Efficient LOADING/UNLOADING Train Station designs | Factorio Tutorial/Guide/How-to

welcome to factorio master class my name is nilas this is the series of tutorials and guides here on youtube covering all aspects of the game and aims to write insights and resources to help you improve today's episode is covering some of the more advanced train topics and specifically stations and all of this is starting out as on my twitch channel where i stream a workshop session this is over at twitch tv slash needles i am streaming factorio at least three days a week and streaming generally is six days a week so do come on over it's at 8pm central european time and about four hours after that so always welcome to drop on by and say hi and hang out and help with the designs and discussions for upcoming guides if you like this kind of video then hit the like button and subscribe to the channel for more content like this ideas comments feedback that kind of thing either provided here in the comment section below on the discord server or join the dive to live streams i started writing the script for advanced trains and then it got way too big for one or even two videos so i started breaking it down and needed to make it even more down and the first topic that i want to cover in this episode is all about stations so it's going to be about loading stations unloading stations and liquid stations just in order to get sort of the the first ones done and all the way to the end including ups optimized and sort of max throughput optimized and that's basically where you're covered there will be tons of other things that i'd like to i'd like to cover in the tutorials such as this like network plannings designs circuits to open closed stations stackers limitations of the train implementations many to many networks managing multiple stations you know all those things i'd like to cover but they'll also be in future episodes so uh do make sure that you follow the channel so that you can keep an eye on when the next train tutorials are coming up because there will be a lot of those i hope if there's an interest so let's dive in let's start by looking at loading stations because well you need to load stuff onto the station or you need to load stuff onto a train before you can actually start unloading it so that seems to be a good place to start so i've um i've been scripting this and i've been sort of figuring out that going through it in detail is going to take way too long time so i'm just just going to try to compress it so if you feel this might be a bit rushed then let me know in the comment section below and then we can if needed come back to more some of the finer details now the objective of a loading station is that we need to well no let's step one step back and say all of my train stations are going to be one fourth trains and anything that you do with one fortran you could also do with the two eight train it's just a bit bigger and that means i would it would take more time for me to build the stuff but i've actually gone really fond of one for chains i think they are they're really good and therefore i'm gonna do this with one for trains all my blueprints are one four so that's basically the where we're gonna start off so the point of having a loading station is to make sure that we have four stations let's start by putting a train in here there i need to get whatever i'm coming i'm getting in here and let's start assuming that we're getting stuff in by here so let's get four belts of something in or for example and my objective is now to get all these four evenly distributed between each of these locations now what we want to do is well no we have not certainly not all of the things we needed we can start by doing this i'm going to start on a red circuit build but i'm going to use green inserters you can substitute blue inserters that just means it's a bit slower but i'm going to say that you have green inserters this is one of the first places you really want to use the stack inserters is for loading and unloading of trains so you have a choice whether you want to unload on one side or load on one side or two sides now if we look at this and if i'm having four lanes in then having the four lanes in here is going to dictate the speed by which the trains can leave not the actual loading of this train but the actual stuff here because it doesn't matter if i can load the chain in one second that means when the train will be loaded and off but the next train will still be dependent on the input here so if you have an input like this with four red lanes we'll just gonna calculate it walk through it four times thirty that's 120 per second that is the speed by which you you are can deliver materials so having it load infinitely fast doesn't make a difference because the next one will not be able to load this fast and it's more of a cadence and then a the actual speed of the of a single one so um one train let's say that it's ore because that's the most limited there is room for 2000 ore in a wagon so that's going to be 8 000 divided by 120 per second that means it's going to take 66.7 seconds for us to fill up enough to fill up a train now then it's pretty obvious that we don't need this many inserters but basically my point here is you certainly do not need to have it on both sides if you're taking four linkedin probably not even eight lanes but let's start with four so what you want that's the first thing is you want to balance it out between all the locations we can do that pretty easily by just making one of the good old oops good old-fashioned balancers here there so now whatever comes in on these belts will be split evenly among the four output belts so we can do something like super simple just bring it in and go here however if we do that well all of what we do we should test it and just verify it just to what i'm building here is a little magical thing it's part of the mod called editor extended that i'm using for all these test cases there so you can see what happens here is that if if i didn't have a train for example you can see that it loads extremely unevenly here and that's very unfortunate so no good then what are we gonna do well then we need to do a what we really should be doing at least is getting a splitter here all right this is a bouncer what this magical thing does is takes whatever you put in here let's actually just um okay let's just do that because that's gonna be better later on so you will see that whatever comes in on this one will be evenly spread between all these locations i'm going to take that out and again i'm going to use one of these magical things here for removing it don't mind that and you can see that the content of each of these is pretty close to identical and that's good so that's a good way that i would propose to fill this up making a little bouncer for each one don't make a mistake here yeah i did i'm going to take that one out and build it here and there you have it this one will okay of course we built the first one first but this one will balance between all the lanes and then subsequently balance between all the boxes that means when a chain comes in it'll be evenly loaded from all the boxes the boxes will have somewhat the same amounts and it's just an even spread very nice very simple if you are building this with blue belts then you actually have the option of putting these two back and i think i can do that i can show it to you just for the bluebots let's take that out it's a subtle difference but it's just i feel it makes a big difference aesthetically that it's now completely in line unfortunately that's not possible with red belts but with blue belts this is possible now if you really feel that you or if you have a location that unloads that has eight lanes coming in there's nothing that prevents you from building it on the other side as well very simple on this side and we're going to put this one again and we're going to try to build it mirrored as well so that is going to be here that one that one that one i think that's it right no it has to be like come on check this out there funny how these don't disappear there jump over jump over jump over and in there [Music] second one and what you're seeing here is a very simple build but it allows us to take eight full blue lanes in here and let's do the calculations again if we have eight lanes also coming in with 45 per second we are getting 360 per second coming in i'm taking a full train of 8 000 divided by 360. that means now every 22 seconds a new train can be fully loaded pretty neat and if you have fully if you have every 22 seconds you're probably gonna have some additional more than one trains uh coming in uh keeping this calculation in mind about how how fast you can fill up a train is pretty good in terms of getting an idea about how you want to design it now this is pretty neat but and this or this is neat this is good this will work for 99 of the people but if you are working on a megabase or maybe you have not the hottest new pc and you're concerned about the calculations down here we all calculations are happening at 60 times per second and every time there is a non-full belt it has to calculate uh individually where everything is positioned and that is a lot of calculations with this setup there's more entities there's more splitters there's a lot more going on so if you can do something that would have fewer entities and actually still work and this is for the very late game then it is actually possible and let's have a look at it because i think it's pretty something we discovered during the one of the workshops and um i think it's a pretty unique so what if we could do like that now you see that the issue here is that uh first of all i'm gonna do some magic on this and that magic is removing whatever comes in and there so if what you can see here is that the first ones are very way more busy and the last one really isn't getting anything so for example if i allow this to stack up and just wait a bit you can see how much this one this already has 60 and this one has only gotten three so clearly that's not working but what we can do is we can cheat it a bit if i do this one four i set this one to six and i set the next one to six and six and six and keep the last one open then one more time i'm gonna just empty this yeah that's not working so what i'm gonna do is again do that one here and yes so now we've kind of reset it and what you can see now is it looks pretty even doesn't it if you look at here let's switch when it's close to 100 100 100 100 100 something there one of those slightly slower this one is slightly faster that is just it's really really neat and and it's extremely close to just working so what we're going to do is we're simply going to take that for all of them and that means we can do here like that way fewer entities and if we compare these two now obviously these are running outs but we can take more and i want to again use that this is just a setup so that it deletes everything that comes in right so now everything gets deleted when it comes in now what you should be mindful of is first of all you can see both the top and the bottom are fully flowing that means everything gets picked up the train the stackers here load evenly the next thing we want to see is that it actually fills up pretty evenly here of course you can see how evenly it is they swing and here they swing a lot faster and what you will see is if we let it run for its course this one will will fill up the train 0.73 faster because there is a slight variation between these two and when one of these fills up the other one they will all fill up at the same time but this case one of them will fill up before the other ones at the end of the day basically what you're saying is that there is no difference what i'm saying is that there's no difference in in usability between these two in the case where the belt's going enough full and you're coming in with trains fast at least as fast as you can produce it it's only when it reaches a steady state and honestly if it reaches a steady state where the trains whether all the boxes are full well then you're not really in a position where you are yours you need to optimize this so this is a very very neat new design that we came up with that is allowing you to use fewer entities if your splitters it looks neater and it actually still balances pretty well within a percent or so they are even so those are but the options we have for loading the train and uh yeah so there's there's the one-sided with four belts there's the two-sided with eight belts and then there's this uh kind of magical thing that only works in the late game and only works if you have fully compressed belts so keep those in mind all those available both for red belts and blue belts in the blueprint provided below in the description below now let's take a look at unloading station because unloading stations they are pretty similar to the loading station in the sense that you are you still want the same priority you want to make sure that whatever comes in gets taken out and again i am going to lean heavily on this concept so if you have a loading station that has four belts going into the train then there is really no point in having an unloading station that is faster than that because no matter how you twist and turn it you're never gonna get any more any faster than what you get inbound so let's start looking at the case where what you have outbound and uh let's do it on this side we want outbound here four lanes of red so our objective is now we need to get a train in it's coming here it's going from there or loading until full until the are unloading until mg go my friend and it comes in here so how fast do we need to unload this if we need to make this well we only need to unload it as fast as these belts move so for the for me you still have the same principle that you need to unload this evenly and you need to load take the content from each box evenly into into these belts so uh the natural thing would be just hey put as many as possible and then put some of these and everyone's happy except you know it's really difficult that's really difficult but balancing from a six to one is kind of kind of bad we can look here in the let's say official balancer look here we'll get it blue that's awful right um first of all they put it on same side so you can kind of do something like this so you get it into fewer belts yes you get that you can start doing something that i have done myself before putting it on both sides and doing that requires blue belts here and but the thing is we have to remember what we're striving for one of the things that i see lots of people and i see myself too is just going like all right when the train comes in i just wanted to unload as fast as possible but honestly there's really no point in having it unload as fast as possible if you are not able to consistently consume it at that level so my proposal is how about taking something with four because four is just a much nicer number than six and you can just do something this one and look at that very very simple now i'm already hearing the tapping in the comment section about oh but that's not optimal and how can you do a master class with it don't worry i'm going to show something that's better than whatever you have later on but i'm saying this one is good enough for 99 of cases and for that extreme case that he is purely hypothetical in my opinion i have something nice for you later on don't you worry see i know my audience or maybe i just know the factorial audience so we do this kind of thing and it's and let's do it like that yeah and i can do that one as well yep and a balancer as usual and i am very much focused on the number four in this case yeah and we suggest removing everything so what you're seeing now is that we are emptying it fast enough to fill up the belt easily able to fill up the belt and it also goes that when you upgrade it to blue belt it's still going to be fast enough there is absolutely no problem keeping these belts compressed this way and it because of the evenness these two are on either side these two are either side this is a balance between those two this is going to be balanced this is balanced and this one ensures that all this all the four locations will be balanced as well so this is a very simple way and if you again if you need it better than that bigger better stronger than this it is no more difficult than just placing on the other side and we built it down here as well i'll build it for you just don't you worry x yeah yeah here that one and that one the rest here is the same yeah so now we have from a single station eight lanes out very simple that's certainly more than you need you can if you can keep this then i don't see the point of adding more now at some point i also had some different design for this with the unload with unloading into into splitters it's pretty neat it does allow more throughput but it isn't but at the end of the day if you improve something here but it still makes no difference at this end it doesn't matter so now the stuff you've been waiting for i want more than eight lanes eight lanes is just not enough for me i want the absolute maximum you can give me out of this and then the caveat on absolute maximum is that it's absolute maximum without being insanely stupid and insanely stupid is when it comes to to designs involving parallel or perpendicular rail wagons or tanks those kind of things i'm not going to do those kind of gimmicks but i'm going to do something that kind of makes sense so we are going to do some some bit of magic here if we take all of these i want this out in as many compressed belts as possible so if we look at this and i'm just going to set up a bouncer here you can see that i'm actually going to let it learn for a longer time this is not going to be compressed because there will be gaps when the two inserters on either side these two are inserting at the right hand side these two are turning on left hand side but what we can do is we can change the stack inserter size to eight for the inner one there and then watch the magic fully compressed belt with uh with just four inserters we're gonna repeat that and get that one as well the that one and that one and as well here and copy paste and we're gonna put it in here as well now that you've seen this work we can take it out on this side three four five and six that damn thing here just cleaning up after ourselves and that one and that one and you can enjoy that as well i'm going to do the same thing on this side here and here so we are absolutely sure that we are we are getting 12 full fully compressed lanes out so with this setup you are now getting let's say you make absolutely sure that this is correct right hand side there we go and it just needs to make sure so there you have it if you really want to have the maximum throughput you can get 12 compressed blue belts out of a single 1 4 train that could be 24 full lanes out of a 2 8 train however keep in mind if we have 12 times 45 then it's 540 and that means 8 000 which is what they can contain divided by 540 that means every 15 second there has to be a train coming in this one it can keep up but this one will actually empty at some point and you can see here let's just have a look at one of these and just see if it keeps up so that's when it comes to loading stations and unloading stations there are different scales there's the one-sided the double-sided one-sided specifically designed for four belts double-sided for eight belts or in this case you can have something silly and you can see here already we cannot keep up the chains are simply not fast enough and this is a the other side of it is you have to think about the train frequency compared to how many belts you want out there's no point in in getting more outbound even though you can theoretically do it if you can't support it with what you get inbound and now you will be seeing that the things are just simply running out they can't support all of this and obviously another little disadvantage of this this has to be first of all it has to be full stack inserters and and the other one is that it will not actually unload these boxes evenly so they have to come in quickly but even at that it's i don't know it i don't think this is practical but it's certainly optional and it is possible to do this kind of thing so that's uh when it comes to to loading and unloading stations and it only gets more difficult when it comes to liquid stations but before we dive into the liquid stations let me just take a moment to thank all the patrons supporting the channel it really means a lot to me that there are so many patrons who are choosing to support the work i do here on the channel and this is what uh what makes it possible for me to continue to do this and continue to deliver these tutorials for you so i hope you are enjoying it and you can thank the patrons who are supporting it so for making it possible for me to continue so thank you very much dear patrons and also thank you everyone for just watching and liking and subscribing and all that's pretty awesome and uh let's move on to the liquids now we're going to use a new test setup for testing our liquids and the thing with the liquids is that i need to show you what the problem is before i can show you what the solution is if i show you the solution before i show you the problem you will not understand why it has to be so complicated so if i build some kind of setup here and that will allow us to unload with as few boxes as possible and that will be unloading here great and i'm going to have one of these that just invents liquid it invents some oil there we go and i'm gonna invent a train station for us and i'm gonna take another station down here where we just basically do the same thing can i just do it like exactly the same thing sure and then all we need to do is rotate rotate rotate rotate rotate and this one just goes to maximum of zero so this one is emptying interesting how bad it actually is so you will be oops sorry ah that is correct i just need to go boom so you're gonna go from your liquid loading onto full to liquid unloading until empty go so far so good basically what we want to see is that they're gonna unload that's all good now we're going to go back here and load let's have to see if it works at this point you can see all of these are full so they pretty easily pretty easily work now in this case i'm pumping in extremely fast that's not as fast as it would go normally and now i hope that we will see our issue here there we go it does not balance and therefore things do not load evenly or unload evenly you can see this one is empty but there's tons of tons of stuff here and the pumping speed is just dropping even though this is still very high pumping speed it's dropping because it simply cannot suck anything out here because it's relying on the self balancing between these elements which means that it keeps dropping and the longer we do this and the more we do it the bigger the problem is that you just cannot empty the trains evenly when they come in at some point you can go like yeah whatever it's it's still being empty and whether it use it waits a couple of minutes more this is in a very ideal case if i was doing something like this one where i had more throughput here it would go in like way slower you can see now it can't pump at 6000 speed it can only pump at 1200 speed because there's more pipe that it has to go through and therefore the pressure drops and here again we're just going to look at the loading situation again whether that actually is the case i don't know if it now i think you think we can see the loading situation as well that it doesn't these middle ones load really fast the outer ones simply do not load because nothing comes in here and these will have to be fill up first that's full we have enough like we have 5000 here those five thousand should go in here immediately and then that allows us to move on but that's not the case so i've now illustrated the problem of balancing liquids now in order for us to do that i need to make sure that we have some kind of way to where do where does all the oil go when i do that i don't know we need to make sure that we have a way to balance this and let me just see if i can remember this here so i'm gonna pump it in here i'm gonna pump it out to the sides and then pop it in well the obvious question is oh not from that one from now is that gonna make it any better no not really not really making it better because as you can see here it this one just doesn't get anything nothing gets pushed out to the side because for some reason this one is faster than that pump ah liquids are weird but what i can do is i can take this design and then i can what if i said that this pump is active when there's less than this one then there isn't that one and this pump is active when there's less than this one then there's that one that would be pretty cool wouldn't it because then i could actually balance it and likewise this pump would be active if there's less than this one then there isn't that one and this pump is active when there's less than this than that so the way i can do that is i can take the content of this box tank and subtract it i can take the content from this one subtract that one if that's a positive number then it can go if it's a negative number then it should stop so by comparing these two together instead of me fiddling with it i have actually prepared a bit in advance oh wow just fit boom let's see now when the train comes in and see if they actually it actually spreads out evenly i think i'll take this one out a bit i'll just put it here so that i get a slightly less pressure then this gets more visual so first of all all of these get emptied into the train done we have now 10 000 in each 11 11 11 11 12 12 12 13 13 13 14 14 fourteen yeah and you can see how much these are flickering because they're only pushing this one it's either pushing at nine hundred or zero and that means everything here is just it's pressurizing just fine this is the speed that it can come in with and you can see here this one is always empty these are flickering i don't care about the flickering the point here is that whatever comes in here is now spread evenly so that the train is loaded evenly and we can also should obviously also do the same thing for the outbound side now that's not the case and i have a blueprint here that one and we can put it in here for the unloading at most sir here and if i take this one out if i put it here and then just pressurize it then it goes a lot quicker because now i can pump at 6000 speed 6000 is the speed that it can push into a pump here and these are now going up quickly and at this point emptying it extremely quickly with these 12 000 in speed or actually i think they had 1200 all right now this one can pump at 12 000 that's how it works but the pumps can actually go this one can provide a six thousand but this can pump at 12 000 that's why the maximum is 12. six six thousand good so going into details i don't want to go into details with this because this is not a circuit logic thing but it's i decided that it was necessary for me to use this circuit in order to make sure that we have a smooth transition a smooth loading and unloading of liquid trains and i think it's pretty neat it's basically using subtracting one from the other and comparing them and then determining whether the pump should be active it's going to be either one of these active and they're each pushing filling this one up as fast as possible and you can see here now when it's full and then boom empty i like this setup it is really neat and those are basically this up you can also do this for two eight trains it's gonna be a bit more balancing because you are gonna go in from central the ninth one here and then balance all the way out to the side it can be done but it's more work no doubt so uh but again liquids i rarely use more than this coming in 100 000 oil is pretty good to to start with or one hundred thousand lubricant that's also usually more than you you need so that uh brings us solid to the end of our tutorial on trains if i just move over and zoom out then you can say or not on trains on train stations we have the various scales of loading stations various scales of unloading stations for both for loading stations we have this neat trick here that works for late game for ups optimization like the calculations and we have this neat trick that i think is a bit theoretical but it's a neat trick nonetheless that um for the very late game and specific scenarios over on the liquid side we have some some circuit magic you could say to make sure that the loading and unloading is evenly is as even as possible so i hope you have enjoyed this as this tutorial uh i'm sure that there are tons of things that you've wondered why did you not cover this on trains but if you look at the runtime of this and the fact that you're still awake then i think that if i had gone any further you would not still be awake and that would be a loss for both of us so i'm going to cut this one here and just know very well that i have material for three four five other train tutorials what i'm going to go into is more on the logic side and stackers and examples of different train networks i have tons of ideas and if you have more ideas hit me in the comments section below and so that you can let me know about what other things when it comes to trains you would like me to explore and also maybe explain to you also well if you want to follow up with more of these well it's probably a good idea to subscribe to the channel it's still like about fifty percent of the people watching the channel are subscribed so if you are watching regularly and not subscribing well consider it i would appreciate it since it it helps with the visibility of the channel and videos to come out they will be shared first to subscribers so thank you for that and of course if you want to be part of the design process which is always really fun when we are finding new things that we always learn new things and all of us pretty much all of us at least learn something when when we're doing these design workshops then i am live on twitch that i'm streaming let's plays on tuesday thursdays and sundays and also doing workshops sometime as well so do check it out so i'm doing most evenings on twitch and the addresses twitch tv slash needles hope to see you either here on youtube on discord or over on twitch thank you for watching and as always stay effective [Music] you

Channel: Nilaus

Views: 594,213

Keywords: factorio, nilaus, nilhaus, speedrun, tutorial, guide, 0.18, 1.0, megabase, howto, how-to, master, class, masterclass, PL-FACTORIO-S41, main, bus, mainbus, science, lab, layout, design, oil, processing, refinery, beacon, module, speed, refining, hub, mall, red, green, circuit, coal, liquefaction, liquifaction, petroleum, plastic, city, block, blueprint, grid, map, settings, rocket, control, fuel, unit, low, density, structure, space, train, rail, signal, chain, schedule, kovarex, uranium, u235, u238, enrichment, station, load, loading, unload, unloading

Id: zJBvw28bQu0

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020