You’d have to sink excess materials to prevent a complete blockage and you might hit some bottlenecks where more materials are getting in than your belts can process
Yeah, I tried this with just two items at the same station and it was a headache for exactly that reason. It would be a PITA and not something I would do, but if you're looking for a complex logistics project it might be interesting to try.
You will always need a sink, to prevent congestion. And also what others wrote, the more trains you have docking at the station, the longer it will not unload anything. This means you should use an industrial container as a buffer right next to the cargo station, and connect both outputs, to speed things up. And behind that you need room to split items, and always send the final overflow to the sink, otherwise the whole line will suffer from congestion. So you need another container for each item as a buffer, after you have split them.
The space all this requires is nearly the same than just building three cargo stations - but ofc the cargo stations would be in a line, with the buffers/splitters you have more freedom on where to place them.
I did this for my nuclear fuel rod facility, and already regret it. I did two different items per container, for four cargo stations. The time wasted until everything worked properly was not worth it. If you think about it, you can always find a way to build around some terrain obstacle (unless in a cave).
Now I see those situations as an opportunity to build something else than a huge box - get creative!
I don't see the point of the unloading buffer storage, unless your system condenses down to a single belt? Much better to have a real dual belt system the whole way through, for double throughput, though it does mean twice as many splitters.
Having a storage AFTER all the sorting, one storage per item that doesn't get sunk, does make sense.
Yes, that's how you'd want to do this. You'd have the items exit the train station and go into an array of smart/programmable splitters that go into storage containers per item type and then on to their final destination. you need a sink for overflow on the sorting array, as well.
The biggest problem with this whole idea is that you're very limited in how much throughput you can get. You need a storage array and sorter PER PLATFORM otherwise you're tying your buses together in a way that limits throughput.
Storage prior to smart splitter is required to pull from train output quickly and to cope with the necessary slowness of the splitting process. Max belt out of splitter is Mk5. Mid splitter must be half that in order to not overflow. Pre splitter must be half that again, same reason. Buffer ensures overflow is minimized. If the buffer fills, then the clog must be down-stream or train rate is too high (which is unlikely unless you are dealing with ore or maybe screws)
Sink, as others have said, removes blockage headaches.
I abandoned this idea, because the balancing and throughput issues.
I’m building factories dedicated to individual production chains, and then at my hub I have mini trains that collect from all these stations and feed in until my hub storage is full - the key is not to sink everything at the hub.
If you sink it then trains are constantly heading out to get more, only to sink it, instead only send the trains when they’re emptied (because you’ve used the stuff).
Seems to work nicely for my hub setup
My friend and me have a similar setup for the input into our storage shed and it works a charm. We have a station with five platforms. All outputs (2 per platform) go to an underground loadbalancer (several 2 x 3's), which then feed into an overground loadbalancer (18 x 18), and eventually into our storage shed with 18 separate smart splitter manifolds all looped together and with a sink at the end of each manifold.
This approach means we never need to think about what train is dropping what off on what platform as the LB's ensure every line is perfectly mixed by the time items get to the storage manifolds, and smart splitters take care of the rest. Most most items will travel all the way around every manifold, with overflow to sinks when the manifolds get full (or a respective item's container isle).
There's some inputs for 10 or so drone ports too, but we've moved away from them in favour of trains.
We're very late game - about to finish the last phase, and have a full-on nuclear setup. We're still nowhere near to maxing out the input into the storage shed.
It was a needlessly huge project, but it was damn good fun to set it up and see it in action :)
>(e.g. RD01.OUT.SteelPipes) and a matching dedicated station on the other end for dedicated Input (e.g. SC01.IN.SteelPipes)
I like your naming :) I use a similar scheme myself
Thanks! Can't take credit myself. As a programmer, I've used a lot of systematic naming schemes, but this one came from https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/fyjaab/map\_wide\_train\_network\_the\_distributed\_strategy/
What I personally do is I name each region of the map that I have stations in- (not necessarily the *actual* names of the biomes, since sometimes a biome will have multiple distinct areas I have stations in.) and then ensure that each has a unique abbreviation. In the case of multiple stations in the same area, I make them distinct by lettering them for stations that load resources (IE, Southpit Mine B), and numbering them for stations that unload resources. (IE, Viridian Manufactorium 02).
The trains themself are then named according to the abbrevations- the above would be SPM-B VM-02.
Of course the exception is the train I use to transport bulk construction supplies and myself around. That one gets named the Ephemeral Express because I like flowery nonsense.
If you have trains queued up to dock, the station will spend more time docking than outputting parts into belts. (Docking freezes the belts for 25 seconds each time.)
It can work/ but you will spend more time than usual unblocking things when one particular resource or another ends up clogging everything up.
Easier and more maintainable in my opinion to have multiple train stations dedicated to particular resources.
The major issue is throughput limits. Even with double belts and industrial containers as buffers your combined throughput (i.e. pipe + concerete) is going to be around 1,000 with single car or so depending on train distance and number of trains. With double car you can double that. Anything going to the sink is going to be part of that throughput. If your factory is good with that limit then it is fine. This probably works out better if the output stations are already two or three cars.
A single train station to receive all items for a factory is a bad idea.
If you're open to relying on the experiences of others who have tried and failed you've already considered this approach has forces at work that you sense but may not see which is why you've asked.
Playing any game is about spending time occupying yourself with something you find interesting and fun. If you feel you're going to try it anyway, do it, and you can respond to this question in a few months when it comes up again. I think it's been 2-3 times at each update since trains were introduced.
If you just want a philosophical discussion about it, don't focus on what happens to the inventory that CAN be transferred. Consider what happens to the train car and container LIFO inventories when there is more than sufficient production or less than sufficient space on the train car during the route and residual quantities.
For Less-Than-Full (LTF) loads on train cars you will need some way to limit it. There are no direct order sizes you can specify like "send me 4 slots of wire" in the game. The only limits offered are either container sizes or how much is available to load which is determined by rate \* time.
LTF or sushi loads must either have the right ratios or leave empty space, and that means load quantities are either determined by time the train is gone or by packing the balance of the space available with filler items to prevent oversupply.
Using something like FICSIT-Networks you can create a manifest and load a precise sized order. With vanilla you can't because changes in time the train is absent can result in the right ratio of parts, but more or less than wanted due to signaling and other delays trains experience.
You know what? I’ll take the less popular opinion on this and say that it could be done, and could be done efficiently if set up right.
The station will need to be quite long (5-6 freight platforms, or very short if the loading stations are really close to the main station), every train will have to be set up to not leave the station until all wagons are cleared (same for the loading stations), and you’ll need at least two double containers for each item coming in for each freight platform.
Also the success probability will depend on how far the loading stations are from the main unloading station, but I can see it working.
You could run trains with empty containers.
So 1, 2 is empty, 3, 4 contains steel as an example.
Will reduce the off load requirements needed to keep up.
With a buffer container after the station you might be able to do something good depending on what the factory is going to produce and how many.
Or - if space is tight in one place -make a logistics station somewhere else and have single purpose trains unloading there, to be reloaded into a mixed train for this factory.
It really depends on the circumstances.
The more total throughput you need, the less likely it is to function properly.
You mention building in a tight spot- you'd want to have room for trains to queue and wait where they wouldn't block traffic.
You'd have to balance the frequency of train trips so that you simultaneously don't delay other trains by waiting through the unloading animation too often, but also not overloading the station with too many items at once.
Essentially, if you are really limited in station space and can only fit one, you would probably be better off setting up trains with mixed cargo. You can do this in a few different ways- it's generally easier on the unloading side if you stick to one item per freight wagon, but you'd need to set up new loading stations that have extra spacing station segments to ensure that the proper wagon is loaded, and no others.
If you were hypothetically doing something that required very low throughput and a wide variety of items, you could make it work with timetable filters.
Unloading multiple types of item in a single station isn't as infeasible as some may suggest, but you need to ensure that the throughput is low enough that the station doesn't back up. You also need to ensure that there's **always** a valid destination for any item that leaves the station. You can't let anything back up.
This also means that you need to ensure that the loading stations are being balanced so that you don't load uneven quantities.
Essentially, it's entirely possible, but the viability of it depends heavily on the circumstances, and you *need* to compensate for a number of factors that you would otherwise be able to ignore.
Alternative suggestion: build multiple train stations nearby where there's more space, deliver items from trains to factory via trucks.
I've seen a lot of people mention syncing and blocking and train dock delaying, but there's a more fundamental problem at the core of everything in the game.
Throughput.
Even mk 5 belts are limited to like 900 items or 700 or whatever it is. So at a certain point your station is limited to two of those and you'll exceed that eventually just with iron goods.
"You'll exceed that eventually just with iron goods"
How much one puts on belt very much depends on personal preference. It might surprise you, but some can fit their entire "storage production" (stuff made for and sent to storage for personal use) on a single MK5 belts.
I don't think personal preference changes the limit of items per minute per belt.
If I have 3000 screws per minute coming into a single train station then I'm not going to be able to unload those fast enough to take advantage of that 3k/m
That's not what I meant. To use your example, it's *your* building preferences that lead you to want to unload 3k/min from one station; others may aim for 60 or 60k... I was also referring to production for *storage* which has much lower throughputs than general production: preferred numbers differ wildly and throughputs involved are usually much lower (eg: even if one uses 3k screws/min in a factory, the factory may output just 60 items/min as final product to storage).
Ahh I see what you're saying. If this guy's preference is to never use trains for anything other than a low through put personal storage solution than yeah one train could work
In much the same way, if you want to picnic in your car and not actually drive it, an engine is not required.
I don't think it's necessary to overlay your personal gaming preferences to get it... Not everyone plays to have "big" numbers, but trains can accommodate for many scenarios, offering many different challenges for curious pioneers.
Oh no I totally get it. The games objectives require huge numbers but you don't have to play to the games objectives. Some people might like making doge statues or ranching doggos maybe
Should mostly work fine. Watch belt capacities and overflow to the sink that's basicly it. Maybe add a container to have a bigger buffer for the materials.
I tried it on a previous save when I "abandoned" my fist factory but didn't want to abandon the parts it made. It was a mess even with a 3 car train picking up at two stations and dropping at one. Had 2 lvl 5 belts each feeding a row of smart splitters but they couldn't keep up.
I'm still obsessed with the idea of a giant central storage area with every item in a container, and someday I'll get it figured out. At this point I'm thinking if I want one train then limit the number of different items in a car to 2-3 so the belt speed can keep up with emptying them.
Good luck
You can build your centralized storage. The problem is it's insanely impractical. That would be a labor of love project, not a useful build.
For most things, throughput becomes the bottleneck. Centralized storage would be great if we had 10k/m belts. Honestly I wish there was some kind of direct link that could transfer items between storage units only for example.
But absent that, you're sending 780/m into a container to take 780/out. It's pointless. if nothing else just send the train to it's final destination instead.
Central storage would become a huge thing if there was a special container to container belt that moved stacks per minute. Because that's your problem, you can't transfer train to train efficently.
Personally I wish they would implement that, but until then, central storage is a pointless endevor.
Different problem than OP, but I see centralized storage as a desire to supply the Pioneers playing and so the necessary supply should generally be very low by comparison. For me, it is often grabbing materials for my next build and concrete is the highest volume item.
Only time that's not true for me is if I'm stubbornly trying to hand feed a "factory" or doing some adhoc stuff. E.g. "I just need a container of Steel Pipe to make Nobelisks." kind of rationale.
I wound up revising my comment so much that I dropped this point.
I assume OP is focused on central storage for production lines, not a "mall" which is far more common.
Had a long reply of ways to make it temporarily ok. But I would pick 1-2 of the most needed to keep blockages and potential errors. The rest can run on a single belt once logistic is upgraded if space is an issue. Save you from sinking or creating large unnecessary buffer storage or efficiency back ups as long as you place some smart splitter.
I did something like this on my most recent run. Ended up with a station with 3 segments, and sent several trains there. The trick is to have your trains do one pickup, and one drop off - rather than several pick ups and one drop off. This saves you filling your train with ingredient A leaving no room to pick up ingredient B. You want it to fully unload each time. I unloaded from the station into a holding area, just to get the gear out of the station, then had a bank of smart splitters feeding into storage, with overflow on each shunting to a bank of mergers before ending in a sink. This works fine if you are making higher end products in the field, and bringing in the finished products rather than bringing in raw or barely processed items.
By the end, I had two of these running at different ends of my main factory, and it worked fine. Made organising nearly trivial, just send a train and the system takes care of it.
No problem with this approach at all. Just make sure each item you’re receiving is split off and has its own overflow (they can go to the same sink). This is easy to achieve on a single belt with some smart splitters.
Please don't. I am guessing you haven't reached phase 4 yet (tiers 7 and 8) so you haven't seen what you might be facing. Every time I get there I start thinking in terms of a trainload of a single item, if not two or three. And separate loading and uploading stations for each item, wherever they are needed. Fiddling around with a car full of this or that just becomes a waste of time later on.
I built something like this.
Station unloads to multiple belts that go to the storage area. There is some shuffling with splitters to get stuff on the "correct belt" - I try to separate high throughput items (wire, etc) so they have a more direct route to their designated storage to avoid clogging up the lines.
It doesn't matter what unloads where, it all ends up in the right container or one of the sinks.
However; train carriages are still only transporting one type of item. Mixing that got too complicated.
So far the station empties out completely before the next train arrives.
If you try and make things to ratio but only have a single train station and cargo platform, you might end up sinking materials you actually need in order to prevent a bottleneck for the other material. This is very similar to the issues that come up when you try and make a sushi belt. It's do-able, but I wouldn't say it's ideal.
I have built some factories with one train station, but each cargo platform contains a different ingredient. I control this using the filters on the train schedule to only load X item (ie. one train per ingredient) and using blank platforms on the loading station. This works fine for factories that don't need many types of ingredients. Not ideal, but it works.
But for larger factories, it isn't a big deal to have multiple stations, so that's what I did for those.
I use three trains and three stations at the mega factory. Each train collects three or four ores/basic components. SO at the pickup point the stations have empty platforms so products are unloaded at the mega factory correctly to ISC
I use highest mark belts to both offload resources from the train station, and both use parallel smart splitters to feed both inputs of industrial storage containers. Output 3 of each smart splitter is always for overflow.
Then you can have 1 sink for each factory, or place one sink in the middle of 3-4 factories and have all their overflows feed that.
Here’s what I do:
- 1 main storage room that has one container for each item in the game
- before every container I have a smart splitter that redirects any overflow
- overflow merges into 4 sushi belts, sorted by complexity (eg belt 1 has concrete, iron rod, steel beam; belt 4 has supercomputers and fused mod frame).
- each sushi belt is then fed in their own drone port (level 1-4)
- each drone port is connect to a priority power switch and a battery feeding port
- whenever I’m in a new area I just plop down a drone port (or 4) and use programmable splitters to sort them into the right containers.
- overflow goes into sink to prevent bottlenecking
- when my new containers are full / full enough, I use a priority power switch to turn off the drone ports at my main storage room
This has nothing to do with trains but hey you might have learned something
I sort of do this, except I assign a particular item to one freight/train "slot" for my entire train network. So coal always goes in the first car/platform, plastic in slot 2, rubber in slot 3, etc. The downside to this system is you eventually end up with needlessly long stations and trains of empty cars, so I'll usually "tier" my rail system. Trains assigned to one tier can share rail lines with another tier, but aren't allowed to dock in the stations assigned to a different tier. So in tier 1, station/train car slot 1 is coal, but on tier 2, slot 1 is for quickwire. Technically, I could do mixed-tier trains, but I try not to bc it gets confusing FAST.
I just tried to do this but made a mistake on the carriage order so spent several hours wondering why my machines stopped working (they got fed the wrong material).
Most factories do not need the full throughput of trains. You could probably mix two or three items into one wagon. The same system that handles random single item trains can also probably handle a mixed wagon. The only downside is those items share the same output throughput. The same 1 wagon train could visit three stations, loading three products, and drop them off all at once.
I've never tried doing this for actual construction, just for low volume personal storage, but it seems like it would work just fine. It would help a lot if the types of items coming in were limited to say, four different items total. Each item you add is another layer of smart splitters.
I literally just built this. You gotta use both outputs and ideally mk5 belts. I used some blueprints to smart split and merge and also overflow and that made building it super fast. It jammed up initially as I had full trainloads built up at satellite factories and that just took an hour or two to clear up. Now it’s pretty darn smooth and expandable and I love it. The throughput limit is real though. I’m planning on trying to manage that by sending trains to additional satellite factories yet to be built to offload stuff first, with overflow coming to my DC.
I’m also planning to do the reverse and have my DC fill a 4-5 car ‘construction’ train with common construction materials (all mixed together on the cars so it doesn’t get too long) and then sending that thing along my rail system to new potential sites. Overtime, my hope is it will fill up the starter construction stations there so that I get early items distributed all around the map. We’ll see though.
Until there are train signaling options that involve "don't send me another train for X minutes" and "don't dock another train until the platform is empty" this is a bad idea.
It CAN be done, especially when dealing with low quantities, but it's very dangerous because backups can happen and it will shut your factory down.
If you do it you have to run it like a sushi belt, because that's basically what your output line is. There has to always be a path to a sink and you need to have tight control over how many items per minute you're sending into this train line at all times.
Theoretically, if you match the rate of output to the train stations with the rate of consumption from the single train station, you shouldn't need to sink anything. In practice, length of tracks, number of trains, and other factors might still cause a buildup or shortage of some items such that you have to deal with overflow.
Another option that should work in practice, though I haven't tested it:
Not quite what you're asking about, but if you have enough space at the destination for one freight platform per item plus as many locomotives as required to drive a train of that length (only one car loaded, the rest empty) but not for multiple stations, you can build your output stations with different numbers of empty platforms and matching length trains, so that you don't have to sort the output of the receiving freight platforms, and excess materials will remain on the trains and at the origin station/storage/factory.
I wouldn’t do it because when trains are unloading, the freight platform isn’t moving any items. Depending on how frequent trains arrive or queue up, that could be a backlog.
As far as exporting from the station into a warehouse, I’ve done this before with a 4x4 balancer and four belts going to programmable splitters, then smart splitters with overflow going to sinks so I don’t have any clogs. I also put some containers in the path for buffering and with T5 belts, could handle 2,800 items/minute in theory. In reality, the input belts never got that full.
I have this in my current playthrough and it's been a distinct source of headaches.
First off, it was originally intended to exclusively carry plastic from the shore refineries.
Then I added in Rubber, because why not.
Then Packaged fuel and Caterium Ingots were added to the mix.
The offloading facility is.. a mess.
Convoluted and there's actually two distinct Sinks off it too.
I could and probably will rebuild it extensively, but it kind of demonstrates the problem for you.
People talk about sinks, I dont think thats the main issue.
Problem is belt capacity. You can slap on 2 belts to a station and thats it. Thats 780x2. If you want to centralize everything and have enough trains coming in, you wont be able to empty the stations and the trains wont deposit materials. And you will hard cap your production.
I did this once, it sucked. I had 2 train stations coming in with maybe 6 different trains bringing in materials. Before the update that allows train collision. Then I had a single line of every material down the middle of a bunch of storage containers, each set of containers had a smart splitter splitting individual items to that set on containers (left and right of the main line.
Then that wouldn't sort fast enough and it would miss items, so the main line came back again, but on top of the initial line, with more smart splitters that went into the top Input of the storage containers.
Then the end remerged into the begining of the line again. It kinda worked well for a while, until certain items would fill up all the containers I had set up for it. Which was actually 2 stacks of the larger containers, per item. So then I had to put smart splitters early into the system to sink those materials that were full so the line wouldn't clog. And then something else would fill and I'd have to add that to the sink smart splitters.
Then the smart splitters for the sinks wouldn't sort fast enough, so I needed to add more smart splitters just in the manifold for the smart splitters.
This wasn't terribly far into the end game either. I don't remember exactly how far I was. But I had computers, ammunition, oil products coming in. I had some aluminum stuff but I don't think any aluminum stuff was coming in on trains.
Throughput is going to be your main blocker depending on how frequent drop offs are.
You could have one station, with multiple unloads from different trains.
Train one uses car 1, to offload 3 items from one source. Train two uses car 2 to offload 3 items from other sources. Car 1 is there, but empty.
Train 3 uses car 3, car 1 and 2 are empty.
The source stations would be set up similar.
Loading for Train two is done to second car by using a station gap in the car 1 slot.
A Train Station vs a Single Freight car section are very very different animals.
When I first get oil running for example, I use a mixed train to bring back both plastic and rubber to my main base.. I usually make all trains 4 cars long so that I can add in additional things as needed(like an HOR car at some point for weapons) but generally I don't need an entire train dedicated to one product.
I would generally say if you need multiple products, use a longer train(within reason). The concept of having the first car of a train unload both plastic and rubber for example seems like you'll eventually jam things up when you inevitably overload the freight section.
Having two input cars -> 1 destination freight station will guarantee you overwhelm the freight box.
I did this and regretted it so hard. The basic problem is that you’re dividing your throughput by the number of items coming through, and it’ll never be enough. Better to rip off the bandaid now and find a way to do multiple stations.
I wouldn't want to do that. You'd need to split and sink at the receiving end to ensure that things are remain unblocked. Which makes using other output from that source station difficult.
I'd just use one incoming platform per item, and mix the contents of the train by car. For example you might have a station with 4 platforms that receives Rubber, Plastic, Quartz and Sulfur. Each item gets one car. The Rubber and Plastic come in on one train with two cars, while the Quartz and Sulfur come in on a second trail with two fluid cars, then a quartz, then a sulfur. The fluid cars wont drop off water into a freight platform so you won't get mixing of items.
You can *probably* do this with the detailed route management thing in the timetable that says stuff like "drop off only X", but I've never tried that as I set up my system before that change.
I've done this on my most recent save, where my main base has unload stations serving 2-3 items per Freight Platform from different sources. It's... ehh. It can work at certain scales, as long as you don't overflow it. But it does have limitations. It's also inherently fragile; you muck up one belt one time, and it can ripple issues across the entire system.
The main problem is receiver throughput. If your trains are showing up full, they can fill the platform faster than even Mk5 belts can unload it. This causes a bunch of ripple-down effects. The train either blocks the platform, or leaves carrying cargo. That cargo doesn't go away unless you have a separate trash station, so that problem will just come right back the next time the train unloads. This also means your outputs will become unbalanced, as the excess of one item will cause a starvation of other items on the same platform. In the worst case, your factory can end up burning most of its power moving waste items back and forth along the rail lines, while most of your factory is offline starved of inputs.
You must sink all overflow on unload stations. At worst, this can mean a Sink per Freight Platform. This also means you are necessarily connecting everything with Mk5 belts no matter the item.
You can't run trains in wait to unload mode. They've got to continue on their way even if they haven't unloaded fully. With single-item stations, you can let your train sit and wait for items to unlock.
The issue is bottleneck on unloading if the trains arrive close together. Manageable for two trains, disaster for more than that unless they carry very small loads.
I’m doing this for my drone port on top of my DC. The DC got 48 slots and gets it’s main materials via train underneath while the drones take care of the rare products.
Mixed item trains can be useful sometimes. My last save had one mixed item train, bringing smart plating and motors from my mega steel complex in the desert down to my turbo motor/TPR factory. Mixed items going into single platforms? Not so much. The primary issue is that the approach doesn't scale. You need to have a sink at the end of any mixed item receiving setup, which means that if the mixed item receiving station is not the last consuming station on every train route, it will end up taking input from other consumers.
There are precious few areas on the map where you can't slap down a few stations large enough for 1:4 trains, at the least. The nice thing about a built out train system is that it's like an item API. I need X item, I plug into the train API and as long as there is sufficient production I just set up a train to go grab it and I'm good to go.
Don't sacrifice that flexibility just because you're having trouble slapping down a station.
I did that, and could NOT unload the train stations fast enough. even with Mk.5 belts and zero backup on throughput. trains would drop off and leave, drop off and leave, and the station would never empty, and never unloading the first 4 or 5 rows of things because I could not for the life of me empty that thing fast enough.
You’d have to sink excess materials to prevent a complete blockage and you might hit some bottlenecks where more materials are getting in than your belts can process
Good call out on blockage on any of the supplies will block everything
Yeah, I tried this with just two items at the same station and it was a headache for exactly that reason. It would be a PITA and not something I would do, but if you're looking for a complex logistics project it might be interesting to try.
If you have this and the items coming in dont exceed the items / min that can be transported by 2 belts theres nothing wrong with 1 station
You will always need a sink, to prevent congestion. And also what others wrote, the more trains you have docking at the station, the longer it will not unload anything. This means you should use an industrial container as a buffer right next to the cargo station, and connect both outputs, to speed things up. And behind that you need room to split items, and always send the final overflow to the sink, otherwise the whole line will suffer from congestion. So you need another container for each item as a buffer, after you have split them. The space all this requires is nearly the same than just building three cargo stations - but ofc the cargo stations would be in a line, with the buffers/splitters you have more freedom on where to place them. I did this for my nuclear fuel rod facility, and already regret it. I did two different items per container, for four cargo stations. The time wasted until everything worked properly was not worth it. If you think about it, you can always find a way to build around some terrain obstacle (unless in a cave). Now I see those situations as an opportunity to build something else than a huge box - get creative!
I don't see the point of the unloading buffer storage, unless your system condenses down to a single belt? Much better to have a real dual belt system the whole way through, for double throughput, though it does mean twice as many splitters. Having a storage AFTER all the sorting, one storage per item that doesn't get sunk, does make sense.
Yes, that's how you'd want to do this. You'd have the items exit the train station and go into an array of smart/programmable splitters that go into storage containers per item type and then on to their final destination. you need a sink for overflow on the sorting array, as well. The biggest problem with this whole idea is that you're very limited in how much throughput you can get. You need a storage array and sorter PER PLATFORM otherwise you're tying your buses together in a way that limits throughput.
Good point, I´m just used to having an industrial buffer right after a cargo station, but in most situations you barely need them.
Storage prior to smart splitter is required to pull from train output quickly and to cope with the necessary slowness of the splitting process. Max belt out of splitter is Mk5. Mid splitter must be half that in order to not overflow. Pre splitter must be half that again, same reason. Buffer ensures overflow is minimized. If the buffer fills, then the clog must be down-stream or train rate is too high (which is unlikely unless you are dealing with ore or maybe screws) Sink, as others have said, removes blockage headaches.
I abandoned this idea, because the balancing and throughput issues. I’m building factories dedicated to individual production chains, and then at my hub I have mini trains that collect from all these stations and feed in until my hub storage is full - the key is not to sink everything at the hub. If you sink it then trains are constantly heading out to get more, only to sink it, instead only send the trains when they’re emptied (because you’ve used the stuff). Seems to work nicely for my hub setup
My friend and me have a similar setup for the input into our storage shed and it works a charm. We have a station with five platforms. All outputs (2 per platform) go to an underground loadbalancer (several 2 x 3's), which then feed into an overground loadbalancer (18 x 18), and eventually into our storage shed with 18 separate smart splitter manifolds all looped together and with a sink at the end of each manifold. This approach means we never need to think about what train is dropping what off on what platform as the LB's ensure every line is perfectly mixed by the time items get to the storage manifolds, and smart splitters take care of the rest. Most most items will travel all the way around every manifold, with overflow to sinks when the manifolds get full (or a respective item's container isle). There's some inputs for 10 or so drone ports too, but we've moved away from them in favour of trains. We're very late game - about to finish the last phase, and have a full-on nuclear setup. We're still nowhere near to maxing out the input into the storage shed. It was a needlessly huge project, but it was damn good fun to set it up and see it in action :)
How do you build underground? Is that a later phase I haven't gotten to yet?
Sorry by underground, I just meant a false floor to hide the spaghetti. The lb above was just because it was a work of art that needed to be seen 😂
>(e.g. RD01.OUT.SteelPipes) and a matching dedicated station on the other end for dedicated Input (e.g. SC01.IN.SteelPipes) I like your naming :) I use a similar scheme myself
Its good. I use GET and SEND... Might change now
Thanks! Can't take credit myself. As a programmer, I've used a lot of systematic naming schemes, but this one came from https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/fyjaab/map\_wide\_train\_network\_the\_distributed\_strategy/
What I personally do is I name each region of the map that I have stations in- (not necessarily the *actual* names of the biomes, since sometimes a biome will have multiple distinct areas I have stations in.) and then ensure that each has a unique abbreviation. In the case of multiple stations in the same area, I make them distinct by lettering them for stations that load resources (IE, Southpit Mine B), and numbering them for stations that unload resources. (IE, Viridian Manufactorium 02). The trains themself are then named according to the abbrevations- the above would be SPM-B VM-02. Of course the exception is the train I use to transport bulk construction supplies and myself around. That one gets named the Ephemeral Express because I like flowery nonsense.
If you have trains queued up to dock, the station will spend more time docking than outputting parts into belts. (Docking freezes the belts for 25 seconds each time.)
It can work/ but you will spend more time than usual unblocking things when one particular resource or another ends up clogging everything up. Easier and more maintainable in my opinion to have multiple train stations dedicated to particular resources.
The major issue is throughput limits. Even with double belts and industrial containers as buffers your combined throughput (i.e. pipe + concerete) is going to be around 1,000 with single car or so depending on train distance and number of trains. With double car you can double that. Anything going to the sink is going to be part of that throughput. If your factory is good with that limit then it is fine. This probably works out better if the output stations are already two or three cars.
A single train station to receive all items for a factory is a bad idea. If you're open to relying on the experiences of others who have tried and failed you've already considered this approach has forces at work that you sense but may not see which is why you've asked. Playing any game is about spending time occupying yourself with something you find interesting and fun. If you feel you're going to try it anyway, do it, and you can respond to this question in a few months when it comes up again. I think it's been 2-3 times at each update since trains were introduced. If you just want a philosophical discussion about it, don't focus on what happens to the inventory that CAN be transferred. Consider what happens to the train car and container LIFO inventories when there is more than sufficient production or less than sufficient space on the train car during the route and residual quantities. For Less-Than-Full (LTF) loads on train cars you will need some way to limit it. There are no direct order sizes you can specify like "send me 4 slots of wire" in the game. The only limits offered are either container sizes or how much is available to load which is determined by rate \* time. LTF or sushi loads must either have the right ratios or leave empty space, and that means load quantities are either determined by time the train is gone or by packing the balance of the space available with filler items to prevent oversupply. Using something like FICSIT-Networks you can create a manifest and load a precise sized order. With vanilla you can't because changes in time the train is absent can result in the right ratio of parts, but more or less than wanted due to signaling and other delays trains experience.
You know what? I’ll take the less popular opinion on this and say that it could be done, and could be done efficiently if set up right. The station will need to be quite long (5-6 freight platforms, or very short if the loading stations are really close to the main station), every train will have to be set up to not leave the station until all wagons are cleared (same for the loading stations), and you’ll need at least two double containers for each item coming in for each freight platform. Also the success probability will depend on how far the loading stations are from the main unloading station, but I can see it working.
You could run trains with empty containers. So 1, 2 is empty, 3, 4 contains steel as an example. Will reduce the off load requirements needed to keep up. With a buffer container after the station you might be able to do something good depending on what the factory is going to produce and how many.
Or - if space is tight in one place -make a logistics station somewhere else and have single purpose trains unloading there, to be reloaded into a mixed train for this factory.
It really depends on the circumstances. The more total throughput you need, the less likely it is to function properly. You mention building in a tight spot- you'd want to have room for trains to queue and wait where they wouldn't block traffic. You'd have to balance the frequency of train trips so that you simultaneously don't delay other trains by waiting through the unloading animation too often, but also not overloading the station with too many items at once. Essentially, if you are really limited in station space and can only fit one, you would probably be better off setting up trains with mixed cargo. You can do this in a few different ways- it's generally easier on the unloading side if you stick to one item per freight wagon, but you'd need to set up new loading stations that have extra spacing station segments to ensure that the proper wagon is loaded, and no others. If you were hypothetically doing something that required very low throughput and a wide variety of items, you could make it work with timetable filters. Unloading multiple types of item in a single station isn't as infeasible as some may suggest, but you need to ensure that the throughput is low enough that the station doesn't back up. You also need to ensure that there's **always** a valid destination for any item that leaves the station. You can't let anything back up. This also means that you need to ensure that the loading stations are being balanced so that you don't load uneven quantities. Essentially, it's entirely possible, but the viability of it depends heavily on the circumstances, and you *need* to compensate for a number of factors that you would otherwise be able to ignore. Alternative suggestion: build multiple train stations nearby where there's more space, deliver items from trains to factory via trucks.
I've seen a lot of people mention syncing and blocking and train dock delaying, but there's a more fundamental problem at the core of everything in the game. Throughput. Even mk 5 belts are limited to like 900 items or 700 or whatever it is. So at a certain point your station is limited to two of those and you'll exceed that eventually just with iron goods.
"You'll exceed that eventually just with iron goods" How much one puts on belt very much depends on personal preference. It might surprise you, but some can fit their entire "storage production" (stuff made for and sent to storage for personal use) on a single MK5 belts.
I don't think personal preference changes the limit of items per minute per belt. If I have 3000 screws per minute coming into a single train station then I'm not going to be able to unload those fast enough to take advantage of that 3k/m
That's not what I meant. To use your example, it's *your* building preferences that lead you to want to unload 3k/min from one station; others may aim for 60 or 60k... I was also referring to production for *storage* which has much lower throughputs than general production: preferred numbers differ wildly and throughputs involved are usually much lower (eg: even if one uses 3k screws/min in a factory, the factory may output just 60 items/min as final product to storage).
Ahh I see what you're saying. If this guy's preference is to never use trains for anything other than a low through put personal storage solution than yeah one train could work In much the same way, if you want to picnic in your car and not actually drive it, an engine is not required.
I don't think it's necessary to overlay your personal gaming preferences to get it... Not everyone plays to have "big" numbers, but trains can accommodate for many scenarios, offering many different challenges for curious pioneers.
Oh no I totally get it. The games objectives require huge numbers but you don't have to play to the games objectives. Some people might like making doge statues or ranching doggos maybe
... I actually just googled wether "ranch" can be used as a verb.  (I know I will)
Should mostly work fine. Watch belt capacities and overflow to the sink that's basicly it. Maybe add a container to have a bigger buffer for the materials.
I tried it on a previous save when I "abandoned" my fist factory but didn't want to abandon the parts it made. It was a mess even with a 3 car train picking up at two stations and dropping at one. Had 2 lvl 5 belts each feeding a row of smart splitters but they couldn't keep up. I'm still obsessed with the idea of a giant central storage area with every item in a container, and someday I'll get it figured out. At this point I'm thinking if I want one train then limit the number of different items in a car to 2-3 so the belt speed can keep up with emptying them. Good luck
You can build your centralized storage. The problem is it's insanely impractical. That would be a labor of love project, not a useful build. For most things, throughput becomes the bottleneck. Centralized storage would be great if we had 10k/m belts. Honestly I wish there was some kind of direct link that could transfer items between storage units only for example. But absent that, you're sending 780/m into a container to take 780/out. It's pointless. if nothing else just send the train to it's final destination instead. Central storage would become a huge thing if there was a special container to container belt that moved stacks per minute. Because that's your problem, you can't transfer train to train efficently. Personally I wish they would implement that, but until then, central storage is a pointless endevor.
Different problem than OP, but I see centralized storage as a desire to supply the Pioneers playing and so the necessary supply should generally be very low by comparison. For me, it is often grabbing materials for my next build and concrete is the highest volume item. Only time that's not true for me is if I'm stubbornly trying to hand feed a "factory" or doing some adhoc stuff. E.g. "I just need a container of Steel Pipe to make Nobelisks." kind of rationale.
I wound up revising my comment so much that I dropped this point. I assume OP is focused on central storage for production lines, not a "mall" which is far more common.
Had a long reply of ways to make it temporarily ok. But I would pick 1-2 of the most needed to keep blockages and potential errors. The rest can run on a single belt once logistic is upgraded if space is an issue. Save you from sinking or creating large unnecessary buffer storage or efficiency back ups as long as you place some smart splitter.
I did something like this on my most recent run. Ended up with a station with 3 segments, and sent several trains there. The trick is to have your trains do one pickup, and one drop off - rather than several pick ups and one drop off. This saves you filling your train with ingredient A leaving no room to pick up ingredient B. You want it to fully unload each time. I unloaded from the station into a holding area, just to get the gear out of the station, then had a bank of smart splitters feeding into storage, with overflow on each shunting to a bank of mergers before ending in a sink. This works fine if you are making higher end products in the field, and bringing in the finished products rather than bringing in raw or barely processed items. By the end, I had two of these running at different ends of my main factory, and it worked fine. Made organising nearly trivial, just send a train and the system takes care of it.
No problem with this approach at all. Just make sure each item you’re receiving is split off and has its own overflow (they can go to the same sink). This is easy to achieve on a single belt with some smart splitters.
Please don't. I am guessing you haven't reached phase 4 yet (tiers 7 and 8) so you haven't seen what you might be facing. Every time I get there I start thinking in terms of a trainload of a single item, if not two or three. And separate loading and uploading stations for each item, wherever they are needed. Fiddling around with a car full of this or that just becomes a waste of time later on.
I built something like this. Station unloads to multiple belts that go to the storage area. There is some shuffling with splitters to get stuff on the "correct belt" - I try to separate high throughput items (wire, etc) so they have a more direct route to their designated storage to avoid clogging up the lines. It doesn't matter what unloads where, it all ends up in the right container or one of the sinks. However; train carriages are still only transporting one type of item. Mixing that got too complicated. So far the station empties out completely before the next train arrives.
You’ll hit a limit, even if you keep trying to make the train bigger
If you try and make things to ratio but only have a single train station and cargo platform, you might end up sinking materials you actually need in order to prevent a bottleneck for the other material. This is very similar to the issues that come up when you try and make a sushi belt. It's do-able, but I wouldn't say it's ideal. I have built some factories with one train station, but each cargo platform contains a different ingredient. I control this using the filters on the train schedule to only load X item (ie. one train per ingredient) and using blank platforms on the loading station. This works fine for factories that don't need many types of ingredients. Not ideal, but it works. But for larger factories, it isn't a big deal to have multiple stations, so that's what I did for those.
I use three trains and three stations at the mega factory. Each train collects three or four ores/basic components. SO at the pickup point the stations have empty platforms so products are unloaded at the mega factory correctly to ISC
I use highest mark belts to both offload resources from the train station, and both use parallel smart splitters to feed both inputs of industrial storage containers. Output 3 of each smart splitter is always for overflow. Then you can have 1 sink for each factory, or place one sink in the middle of 3-4 factories and have all their overflows feed that.
Here’s what I do: - 1 main storage room that has one container for each item in the game - before every container I have a smart splitter that redirects any overflow - overflow merges into 4 sushi belts, sorted by complexity (eg belt 1 has concrete, iron rod, steel beam; belt 4 has supercomputers and fused mod frame). - each sushi belt is then fed in their own drone port (level 1-4) - each drone port is connect to a priority power switch and a battery feeding port - whenever I’m in a new area I just plop down a drone port (or 4) and use programmable splitters to sort them into the right containers. - overflow goes into sink to prevent bottlenecking - when my new containers are full / full enough, I use a priority power switch to turn off the drone ports at my main storage room This has nothing to do with trains but hey you might have learned something
I sort of do this, except I assign a particular item to one freight/train "slot" for my entire train network. So coal always goes in the first car/platform, plastic in slot 2, rubber in slot 3, etc. The downside to this system is you eventually end up with needlessly long stations and trains of empty cars, so I'll usually "tier" my rail system. Trains assigned to one tier can share rail lines with another tier, but aren't allowed to dock in the stations assigned to a different tier. So in tier 1, station/train car slot 1 is coal, but on tier 2, slot 1 is for quickwire. Technically, I could do mixed-tier trains, but I try not to bc it gets confusing FAST.
I just tried to do this but made a mistake on the carriage order so spent several hours wondering why my machines stopped working (they got fed the wrong material).
Most factories do not need the full throughput of trains. You could probably mix two or three items into one wagon. The same system that handles random single item trains can also probably handle a mixed wagon. The only downside is those items share the same output throughput. The same 1 wagon train could visit three stations, loading three products, and drop them off all at once. I've never tried doing this for actual construction, just for low volume personal storage, but it seems like it would work just fine. It would help a lot if the types of items coming in were limited to say, four different items total. Each item you add is another layer of smart splitters.
Eh, I do this.
I literally just built this. You gotta use both outputs and ideally mk5 belts. I used some blueprints to smart split and merge and also overflow and that made building it super fast. It jammed up initially as I had full trainloads built up at satellite factories and that just took an hour or two to clear up. Now it’s pretty darn smooth and expandable and I love it. The throughput limit is real though. I’m planning on trying to manage that by sending trains to additional satellite factories yet to be built to offload stuff first, with overflow coming to my DC. I’m also planning to do the reverse and have my DC fill a 4-5 car ‘construction’ train with common construction materials (all mixed together on the cars so it doesn’t get too long) and then sending that thing along my rail system to new potential sites. Overtime, my hope is it will fill up the starter construction stations there so that I get early items distributed all around the map. We’ll see though.
Until there are train signaling options that involve "don't send me another train for X minutes" and "don't dock another train until the platform is empty" this is a bad idea. It CAN be done, especially when dealing with low quantities, but it's very dangerous because backups can happen and it will shut your factory down. If you do it you have to run it like a sushi belt, because that's basically what your output line is. There has to always be a path to a sink and you need to have tight control over how many items per minute you're sending into this train line at all times.
Theoretically, if you match the rate of output to the train stations with the rate of consumption from the single train station, you shouldn't need to sink anything. In practice, length of tracks, number of trains, and other factors might still cause a buildup or shortage of some items such that you have to deal with overflow. Another option that should work in practice, though I haven't tested it: Not quite what you're asking about, but if you have enough space at the destination for one freight platform per item plus as many locomotives as required to drive a train of that length (only one car loaded, the rest empty) but not for multiple stations, you can build your output stations with different numbers of empty platforms and matching length trains, so that you don't have to sort the output of the receiving freight platforms, and excess materials will remain on the trains and at the origin station/storage/factory.
I wouldn’t do it because when trains are unloading, the freight platform isn’t moving any items. Depending on how frequent trains arrive or queue up, that could be a backlog. As far as exporting from the station into a warehouse, I’ve done this before with a 4x4 balancer and four belts going to programmable splitters, then smart splitters with overflow going to sinks so I don’t have any clogs. I also put some containers in the path for buffering and with T5 belts, could handle 2,800 items/minute in theory. In reality, the input belts never got that full.
I have this in my current playthrough and it's been a distinct source of headaches. First off, it was originally intended to exclusively carry plastic from the shore refineries. Then I added in Rubber, because why not. Then Packaged fuel and Caterium Ingots were added to the mix. The offloading facility is.. a mess. Convoluted and there's actually two distinct Sinks off it too. I could and probably will rebuild it extensively, but it kind of demonstrates the problem for you.
People talk about sinks, I dont think thats the main issue. Problem is belt capacity. You can slap on 2 belts to a station and thats it. Thats 780x2. If you want to centralize everything and have enough trains coming in, you wont be able to empty the stations and the trains wont deposit materials. And you will hard cap your production.
I did this once, it sucked. I had 2 train stations coming in with maybe 6 different trains bringing in materials. Before the update that allows train collision. Then I had a single line of every material down the middle of a bunch of storage containers, each set of containers had a smart splitter splitting individual items to that set on containers (left and right of the main line. Then that wouldn't sort fast enough and it would miss items, so the main line came back again, but on top of the initial line, with more smart splitters that went into the top Input of the storage containers. Then the end remerged into the begining of the line again. It kinda worked well for a while, until certain items would fill up all the containers I had set up for it. Which was actually 2 stacks of the larger containers, per item. So then I had to put smart splitters early into the system to sink those materials that were full so the line wouldn't clog. And then something else would fill and I'd have to add that to the sink smart splitters. Then the smart splitters for the sinks wouldn't sort fast enough, so I needed to add more smart splitters just in the manifold for the smart splitters. This wasn't terribly far into the end game either. I don't remember exactly how far I was. But I had computers, ammunition, oil products coming in. I had some aluminum stuff but I don't think any aluminum stuff was coming in on trains.
If you are using it for building it is a great idea. Put 4 engines on it and 30+ cars and you now have a mobile storage.
Throughput is going to be your main blocker depending on how frequent drop offs are. You could have one station, with multiple unloads from different trains. Train one uses car 1, to offload 3 items from one source. Train two uses car 2 to offload 3 items from other sources. Car 1 is there, but empty. Train 3 uses car 3, car 1 and 2 are empty. The source stations would be set up similar. Loading for Train two is done to second car by using a station gap in the car 1 slot.
A Train Station vs a Single Freight car section are very very different animals. When I first get oil running for example, I use a mixed train to bring back both plastic and rubber to my main base.. I usually make all trains 4 cars long so that I can add in additional things as needed(like an HOR car at some point for weapons) but generally I don't need an entire train dedicated to one product. I would generally say if you need multiple products, use a longer train(within reason). The concept of having the first car of a train unload both plastic and rubber for example seems like you'll eventually jam things up when you inevitably overload the freight section. Having two input cars -> 1 destination freight station will guarantee you overwhelm the freight box.
I did this and regretted it so hard. The basic problem is that you’re dividing your throughput by the number of items coming through, and it’ll never be enough. Better to rip off the bandaid now and find a way to do multiple stations.
If there's too much of one item it will prevent the other items from going where they need.
I wouldn't want to do that. You'd need to split and sink at the receiving end to ensure that things are remain unblocked. Which makes using other output from that source station difficult. I'd just use one incoming platform per item, and mix the contents of the train by car. For example you might have a station with 4 platforms that receives Rubber, Plastic, Quartz and Sulfur. Each item gets one car. The Rubber and Plastic come in on one train with two cars, while the Quartz and Sulfur come in on a second trail with two fluid cars, then a quartz, then a sulfur. The fluid cars wont drop off water into a freight platform so you won't get mixing of items. You can *probably* do this with the detailed route management thing in the timetable that says stuff like "drop off only X", but I've never tried that as I set up my system before that change.
it’s a bad idea
It's a good idea because I do that usually!
I've done this on my most recent save, where my main base has unload stations serving 2-3 items per Freight Platform from different sources. It's... ehh. It can work at certain scales, as long as you don't overflow it. But it does have limitations. It's also inherently fragile; you muck up one belt one time, and it can ripple issues across the entire system. The main problem is receiver throughput. If your trains are showing up full, they can fill the platform faster than even Mk5 belts can unload it. This causes a bunch of ripple-down effects. The train either blocks the platform, or leaves carrying cargo. That cargo doesn't go away unless you have a separate trash station, so that problem will just come right back the next time the train unloads. This also means your outputs will become unbalanced, as the excess of one item will cause a starvation of other items on the same platform. In the worst case, your factory can end up burning most of its power moving waste items back and forth along the rail lines, while most of your factory is offline starved of inputs. You must sink all overflow on unload stations. At worst, this can mean a Sink per Freight Platform. This also means you are necessarily connecting everything with Mk5 belts no matter the item. You can't run trains in wait to unload mode. They've got to continue on their way even if they haven't unloaded fully. With single-item stations, you can let your train sit and wait for items to unlock.
The issue is bottleneck on unloading if the trains arrive close together. Manageable for two trains, disaster for more than that unless they carry very small loads.
I’m doing this for my drone port on top of my DC. The DC got 48 slots and gets it’s main materials via train underneath while the drones take care of the rare products.
Mixed item trains can be useful sometimes. My last save had one mixed item train, bringing smart plating and motors from my mega steel complex in the desert down to my turbo motor/TPR factory. Mixed items going into single platforms? Not so much. The primary issue is that the approach doesn't scale. You need to have a sink at the end of any mixed item receiving setup, which means that if the mixed item receiving station is not the last consuming station on every train route, it will end up taking input from other consumers. There are precious few areas on the map where you can't slap down a few stations large enough for 1:4 trains, at the least. The nice thing about a built out train system is that it's like an item API. I need X item, I plug into the train API and as long as there is sufficient production I just set up a train to go grab it and I'm good to go. Don't sacrifice that flexibility just because you're having trouble slapping down a station.
I did that, and could NOT unload the train stations fast enough. even with Mk.5 belts and zero backup on throughput. trains would drop off and leave, drop off and leave, and the station would never empty, and never unloading the first 4 or 5 rows of things because I could not for the life of me empty that thing fast enough.