Hello everyone!

This is the final FOUNDRY Friday before we’re launching Update 4 “Rails & Reactors” on Tuesday, April 28th. Therefore today we’re covering the update’s content in general, and are looking more deeply into one of the core features: Trains!

Trains: Expand your factories with trains. From small end-to-end lines to complex multi-track rail networks, we’ve got you covered.

Xeno Power Plant: Endless power from a complex power plant made out of multiple modular buildings. More details here.

More Science Pack 5 Content: Three more assembly line robots and some new components.

Information Overlay: More information about your factory with a brand new info overlay showing various machine states. More details here.

Construction Drone: A remote controlled construction drone which makes building your factory more convenient. More details here.

New decoratives: A set of glowing neon tubes.

Polishing and Improvements: Lots of polishing, bugfixes and improvements.

I’m thrilled that we’re finally able to deliver trains. They have been highly requested for a very long time, and we’ve been working on them for quite a while. Some of you might have tried them already on the experimental branch, but for everyone else here are the details. Let us start by looking at the individual parts of the Train System.

This is where your trains will drive on. You place it with a drag mode similar to how belt dragging works. They snap to a 4x4 voxel grid, and we do support a wide range of shapes: differently sized curves, slopes for going up and down, diagonals.

Obviously we support branching and merging, and also tracks crossing each other.

This is where your trains stop at, you place them adjacent to tracks and automated trains will be able to stop there. More details below when we’re talking about the scheduling.

Loading Stations are supposed to be placed next to the Train Station itself. You need one per wagon and it can either be set to Load or Unload mode. A Loading Station has an internal inventory which can be filled or emptied while the train isn’t present, which allows for faster train loading/unloading. The building itself has two input and two output belt connections to connect your factory to.

We decided to go with a widely used solution of having two signal types: The regular and chain signal. Signals divide your tracks into so-called track segments and trains will only ever enter empty segments. The regular signal lets trains pass whenever the upcoming segment is empty, and the chain signal lets the train pass only when the next segment after the upcoming segment is also empty.

It is the same solution most factory games and many simulation games with trains use. I know it needs a bit of time to understand for a beginner, but ultimately we wanted to ensure that complex train solutions will work and that the player has the control needed to make interesting builds. We’ll have an info database page where we’ll try to explain the basics to get started.

We also have helper visualization showing the segments (while having a signal equipped):

The train engine is what makes your train move. It needs to be at the front of your train, and if you want your train to be bi-directional, you need an engine on each side facing outwards. For this update, we have decided that trains will not require fuel. It’s something we want to change eventually, but we didn’t want to rush it and therefore delayed it.

For cargo transportation we have a wagon for solid items and one for liquids/gases.

You can drive your train manually from the screen panel, but this isn’t very useful for automating freight transportation in your factory, so there is an autopilot mode.

For the autopilot you can create train schedules, which are a list of stations the train should go to, and a related set of conditions for how long a train should stay in the station. The typical conditions are “Wait until full” and “Wait until empty”, but there are also timers or data signal conditions. You can combine multiple conditions with “AND” or “OR” logic.

Work in progress

I won’t go into too much detail here, but we do also have advanced features like train limits per station, support for multiple stations sharing the same name or creating shared schedules for multiple trains. There is also a bunch of data system support in case you want to do more complex things.


This concludes today’s episode and I hope you’ll have fun with Update 4!

See you at the next one,
-mrmcd



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Hello everyone!

This is episode 100 of FOUNDRY Fridays! Time flies when you’re building the factory (game). Looking back, it’s incredible how the game has progressed over the years. Quite an improvement over our first version on itch, but also over the Early Access launch version from two years ago. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support through this journey. There’s a lot more to be done, so stay tuned!

Soon, on April 28th, Update 4 will officially launch and today we’re looking at the new Xeno Power Plant and a few upcoming long distance transport changes.

Our new power plant, made out of multiple modular buildings, will unlock new heights of power generation. The whole complex is made up of five different buildings, it can generate up to 360MW of power and it is fueled by new items derived from Xeno-Crystals.

Let's have a look at each of the five new buildings.

The building that creates the liquid reactor fuel from precursor items and liquids you’ll have to manufacture.

The central piece of the plant, the reactor burns the fuel and generates Energized Reactor Compound (another liquid).

A giant heat exchanger that takes the Energized Reactor Compound from the Reactor, and together with Water, it generates High-Pressure Steam and Depleted Reactor Compound. The Steam goes to the next building, while the Depleted Reactor Compound needs to be looped back to the Reactor.

It works just like the regular Turbine, but it is much larger and produces ten times the amount of power. It needs High-Pressure Steam to generate power and produces Exhaust Steam as a byproduct.

And finally, to disperse the Exhaust Steam from the High Pressure Turbine you need the Cooling Tower.

Except for the Reactor and the Steam Generator, which need to be connected in a loop, all buildings are to be connected sequentially. We initially thought about going for a more complex mechanic, but ultimately felt that this would be enough to achieve our goals. Those of you familiar with real life nuclear power plants will certainly see the parallels in the design approach, although in reality you’d have up to three loops instead of just one.

Let’s talk about the configurability of the modular buildings next. One of the key features our modular buildings support, is the ability to make buildings with different properties, depending on which or how many modules you use. However, for the power plant we have kept it straight forward, and there is no module tinkering on any of those buildings. The reason is simple: To modify a building, it needs to be shut down and construction can take several minutes. If the power plant is your main source of power, it is just too frustrating to be forced to shut it down as your factory might spiral into a power blackout. If your construction industry runs out of power, you can’t even finish the construction to get the power back up. We do not want to introduce any catastrophic pitfalls like that.

However we went with a different approach: The reactor can be throttled up or down, in steps of 10%, and this affects both power generation and fuel consumption respectively. For each 10% of reactor utilization, you’ll need exactly one Turbine. This allows you to start with a small power plant of, for example, just one or two turbines, which should be enough at the point where it is unlocked. After that you can gradually expand the generation capacity of the plant by building more turbines without the need to shut down the other parts of the plant.

We are going to make changes to the behavior of the shipping pads (planet to station ships). Specifically we’ll remove the ability to abuse them as long distance transport, you’ll only be able to either move items up or down, but not in both directions at the same time. They were never intended that way, and in all honesty it was an oversight on Update 2.

The most important information first: For existing saves, you’ll be prompted at savegame load if you want to switch to the new ruleset or not. So your factories won’t break if you heavily rely on it. For new games the new rules will be active.

Why are we doing this? We never wanted a free and ultra high throughput long distance transport. It made our cargo shuttles completely obsolete and no other logistics solution will ever be able to compete with it. While we’re adding Trains with Update 4, this is a change long overdue even if we wouldn’t add trains. I know this might be a little controversial, and I’m looking forward to reading your feedback on the topic.

Additionally we’ll also adjust the cargo shuttles so that they are more distinct from trains. They will get a speed increase, but at the cost of a storage capacity decrease. That means they’ll be even stronger for low to medium throughput, but they’ll be worse for moving massive amounts of items. Ultimately, this change does not force you to use trains, but it’s an incentive for certain goods. I think that different logistics systems should have different strong suits. Again, we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts on that.


And finally before we conclude this blog post, I’d like to share one of the videos from our train stress tests:

And one more video, showing off another new building: The heavy caster, a replacement for the 96 Casting Machines needed for the largest Blast Furnace:

Thank you for reading and see you in two weeks,
-mrmcd



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