Silo Question

[Silverbiker]

OK, just getting back into this after a long while away.
My question is this:
I hook up a silo to food factory for example.
Factory takes grain.
Chain link another silo to first silo but firat silo wont "top up" from second silo.
Why?
Makes sense to me that you should only need to fill/empty one silo and then they auto balance as they do in the silos i have worked in in r/l.
Is there something I'm missing or is just another illogical way this game works?

[daro30-77]

You must have forklifts between the silos... sorry for my English. Regards

[Karma]

The game code treats factory connections as only transferring between storages and building inputs/outputs. So connecting two buildings coded as storage (warehouses, silos, open storage, etc.) won't auto-transfer between them even if one building gets full or empty.

So if you want a larger grain silo, you either have to connect multiple silos directly to a factory in parallel (tricky) or build a larger single silo (now that there are many options in vanilla test branch, you don't need mods for that anymore).

E.g.:

Farm -> Silo 1 -> Silo 2 -> Food factory
This system won't work, grain will pile up in Silo 1 until it's full without getting moved to Silo 2.

Farm -> Silo 1 -> Food Factory
This will work, grain from the farm will fill Silo 1 and be drawn down by the Factory automatically. Just make Silo 1 large enough that you don't quite fill it up entirely each season.

[dazkaz]

https://youtu.be/psk7fcl9jlk?si=4aNbd_CcwyckPlAM
Hope this video helps.
It's more a work around than a solution, and some consider it cheating.
Its your choice how you play, at the end of the day.

[gwahazar]

But if silo is overloaded, would it push cargo to another silo?

[dazkaz]

Originally posted by gwahazar:

But if silo is overloaded, would it push cargo to another silo?

I can't remember for sure, but I don't think so.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Karma:

Farm -> Silo 1 -> Food Factory
This will work, grain from the farm will fill Silo 1 and be drawn down by the Factory automatically. Just make Silo 1 large enough that you don't quite fill it up entirely each season.

There's a caveat to this in that any grain that ends up in the farm's on-site storage is not accessible to the factory without some kind of active connection, as the factory can't pull it through the silo and the farm won't push it to the silo. Regardless, that's only a minor amount of wastage.

It's perhaps also worth mentioning that it isn't necessarily a good idea to put a grain-consuming factory within passive connection range of a farm or farm-adjacent storage, as real estate around the farm building itself is often more valuable for fields (to minimize travel times, especially for tractors and combines) while the factory often wants to be able to draw grain from multiple sources due to the quantity of grain you need to keep it operating year-round (especially off of the single harvest you get with seasons enabled) and may also want considerably more space than its footprint would suggest due to whatever transportation infrastructure you need to distribute and export whatever it's producing or deliver the workers and whatever other inputs (including grain from other sources) it requires. Another potential issue for factories in close proximity to farms (or, rather, to fields) is that fields can accept workers during sowing and harvesting; while this isn't an insurmountable problem, it can take a bit of extra work to avoid any issues arising from it depending on how you're delivering workers to the factory and it might be just as easy, if not easier, to put the factory somewhere else instead.

Originally posted by gwahazar:

But if silo is overloaded, would it push cargo to another silo?

Only if you're dropping grain off directly at the overloaded silo - freight carriers will unload cargo into the drop-off point's on-site storage and any adjacent storages that both have a direct connection to the drop-off point and can accept that type of cargo, but overflow won't 'spill out' beyond that. Also, deliveries tend to be split between all storages that can be 'seen' from the drop-off point so as to (try to) make all of them equally full by percentage of capacity utilized.

If for example Silo B has direct connections to Silos A and C while no direct connection exists between Silos A and C, trucks using Silo B's internal loading station can deliver cargo to or pull cargo from all three silos, but trucks using Silo A's internal loading station can only deliver to and receive from Silos A and B regardless of how close each of the three silos is to its storage capacity.

[Silverbiker]

Thanks for help.
I have built 3 silos (a-b-c) with c connected to factory. It would be so simple that I would only need to draw from c and that it would be topped up from b then a.
BTW where are the forklifts?

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Silverbiker:

BTW where are the forklifts?

They're under the General Cargo tab in the construction menu. You need at least one forklift garage, and you'll probably want to use the factory connection junctions as well.

Also, if you need to move large quantities of stuff but for whatever reason cannot use a direct connection, it'd probably be better to use trucks or conveyors/cableways even over very short distances - the forklifts available in the unmodded game are very light on carrying capacity and you don't get that many of them in each forklift garage.

[Silverbiker]

Thanks joeball123