Increase Freight Car Carrying Capacity

[>< V ><]

I'm really liking the game. 500 hours in and I feel I've only conquered about a quarter of the map.

But I don't want to use conveyors everywhere. I want to use the trains, because they're cool, but the train efficiency drops rapidly after a certain distance because of the freight car carrying capacity.

I can match conveyor belt efficiency with storage buffers on either end of a train route, but after a certain distance the buffers will empty because the train doesn't come back fast enough to refill them.

I'm not asking for trains to be efficient to the point that everything can be transported to one massive hub, but the current distance of train efficiency is less than a quarter mile, which is just right on that border of whether to use trains or just conveyor belt it.

If the freight car carrying capacity was increased, say to the point that you could do a half mile with matched efficiency to conveyors, it would make the decision much easier to justify using trains over conveyor belts.

Ideally, I would like the freight cars to have the same capacity as the freight station.

[XistenZ]

I have a train with 13 cars. More cars = increased throughput.

[Man's Best Friend]

Use more train. The beautiful thing about trains is that once you have the lines setup, you can just add another trains. In this case, just add a second train doing the same route as the first one. As an added bonus you can configure them to only leave the dropoff station after they've emptied everything. Doing this will force the trains to maintain a minimum of spacing.

[Sanquin]

Or you could...use more trains. Sure it means you probably need 2 rail lines instead of 1. 1 going to a point and 1 coming back, to create a loop. But that way you could easily put 2, 3, 4, or depending on how far it is, more trains on the same route.

Remember, the game is all about MORE. (And how to efficiently make use of the space and resources you have.) One generator doesn't give enough power? Add more! One constructor doesn't produce enough resources? Put another one next to it for the same resource. One conveyor belt doesn't have enough throughput? Put another one next to/above it. One train doesn't give enough throughput? Add more trains!

[MJS WARLORD]

I have a 40 wagon long train but the downside it takes up a lot of space so this is my alternative

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886789837

The belt system is 18 wide , 16 go from gassy fields which is behind me , up to my main base just past the waterfalls and 2 come down.

It took a long time to do and the end result is items are moved quicker than they would be using drones or trains because the flow is continuous , no waiting for loading unloading.

BTW whenever i post this i get accused of using mods ..... i did not , all i used was time and patience

[The Big Brzezinski]

Seems like you could just do eight trains of five cars each instead. It would certainly make the stations a lot more manageable, especially if you had two trains share one of four platforms.

[MJS WARLORD]

i only use the train for collecting unwanted stuff from dune dessert then ship it to other end of my layout to unload to sinks , i fine tuned it so that the sinks are just empty by the time the train comes back.

I prefer the method i shown in the above screen shot because 18 belts move quicker and takes up less space than 18 pairs of drones would.

[>< V ><]

The freight car has a carrying capacity of 32 slots. If we consider a stack of say Iron Ore which stacks to 100, then the freight car can hold 3200 Iron Ore. If I consume the Iron Ore at 780 parts / min then it will take 4 mins and 6 seconds to empty it. Subtract off 25 seconds for loading and 25 seconds for unloading and you have 3 mins and 16 seconds left for round trip travel time. Divide by 2 and you get 98 seconds as a maximum travel time between stations.

That 98 seconds also includes the starting and stopping of the train and in this giant world of Satisfactory, 98 seconds barely gets you out the front yard. You can't even go from one side of a biome to another. And if your within a biome, then you might as well belt it.

If one is into being efficient, then there is just no reason to use trains. They can't even be efficient within the totality of a biome.

Up their carrying capacity to that of the freight station with 48 slots. This will give another 49 seconds to travel time.

[God of Snacks]

Originally posted by >< V ><:

The freight car has a carrying capacity of 32 slots. If we consider a stack of say Iron Ore which stacks to 100, then the freight car can hold 3200 Iron Ore. If I consume the Iron Ore at 780 parts / min then it will take 4 mins and 6 seconds to empty it. Subtract off 25 seconds for loading and 25 seconds for unloading and you have 3 mins and 16 seconds left for round trip travel time. Divide by 2 and you get 98 seconds as a maximum travel time between stations.

That 98 seconds also includes the starting and stopping of the train and in this giant world of Satisfactory, 98 seconds barely gets you out the front yard. You can't even go from one side of a biome to another. And if your within a biome, then you might as well belt it.

If one is into being efficient, then there is just no reason to use trains. They can't even be efficient within the totality of a biome.

Up their carrying capacity to that of the freight station with 48 slots. This will give another 49 seconds to travel time.

I get what your saying but, this is assuming your train only has 1 car and even more importantly, 1 train. You can have multiple trains running the same line with many cars. You are technically right in that just belting is more efficient, but there's a few things to consider:

1 - Belts have a huge CPU impact, if you go for the ultra mega giga factory, belts are incredibly inefficient in terms of time investment cause you're gonna chug down to like 5 fps.

2 - Belts bug out over long distances, especially on weaker PCs. Objects will start being deleted to handle the high speed of a maxed out Mk 5 belt.

3 - Trains go choo choo.

If you like mods, there is a Train mod that allows you unlock Train Mk 2 which basically doubles all the capacities of trains.

[>< V ><]

Originally posted by God of Snacks:

Originally posted by >< V ><:

The freight car has a carrying capacity of 32 slots. If we consider a stack of say Iron Ore which stacks to 100, then the freight car can hold 3200 Iron Ore. If I consume the Iron Ore at 780 parts / min then it will take 4 mins and 6 seconds to empty it. Subtract off 25 seconds for loading and 25 seconds for unloading and you have 3 mins and 16 seconds left for round trip travel time. Divide by 2 and you get 98 seconds as a maximum travel time between stations.

That 98 seconds also includes the starting and stopping of the train and in this giant world of Satisfactory, 98 seconds barely gets you out the front yard. You can't even go from one side of a biome to another. And if your within a biome, then you might as well belt it.

If one is into being efficient, then there is just no reason to use trains. They can't even be efficient within the totality of a biome.

Up their carrying capacity to that of the freight station with 48 slots. This will give another 49 seconds to travel time.

I get what your saying but, this is assuming your train only has 1 car and even more importantly, 1 train. You can have multiple trains running the same line with many cars. You are technically right in that just belting is more efficient, but there's a few things to consider:

1 - Belts have a huge CPU impact, if you go for the ultra mega giga factory, belts are incredibly inefficient in terms of time investment cause you're gonna chug down to like 5 fps.

2 - Belts bug out over long distances, especially on weaker PCs. Objects will start being deleted to handle the high speed of a maxed out Mk 5 belt.

3 - Trains go choo choo.

If you like mods, there is a Train mod that allows you unlock Train Mk 2 which basically doubles all the capacities of trains.

A mod you say? I will check it out. The mod manager for this game is amazing.

I want to use trains because they are cool, but this game also brings out the "desire to be efficient" in me. I understand that I can add more cars, but I already have a 2 engine 14 car train with each freight car having a 780 input line. Doubling this and then doubling the train stations to have a 32 car train with 64 stations is just absurd to bring resources about 75% across a biome.

Thanks for the heads up on the mod, I'm going to check it out.

[LittleEngineer]

Originally posted by >< V ><:

I understand that I can add more cars, but I already have a 2 engine 14 car train with each freight car having a 780 input line. Doubling this and then doubling the train stations to have a 32 car train with 64 stations is just absurd to bring resources about 75% across a biome.

Instead of doubling the number of wagons on a single train, add a second train with 14 wagons for twice the capacity.

[>< V ><]

Originally posted by LittleEngineer:

Originally posted by >< V ><:

I understand that I can add more cars, but I already have a 2 engine 14 car train with each freight car having a 780 input line. Doubling this and then doubling the train stations to have a 32 car train with 64 stations is just absurd to bring resources about 75% across a biome.

Instead of doubling the number of wagons on a single train, add a second train with 14 wagons for twice the capacity.

Perhaps for a future expansion, but I currently design my stations to have one track connecting them with the train doing its turn around at the station. I can't get 2 trains on the current design.

[LittleEngineer]

Could you design a passing loop[en.wikipedia.org] at the approximate middle point in your track with the necessary signals (block signal at entry and exit of both tracks in the passing loop) to ensure the trains pass at the middle.


e.g.:
-------------- Track direction: <-------
--------------______________
________/______________\________
-------------- Track direction: ------->

Please ignore the dashes they are only there to preserve spacing.