You know, with blueprints and Satisfactory, we can construct functional, realistic, good-looking and even easy to handle rail infrastructure. So today, I want to show something about a dozen different blueprints for railway track creation. There would be viaducts, trestles, elevated tracks, double deck bridge structures and even anti-gravity levitating support platforms. So we will go all the way from the ancient history, through the modern times and up into a science fiction territory. I will show how to make those in game, with all the small tips and tricks. And as usual, I will share my blueprints for free, because well, I am a gamer, not a Youtuber God forbid. Most of those structures would be grounded in real life rail construction techniques, and I will explain a bit of those, well, while creating my blueprints on camera. Quite a bit of research went into this video, and now my hard drive is full of, well, railroad pictures. So give this video all the engagement and allow it to perform better than ordinary gaming videos. And if you want to support me, well, there is always this super sticker thing on YouTube. So let's go! Placing rail on the ground is usually not a pleasant solution in Satisfactory. Satisfactory maps have a bunch of sharp elevation changes, and by elevating track we can avoid majority of those. And let alone we can actually pass other traffic beneath our rail system. Before the update 7, creating detailed elevated track on mass was not really an option. Well, if you are kinda a sane person. RSI can always stand in your way, and well, let's be real, placing thousands of supports by hand is not something that many people can enjoy. Well, here's an example of typical elevated track before the blueprints. Just making 1 meter concrete foundation path and placing concrete support column every 10 foundations and after that just deleting the excess. Boring, dull, and in my later save I was just using an upgraded version of those, with the small pillars being encased in the steel structure. Made it with the blueprints, and then I was like covering half of the dune desert and I was thinking like "Wait a second, I'm just placing a blueprint. Try not to make it way more detailed." And this is how the first viaduct has been created. Railroad viaducts in real life have been around for quite some time. They are absolutely of overengineered solution, and this is why earlier railroads used them quite a lot. Arch is very strong load-bearing geometric shape, and it will not fall apart from constant dynamic stress. Thousands of years ago, ancient Romans used aqueducts to deliver water into their cities. And a lot of those structures are still standing today. The longest ancient Roman aqueduct system was in the modern-day Istanbul, and was even longer than 400 km, which is, well, 250 miles. Modern term for viaduct is derived from Latin for "road", which is "via", and "ductus", which is "led" or "guided" in English. An aqueduct is "Agua", "Agua", "water", well, in English, and once again "ductus", "guided" or "led". And now I'm talking too many languages. In Satisfactory Blueprints 4x4, you can cram 3 support columns. But I have decided to go with only 2 to give it a slimmer look. This means that there should be like 2 meter gap between half arch pieces in the middle of the blueprint, and 1 meter gap on the either sides. I am using half foundation pieces, overlapping into each other as the support column. And on the sides I add small concrete pillar to add this minor detail and to break up the plain sides of the viaduct, because well, if you are placing like 10 of those, or maybe even like 20, it will look really dull if you have like flush face. Also I'm using 32 meters of height on every single railroad blueprint. And the reason for this is well, extra materials is just automation time of your factory, while extending the pillars by hand is your personal time, so it's better to waste materials than to waste your personal time. And for the Bidirectional Railway, I'm using 8 meter wide deck, which is well 2 foundation wide.
This is not so important for the viaducts, but well, if you'll make something like more than the viaducts itself, it will become more obvious, especially with like pillar supports, and I just want to have some level of centralization in my railroad system. With viaduct section ready, good question is how to use it, and this is really important, because this will apply for every single blueprint. Just lapping it on the ground can work, but we can do better. There are several tools we are required to use. First, we place a foundation in the air at the desired height, then select your viaduct blueprint. Next, aim for the bottom of foundation with the blueprint itself. Once you eyeball it into a roughly acceptable place, you can press H key. This is the notch tool, and now your build piece is locked in place. No, this is update 8 experimental feature, it's not yet available on the update 7 air access. And with the first section in place, we can totally just go for the blueprint placement mode with the R key, and snap every sequential blueprint to the previous section. Unfortunately you cannot connect rail track by snapping blueprints itself, so this is why railroad will be constructed manually after viaduct construction. Eventually you will run out of space or height, and even 32 meters of elevation is not enough, and you will need to make a slope. And viaduct shape is surprisingly like allowed to make a realistically looking slope. Here is how you make it. On the design front we will need to adjust height of every sequential arch piece by 1 feature, and to make those small concrete pillars on the sides, well, we can just use the foundation on the top and bring the pillar down, this way we will have it flush with the slope. There will be unfortunately a little bit of clipping on deck over here, but once rail is in place it's not really noticeable. So now we have this bizarre angle blueprint, how we make it into an actual slope through several blueprints. Note that this angle blueprint is still counted the same height as the horizontal section, so if you will use the blueprint snap mode, well, it will snap in this bizarre shape. After the first section we need to lower it down. To achieve this precision I just extend the level of the deck with foundation pieces. Then I aim slope section from beneath into the rough spot. And then I use the H key nudge tool to bring the section into a perfect alignment. And later I just deconstruct extra foundations. And in this simple manner we can have continuous slopes for our viaduct and still retain all the level of detail. Definitely better than making it by hand. And now let's move into a more modern territory with railroad trestles. Railroad trussles were a common thing during earlier railroad construction. Pretty not it was made from wood to chop down even more wood. And wood allowed for increased flexibility to deal with the dynamic stress, but at the same time it was kinda not a longevity solution, because well, rot and fire can deconstruct a lot of wooden things. And well, they are up there in the nature with no proper maintenance, so yeah, usually more permanent wooden trussles were either filled up with embankments or replaced by steel or concrete. And to this day you can find derivatives of trestle construction in modern day railroads, highways and even roller coaster construction. In satisfactory, obvious pick would be small concrete pillars at an angle. I went with 5 per section and to make it even more of a trestle design, I decided to make total of 2 support groups per blueprint. With more modern rail supports, I will use only one support point per blueprint. So this will make trestles to stand out as something more, well I guess primitive. Tricky point is how to make an angled beam. And first you need to make a deck and then bring down the painted beam at desired angle. Then you construct small overlapping section of beam into the backwards direction, and after this you just delete the original beam and snap concrete pillar to a stop. Now you can bring your pillar all the way up at an angle. Repeat this 4 times and you have yourself a concrete trestle. Here are some shots of this beauty in the game. And here is an example of another modern looking trestle. Nothing really fancy when it comes to construction, just bunch of steel beams cross braced 2 times into a trapezoid box with a height of 30 meters. Nice alternative if you want to use steel over concrete. This vertical trestle is not so easy to extend, but if you have a small gap before ground, you just can slap a big concrete pillar and imitate awesome looking foundation. Also you can see that I'm using inverted small pillar supports as some sort of the base for my deck. Good question is, what is this? Well, this is how we are entering into a modern territory of construction. Obvious issue with wide-axon tressles would be how they deal with dynamic stress. Wood is great material and can bend a lot. But something like concrete or steel can only bend so much. The lack of any sort of spring can take its toll on any construction and lead to a catastrophic failure at some point, especially if we deal with heavy duty rail traffic. So structural bearing parts is the common feature that you can find in any modern bridge and elevated structures of any sort. Usually, there's something elastic and we need to simulate this in satisfactory. Obviously, like concrete piece is not what we want to use. And the pillar support piece pretty much is perfect visual option when painting black. Also for this blueprint, for the column here, I'm using four rounded concrete pieces. Looks quite sturdy and you can even extend it with an extra blueprint when necessary. Extra bonus to 8 meter wide deck is the ability to carry numerous belts and pipes beneath the deck. And I just place three steel beams for an extra detail. Another thing that I commonly do with my rail support is to carry numerous power chains, but honestly I do not place the outlets itself on every single blueprint anymore since it's just not so cost effective. The interesting part is how to make slopes from those pillar supports. To place blueprints higher or lower, similar to the wide-ax, I use four meter foundation pieces and bring them up or down every section. Then I place blueprint from beneath and rely on simple notch tool for a minimal adjustment. You can notice that I'm using half foundations for all of my rail decks. Works nicely horizontally, but vertically, we still like the slope half foundation piece in satisfactory. I just prefer to deconstruct the deck and then replace it with angled support ramps and call it a day. And as another interesting iteration, we can use pipes as the columns. Just place one meter foundation in the base and make perimeter from the pipe floor holes. Then bring columns up and finish decorating with one meter round pieces. Columns can be painted into any color and, well, the central bit can be something like a big metal pillar to have some contrast. So, now let's go with something more M city way easier to handle connecting to other rail infrastructure. Also you can always just place 4 or even 5 tracks onto this railway support, and I do not make railings on top as part of the blueprint to have the flush connection with other 32 meter blueprints. And the final variety would be Concrete Pillar A-frame. It is basically using the same technique for angled pillars as previously showcased trestles, so nothing new for the construction techniques. And for the grinder I am just using Inverter Slow concrete pieces. And if you want to make supports for the belt, you can always align them with a notch tool. Alright, now we are entering into double decker territory. 32 meters of height in the blueprint is enough to have two levels of trains or to slap a highway on the top. There are quite a lot of double deck elevated rail track in the real life, but for satisfactory blueprints I just started with iteration of, well, my previous blueprints. So I lower down the second deck 12 meters down and widening it up 2 meters to account for the central supports of various shapes. Another option is to have triple solution with rail slash highway on top and another rail going through down beneath. Also for the double deck there is another interesting solution and option working quite well with the limitation of blueprints. And I am talking about K-Truss bridge structure. This structure where two decks and truss structure itself forms a nice sturdy box. K-Truss is one of the older option in the bridge construction and it was quite popular in the real life since it was way easier to assemble. Obviously it resembles the Latin letter K and this looks like something more monumental than ordinary supports that I done before, so I want to reserve this structure for closing the canyons and working as an actual bridge. For this we will require second blueprint extending our support pillars downward. And to reduce weight, once again we are using arches. Previously with fat column design it was reasonable to place them into a water. Why? Well, because they have no gaps and water like gaps. Here we can totally get away with gaps to reduce the weight since there is no water stream to destroy and mill down our supports. So here you go. This is our double deck variety. We have A-frame, pillar supports, huge estachates and even K-Truss bridge. But there is another interesting bit. What to do when you have a standalone rail. just making 1 meter concrete foundation path and place concrete support column every 10 foundations and after that just deleting the excess. Boring, dull and in my later save I just using an upgraded version of those with the small pillars based in the steel structure with the blueprints and then I was like covering the half of the dune desert and I was thinking like wait so actually it is quite easy. You just place concrete on metal pillars as usual, then you create 8 meter height blueprint with a low bearing. You use the foundation to get exact height of your pillar in your blueprint, then you just delete two pillars from the support and you replace it with the blueprint itself. Nice, clean, easy and looks realistic. Now, let's go in the opposite direction from the realistic. You know, science fiction usually have some sort of magical anti-gravity engine. This allows for Deep Space 9 to have artificial gravity, while way more superior Babylon 5 need to spin around like a fidget spinner in 2017. And now, this video dislike button is burning hotter than Rosinante escaping from Donnager. When it comes to the magical science fiction, I was always baffled by sheer lack of anti-gravity in city architecture and designs. Coruscant from the Star Wars looks like a modern-day Dubai and not like a proper megalopolis of galaxy spanning civilization. Where are all the billboards taking up half of the sky? Where are all the fancy wheels floating in the clouds? Or maybe levitating planters for the three-dimensional parks? Or inverted architecture? You know, there are a lot of possibilities. So, let's change that by making a levitating rail support in city factory. We start with a simple deck, then we place beams, paint them red so they go faster even though they are not going anywhere, but whatever. Slap some pipe floor holes to imitate the shape of an engine, then encase everything into steel pillars, add smaller city screens beneath, crank up the strength of the light emission to 500, slap some pillars, blah blah blah. So slap some pep pep pep pep pep. Slap some pillars supports and call it a day, what a script, dude. And here you go, you have the legit excuse to have floating foundations in city factory. And if you never exported blueprints, you will need to do this manually. You need to go to your system disk, users, your username, app data, local, factory game, saved, save games, blueprints. There your game session would create a folder. Once you have blueprints unlocked in your progression and have created first blueprint. Every blueprint can see from two parts, .svp file with parts and items and .svp cfg file with text description and color settings. Click now that my blueprints are done in update 8 experimental and they will crush on all the versions of satisfactory. Thank you very much for watching, give this video a magical gravity thumbs up, and until the next time, have a nice one, and Yakez out!
