.

[Virtual Ocean Horizon]

Building off of above ideas, yeah, transportation logistics requires a bit of thinking because they are not as intuitive as first glance. The ideas presented by OP can already be done ingame too!

Generally trucks (and even tractors) already have massive inventory space so unless you're transporting endgame levels of materials you can just package the fuel and bring it along the transportation network with plastics and other oil products, sorting at destination. Rinse wash repeat down the transportation network. The downside is that yes, you will have to siphon off some plastic production. If you really start choking due to so many materials, you can simply just copy paste more trucks on the same route. For all the excess fuel you will either have to sink it at the final destination of the fuel OR unpackage it and burn it for excess power (your choice).

Its generally more efficient to do it this way, rather than have dedicated trucks for single resources. Unless you're dealing with irregular stack sizes and massive amounts of materials per minute, in which case yeah it might be better to transport individual mats / truck.

An example of what this looks like in practice:
1) Produce & package fuel at oil base, refuel here. Ship to hub w/ oil produts.
2) Primary base hub. Drop off oil products + packaged fuel, refuel here as well. All stuff gets sorted cleanly into containers before going to the rest of your factory.
3) Distribute the packaged fuel across your primary base hub to other truck stations / rail stations / etc. as necessary
4) all excess fuel is sunk for points or burned for power

Building off previous example, imaging a scenario where your hub has fuel distribution but you have a distant factory with its own transportation logistics from other distant factories. This hub factory assembles some kind of advanced part and then ships it back to hub.
4) Ship packaged fuel from hub to distant factory with the same vehicle that takes the finished product to main hub.
6) Distribute fuel to all truck stations that unload materials at this distant factory, fueling an entire transportation network
7) all excess fuel is sunk for points or burned for power

[Die Hand Gottes]

Sounds complicated to me too
The track stations already offer everything you need
and to be honest I haven't really used them yet either
the magic word for me are trains.
I use some drones but trains run on the whole map.

[Quality House]

Originally posted by Waldorf:

This seems easy to do without any changes to the game. Just have a truck follow this:

-Pickup Fuel at Point A
-Drop off fuel at Point B
-Pickup Fuel at Point A
-Drop off fuel at Point C

and so on and so forth with each station. It would have to have its own recording of where to go, but that shouldn't be an issue considering that's what you do for all trucks, and the only other issue is that it would be dropping off all of the fuel at B before C, and may run out near the end like at D or E, However once you have confirmed that there is enough fuel going into the system to cover all of the trucks plus some, the stations would eventually fill up and this wouldn't be an issue.

Thats just my take though.

But that's my issue, unless you want a lot of smart splitters or truck stations just built for receiving fuel this won't work. I'm thinking in terms of tractor/truck based transport system with as little pointlessness as possible.

Even if I use the buggy to transport fuel it's still way more then any one station will need to keep the trucks going through that station fueled up. Also because you are dropping fuel off directly into the Station inventory, you have to empty that out before you can use the station for resources, meaning (bare minimum) you will need to set up a storage area that's bigger then the station inventory with a smart splitter that can store the fuel.

I understand this game is about excess, but I'm a minimalist, and that seems needlessly redundant.

Also I have MANY truck stations, I can't be dropping off insane quantities of fuel everywhere, it's incredibly inefficient and I don't produce enough fuel to do all that anyways. So that's when I came up with this idea.

There's also the issue of burning off that fuel before the autopilot delivers another batch, unless you also want to have a ticket machine to destroy any excess fuel. Otherwise you risk, backing up the station or backing up your conveyor belts.

I get that this may come off as pointless, but I've been racking my brain for the last few days to come up with a proper answer.

[Quality House]

There's also the issue of if a vehicle is not loading or unloading at a Truck Station, the vehicle will not pull fuel from it if it's in autopilot mode. The player can pull fuel just by driving through it, but not an AI. That means you have to use that station in some way which only adds to the frustration of what i mentioned above.

[Quality House]

Honestly, if it were possible for AI driven vehicles to passively pull fuel just by driving through a station without activating it. That might fix all my issues.

[Quality House]

Cause then you could just have a truck dedicated to fuel delivery interacting with the station.

[Teemo]

Originally posted by Quality House:

Originally posted by Waldorf:

This seems easy to do without any changes to the game. Just have a truck follow this:

-Pickup Fuel at Point A
-Drop off fuel at Point B
-Pickup Fuel at Point A
-Drop off fuel at Point C

and so on and so forth with each station. It would have to have its own recording of where to go, but that shouldn't be an issue considering that's what you do for all trucks, and the only other issue is that it would be dropping off all of the fuel at B before C, and may run out near the end like at D or E, However once you have confirmed that there is enough fuel going into the system to cover all of the trucks plus some, the stations would eventually fill up and this wouldn't be an issue.

Thats just my take though.

But that's my issue, unless you want a lot of smart splitters or truck stations just built for receiving fuel this won't work. I'm thinking in terms of tractor/truck based transport system with as little pointlessness as possible.

Even if I use the buggy to transport fuel it's still way more then any one station will need to keep the trucks going through that station fueled up. Also because you are dropping fuel off directly into the Station inventory, you have to empty that out before you can use the station for resources, meaning (bare minimum) you will need to set up a storage area that's bigger then the station inventory with a smart splitter that can store the fuel.

I understand this game is about excess, but I'm a minimalist, and that seems needlessly redundant.

Also I have MANY truck stations, I can't be dropping off insane quantities of fuel everywhere, it's incredibly inefficient and I don't produce enough fuel to do all that anyways. So that's when I came up with this idea.

There's also the issue of burning off that fuel before the autopilot delivers another batch, unless you also want to have a ticket machine to destroy any excess fuel. Otherwise you risk, backing up the station or backing up your conveyor belts.

I get that this may come off as pointless, but I've been racking my brain for the last few days to come up with a proper answer.

The problem is that you're thinking about this backwards. Having multiple lines with single materials is not minimalist. Using smart splitters and combining your lines is the minimalist approach. Once you get good at doing it, it looks great and works much smoother. Way less in planning and space required to get jobs done.

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

Originally posted by DaBa:

I am so confused. Why not just use a normal truck to transport fuel to the stations? And normal Truck Stations to refuel them? Why would you need a brand new form of a truck to accomplish this? In fact, what you're suggesting sounds like it would only complicate things and create confusion, just like I am confused right now.

I mean the dude has a point, like the train station for example will use a liquid trailer then a cargo trailer for moving cargo, even if its just graphic wise, seeing a liquid tank on the back of a truck would make sense, we have fuel truck these days that also move other liquids.

But fuel moving trucks also exist to, those would be equally easy to do if you just give the truck 2 inventory systems then just one like they do with the player as is, in this example if you load ammo into a gun, the ammo is removed from your inventory as its in the gun, if the fuel is loaded into the truck, it can be given a over all % of fuel left instead of pulling from the cargo.

Granted, this leaves a lot of work in terms of limiting fuel and storage and what not for the devs so it may be something they would do after they release the game simply as a patch or something, idk