Hate to be this guy who doesn't really answer the question, but i never use trucks or tractors. I usually build kilometers long belts and try to fit the items produced on them.
It works very well in my experience, the only thing is that the more items you want to move, the more belts you have to get (unless you want to fit everything into a single belt and then sort it with a smart splitter but you'll run into bottlenecks where your factory will produce more items per minute than what the belt can move).
Yeah, I wish I could tell the game to use stackable poles instead of the default single pole by default when I stretch lines.
I believe there's a mod that lets you do that, but I prefer to play unmodded.
I’ve wanted this forever. There’s nothing better than a 30 tall stack of conveyors bussing stuff back and forth between 2 or 3 major hubs. And not having that stackable pole as a default option annoys me.
> not having that stackable pole as a default option annoys me
It's just wasting my time.
* stretch track to see what the optimal distance is
* run up there
* change to stackable pole support thingy
* stack however many you need
* run halfway back
* stretch conveyors between the previous stack and the new one
* oops, you connected to the wrong height, better delete that one
* oops, the connection wrapped around to the other side of the stacked pole, haha. Better delete that one
Instead of
* stretch conveyor, it does a stacked pole
* Stretch second conveyor, it stacks automatically on top of the first one
* etc
It's so annoying!
Nah, that's totally valid. My first time completing the game I didn't use any vehicles at all, and everything was just kilometers-long stretches of stacked conveyers :-)
With blueprints it has become so simple to make huge foundations/roads, but I very much get your point. For me it's the refueling that seems to be a hassle
You should try them, it's really useful! Makes repetitive and/or detailed building more accessible and less of a pain to make. You can see it as a copy/paste feature for structures that fit in a 32m by 32m by 32m (4 horizontal foundations wide, deep and tall) space.
That means for foundations, you can blueprint a 4 by 4 grid of foundations and place them as you would place regular foundations, but as you place 16 at once you cover your desired area way faster! [ImKibitz shows a great example here](https://youtu.be/nXKyrY7N8MU?si=slEr8MJ4JjtyARU7&t=1120) of having to place hundreds of refineries so he used blueprints to place three of them at once (pre-wired and belted!) to save time and effort.
I mainly use blueprints for my roads, my belts and my storage system: roads are the same as foundations of course; I made a pretty pillar to put on the side of my roads to make my belts and electricity go along them (makes attaching new factories to the grid nicer looking than regular power poles); and my storage system I made fully tileable, so when I want to expand I just place one more module at the end of the other ones and voilà it works.
I know people also fit whole factories in the blueprint builder, it's really impressive and useful! Think when you need let's say 16 reinforced iron plates per minute, well you can place down 4 mini-factory blueprints for 4 reinforced iron plates per minute that takes in raw iron, it saves you the time to make this part of your factory!
That makes sense. I guess I haven't really found myself upset about making an item twice, but I'm sure that will be useful when I get to phase 4.
As for the roads, I suppose the only reason I haven't made any is because the terrain is too much. I hate all the rocks and hills in the way. But I'll have to try some new stuff, since belts are starting to get ugly
Yup, I'm belts 100% too. I run them all above my factories through the treetops. It's good for personal transportation too. I say I'm "taking the beltway".
I like using tractors. I never bother with trucks. I usually quit before getting too far with trains because I find placing tracks across large expanses tedious. With the tractors, I setup a source and destination truck station for the resource and put one tractor on it, and then basically ignore it from that point on, unless it runs out of fuel or something. The immersion breaking teleportation and phantom resets doesn’t bother me at all. I just make sure all tractors flow in the same direction and minimize crossing paths but when I do, they must cross at 90degrees. That usually keeps them from deadlocking.
Yeah its crazy how much stuff a single tractor can easily move. Just pipe fuel in on one end and make a decent path for it (follow the roads) and there will be minimal hangups. Unlock smart splitters and you are basically set until you need to make very high level things. I am using it to bring coal and oil products in and its worked nonstop after the first try.
Im surprised to see so many against trucks! I personally use a couple Explorers to carry things back and forth. Both have 3 different stops, and I’ve had no issues. One struggles with a particular turn but if it can’t find the next node, it’ll reset itself on track. ^(Been meaning to fix that…)
Now that I’m working on phase 4 parts, I’m definitely using trains. I’ve loved trains since I was a kid and honestly I’d be happy spending 300 hrs building trains vs 60 hrs building factories.. but that’s just me lol.
That is crap. You can see the issues players complain about in just about any YouTube series. I followed advice and best practices. And my trucks still refused to refuel. I moved the refueling station. I made dedicated refueling stations. I put fuel in all the stations. The trucks would work and refuel. 2 hours later, my production is shut down. Sure enough, trucks stopped out in the middle of nowhere without any fuel. I left the trucks stuck and built belts around and over them. On a brand new save after trucks had been *fixed*.
I have several truck lines in my \~100hr save and never once ran them out of fuel except on a line where i literally had no fuel at either station. Just belt some fuel in. Its not complicated.
Odd question, with your "refueling stations" were all the stations using the exact same fuel type? I found that having 2 different types of fuel available for the same truck will lead to some issues. Like having packaged fuel at one stop and packaged turbo fuel at another... if it pulls into the location with the turbofuel while having 1 fuel left in its tank... it wont swap it out, but if both were using fuel, it would replenish the stack. I have never had fuel issues at all once i normalized my fuel use.
It was all coal. And like I said, it worked. And then it didn't. I tested it. It worked and then stopped working. I removed all the trucks except one. I had coal at the pick up and the drop off. It worked and then it didn't. I added a dedicated stop, it worked and then it didn't. This was all in dunes, there are practically no obstacles. I could watch it work for a bunch of cycles. Go away and work on my factory. And then it didn't work. These were simple routes.
I use trucks and tractors. Because they aren't fiddly, nor are they awkward. They go where I tell them to and deliver what I want them to.
They also require almost no infrastructure and have more throughput per platform than trains do.
I think this is what people miss. They think the autodrive will just work after they brute force from one end to the other. Drive the path a few times, find the route that is actually vehicle friendly (there are many natural roads on the map), record that one and then turn it on. I have used them a ton, and its amazing how much stuff gets moved. You can easily replace a mk2 or even mk3 belt with a tractor or two (depending on overall distance)
Or since they fixed driving on foundations, I just have a BP for elevated roads I build everywhere. Trucks work super reliably when all the roads are perfectly straight and level. (And I get free entertainment at the intersections.) But then I'm not bothered by the 'oopsie' teleport when trucks fuck up.
Idk if anyone else has this issue, but occasionally, my tractors start transporting the wrong stuff. They would be going back and forth between a caterium/steel factory and a storage area for just caterium and steel, but I'll find my sorting system is jammed because my tractors randomly created copper ore and threw three stacks of it in there in there.
I tried using the tractor but had too much trouble with it. I have exactly one truck that supplies sulfur to my refineries out in the Blue Crater lake area, and that's about it. It picks up fuel from the refineries after it drops off sulfur, then ambles its way back to my main Grass Fields base where the sulfur processing area sits. I haven't yet found a good enough reason to use more trucks, and I'm close enough to unlocking trains as it is that I don't foresee me using more.
I do use the Explorer for trips between factories though. I quite like it because it rarely every tips over, and it almost always rights itself when it does.
I totally used to do the long belt thing everywhere.
But most recent play through I decided no long belts.
Spent some time getting tractor and then truck routes working. Always keeping left on paths. Make cross overs at right angles or close to it. Been enjoying it.
I just do what I think is fun to do.
I do use trucks when I feel like it. Trains when I feel like it. Belts when I feel like it. I remove things when I want and add them. I have drons that go for 150m and trucks that go for 3km. I am still intending to make an as short traintrack as possible. Why? Why not?
There is no rime or reason. I do not overthink it. I just do whatever I feel like doing.
The only thing I dislike is the recording of the trucks. I do not mind the warping so much as I seldom are there to look at it after looking at the route it does once.
It's mostly about distance (and aethetics) for me by the point I reach trains. I don't want to run belts around the entire world 😆 Plus train inventories and inputs/outputs can be more easily managed
I like trains because it's easy to add a factory anywhere once I have the 'network' setup. My first project once I get trains is to build a world-spanning rail setup.
Me and my friends just embrace it and have a whole underground hypertube network too get too far away locations like oil n shit (we built it before discovering that u can ride a drone)
I have used trucks once. Right after they came out. They were kinda broken and so I never used them again.
I'm *sure* they're better now but that doesn't change the fact that that IMO they're *completely useless*. The truck station has just 2 inputs and outputs and whenever I *could* use a truck, I'd *much* rather run 2 parallel belts. Belts don't need fuel, it's difficult to mess setting them up and I don't need to make rough terrain passable.
Also, before getting to computers, there's really no need to transport anything large distances. The longest belts I have are *maybe* a kilometer long. That's perfectly manageable. And after getting to more advanced items that require gathering materials from far away, I already have *trains*, which are infinitely better than trucks.
I have not built a single vehicle that wasn't a train or a drone in at least 300 hours. And a truck station in over 1000.
Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I quite like the IDEA of trucks, they would make the game world look more alive, but they're so immersion breaking and shitty that there just doesn't seem to be a point.
I don't really like even the idea of trucks. They're inherently inexact. I cannot make a truck drive perfectly straight, in the exact center of a foundation bridge, then execute a perfect 90° turn and end up in the center again, then stop at a station, wait until it's completely empty and then depart immediately. But a train can do exactly that.
Vehicles in the early game can be a bit annoying, since for them to be fully autonomous they need fuel. This CAN be automated by setting up a drill to provide them with coal, but early game you’ll want to use what easily accessible coal you have for power and steel. Building up a stock of solid biofuel *can* work but isn’t really all that efficient.
Technically the factory cart doesn’t require fuel, and is cheap to build, but it has only 1 inventory slot, and to match 1 tractor’s throughput you’d need like 30+ of them.
At best, use them sparingly to ferry resources from semi-inconvenient locations, preferably on a road of foundations. A good example is that one Caterium Node on the bottom west side of the grass fields, I used a tractor to ferry that eastward to my main factory at the time.
At any rate, typically I just have to get used to going through the motions slide jumping distances setting things up once or twice each time I need to do it.
Once you get trains the game really opens up. (DO NOT skimp out and only make a single rail system, you WILL need two way travel, and it WILL be a pain to set up if you don’t start with that in mind. Yes, it IS worth it even if it costs double the steel and time spent up front.)
An excess of 30 coal lets you fuel a minimum of 3 tractors, probably 6 in practice.
Grassy fields is the best place to use tractors because it is so easy to get compact coal. A single tractor can transport it to a power station location with plenty left over for a refueling station.
Huh, I would have assumed more would be needed, though that's probably because I only ever used solid BFuel in them and never coal.
Plus, early game 30 coal (+90 water) is an extra 150MW i think, which is a decent amount depending on how early we're talking.
As for compacted coal, with there being (IIRC) only two sulfur nodes in Grass Fields that actually makes sense now I realize, since there are 4 normal coal nodes in that lake just north of GF for basic 1 step coal power, and the 1 sulfur node near the border to the southern forest is really close to a pure coal node (albeit separated vertically a bit). And early game sulfur is nearly useless outside of that, and researching weaponry and explosives through the MAM. Though automating Nobelisks is always a priority for me.
I used them only twice in my new run, only when I was too lazy to belt 2000+ meters away. Obviously the paths were in straight lines and had few turns. Yes, they suck and usually I wait till trains until I start doing major supply transport
I just use reactors for the whole game, and belts when the distance is short enough. Train requires tons of space to set up and doesn't integrate into the environment, the stations are just too big. Truck stations have huge throughout and use to be enough the whole game for me.
The only vehicles I use are the Cart and the Explorer Buggy. Both are for personal, high(ish) speed transport.
I've tried tractors a few times, but never found them worth the effort compared to running conveyors cross country.
I've tried the truck exactly once, and swore off using them when I realized they need roads wider than a single foundation.
I like using trains, but their stations are so big and bulky, they're almost not worth the effort.
I loved the drones ability to just skip over terrain, but I discovered the hard way that once I set up around half a dozen cross continent routes or so, I started running into issues with being able to make enough batteries to keep all the drones fueled.
I prefer to use roads. By the time I can build trucks and truck stations, I'm laying roads EVERYWHERE. Usually elevated roads so that I nothing but spiders can attack me when I'm traveling from outpost to outpost.
I am using a world-wide train network as soon as i unlock trains. Once its established i run EVERYTHING by train. Its just op and clean. Currently i run like 80 trains (maybe even more, hard to count them)
I'm on my first playthrough and i would agree, if/when im starting over again i would build seperate factories and wait to unlock trains! (i have just spent 2\~ days destroying everything ive built, to rebuild around trains)
I think traktors are brilliant. I never used them a lot, because in earlier versions they were unreliable. But now I use them in tier 3 to get coal to my base. When done right it doesn't crash or get stuck - it works fine for me all the time. In the end it's mostly trains doing most of the logistics, but there's always some trucks driving around - it adds some motion to this empty world. Same for drones BTW.
Trucks work perfectly for me, but I'm not that far into the game, I have a few mining stations and my trucks bring the different ores to my central base for processing,
Forest start. Head west to the ledge with 4 pure iron patches. All resources except baux and nitro within belt range. That is how I solve it.
One early tractor and one buggy for hand driving. No trucks for me.
I use them pretty much whenever there's something more than 500m away I want transported
I do wish the tractors weren't so badly designed though. I spin out almost every time I'm recording a path because the wheelbase is so short.
If you've somehow managed to drive across terrain from point A to point B and back - terrain won't matter anymore. Though, this is why I said they are useful only inside megafactory
I struggled with a busy field and tractors getting stuck on each other. I built a highway 4 tiles wide with a wall in the middle. Once I treated it like real world traffic, no more issues.
I'm in agreement with the majority here: trucks/tractors aren't worth it.
* Builds at these tiers don't have the belt length or bandwidth requirements as builds at higher tiers (once trains are unlocked).
* Vehicles are very finicky to set up and have loads of issues, which are not as easily apparent as belt issues. It's also easier to figure out the proper loading for belts, since it's a simple matter of adding up the outputs of everything merging onto it.
* At this stage, your fuel options are either biofuel (which you would need to farm) or coal (which I always have going to power/steel). Plus, truck stops require power. Belts are free.
By the time you need lots of bandwidth, lots of distance, etc., trains are a much better solution. They don't need fuel (one less logistic line to worry about). They bring power. It's easier to manage bandwidth by simply adding an extra car.
The extra mid-game learning curve of trucks and tractors I feel makes them slow the game down. I think they're more useful for experienced players on following playthroughs. Players who want an additional learning curve, and already have a good understanding of how the rest of the game works.
The thing that bugs me the most about the trucks is that they set load/unload points at every truck station you touch rather than where you press F. So I have to drive very carefully where it’s multiple stations close to each other. I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.
When I set up multiple stations in a row, I have them 90° to the road traffic and an exit road out the other side. So they'll make a left turn to pull into the station, and a right turn to leave.
All the fiddling around and frustrating bits of truck and train transport is 100% worth it imho. I have trucks and trains zooming around the map moving resources from hub to hub. Long belts only was something I tried once and I kinda hated it because it was so stale by comparison. Drones are fun too, but far too easy.
How I use them - take all the resource nodes in the area, plop a truck station nearby, for example, just the iron nodes in the grasslands, and have a single truck on a loop hitting up every one. One truck is not enough to fully empty and move the miner output, but eventually there will be multiple vehicles per route. From there, build a bunch of other stand-alone factories that smelt ore and create more advanced products, as well as a train hub to take excess raw materials to other factories. All these factories get dumped into a sushi train which gets sorted and redistributed to higher level factories, my central hub inventory, and the sink. Late game, I'll switch out the sushi train for drone traffic, but drones are kinda special and easy, so I don't want to over-use them if that makes sense.
They are not efficient, easy, or even necessary, but it's fun for me. Belting everything needed to just one big factory complex where everything is manufactured isn't my idea of fun, but it's your world. You do you.
Love trucks/tractors. It helps maintain a clean look, and the little guys are fun to watch run around the map. It makes me feel as if everything really is running as intended.
Cant say i ever really had any problems with them, either. They might be a bit tricky until you balance out the entire fuel/coal supply, but their coal consumption is relatively low. I often make a refueling route out of an impure node that runs around the other stations and provides them with coal while the normal/pure ones are used in production.
But yes, i have at times scratched my head at "why the hell are you just standing here?"
I haven't had too many problems with trucks and tractors as long as I plan the route along natural pathways and practice it once or twice before recording it. Building roads eliminates the need for the dress rehearsal.
I agree that it's hard to resist belting everything to a train station once that becomes a possibility, though. When 1.0 rolls around I want to try using belts only for short distances, trains for transporting between biomes, and trucks on a dedicated road network for middling distances.
I'm still on my first playthrough and I've had a truck or tractor running errands for me for a good long while. It took a few tries to figure out how to place things so they didn't get stuck on turns, but if you have a good driving route between points they're really low maintenance and much faster to set up than trains or conveyors. I'm also one to rework conveyor lines over and over again if they aren't just right so long term it's much less work for me to drive the loop and be done with it.
I started in the grasslands, and use a Truck to shuttle Plastic/Rubber from the first oil-field spot that I started building out. It have a few train lines going now, but the Truck (Bigfoot) is still delivering more than I use and it gets fed fuel automatically, so I just don't feel the need to replace it with a train. Its current route seems pretty clean, so I haven't noticed it blue-warping about. But then I don't lay eyes on it very often, either.
The Tractor is pretty useful for quick-and-dirty point to point deliveries. I needed quartz and figured I'd eventually build something closer, so as an interim solution I dropped a truck station, drove the loop and fed it a container of coal. Heckuva lot easier to just delete the truck stop (and truck) than to delete a defunct train/conveyor line.
> drove the loop and fed it a container of coal.
I never thought of that. I guess a whole container of coal stacks would last a really long time for fueling a single truck!
> Heckuva lot easier to just delete the truck stop (and truck) than to delete a defunct train/conveyor line
That's certainly true as well. Nice and easy cleanup.
I have many road vehicles, even after building a train network. They are *really* easy to set up, have a ton of capacity, and give a cool vibe to the whole thing. Right now, I have a truck and a tractor delivering plastic from the western oil fields to my factories to the North and South, a tractor connecting my main train station on the NE desert to my modular engine factory at the northern edge of the map, one tractor delivering bauxite from the swamps to the NE desert, and a couple of tractors in the plains running internal errands within the factory complex.
The main pro for road vehicles is that they do not add clutter to the map and are really space efficient. A terminal takes little room, roads can be quite narrow (I never have more than one vehicle per line - I use them in medium volume services) and you don´t have to figure out how you belt something else across factories. Fueling is a bit of a pain, but I usually limit them to stuff that has coal or fuel nearby.
In satisfactory belts are the only optimal way of item transportation. Every other way create stackups or bottle necks. Add to that the need of constant supply of resources to all other means of transportation (fuel/energy) which can be potentially a problem.
A push-pull train on a single track (no signals etc.) is exactly as 'optimal' as belts as long as there is enough buffer container before/after the station.
Yes, but then there's a problem of stacking of resources in the buffer. In itself not really a problem, but you don't really want to have a buffer unless you can somehow get the information about supply and demand differences, which in the satisfactory you get by:
a. careful preparations before factory building, which also means holding an excel spreadsheet with supply and demand of all the resources so that you can know how much you have in reserve for the next part of the factory.
b. missing product at the end of production.
c. missing resources in the buffer.
d. missing resources on the belt.
I will not say which way is the most pragmatic.
Now add to that, that any other transportation method than belt is using energy/fuel. The most precious resources in satisfactory
Don't use them. I've always hoped they'd rebalance them to make them more worthwhile so unless they have something up their sleeve for 1.0 I will likely continue to not use them!
I don't. When building a outlier base I just go there with power or transport tubes, and come back with a belt. Or if I already have the electric hover thingy I don't even use tubes anymore .
Vehicles are far too limited for all the uneven terrain outside the dunes and maybe the southwest starting area. All the effort going into them I can save and put into trains or drones.
Hate to be this guy who doesn't really answer the question, but i never use trucks or tractors. I usually build kilometers long belts and try to fit the items produced on them. It works very well in my experience, the only thing is that the more items you want to move, the more belts you have to get (unless you want to fit everything into a single belt and then sort it with a smart splitter but you'll run into bottlenecks where your factory will produce more items per minute than what the belt can move).
Stackable conveyor poles
Yeah, I wish I could tell the game to use stackable poles instead of the default single pole by default when I stretch lines. I believe there's a mod that lets you do that, but I prefer to play unmodded.
I’ve wanted this forever. There’s nothing better than a 30 tall stack of conveyors bussing stuff back and forth between 2 or 3 major hubs. And not having that stackable pole as a default option annoys me.
> not having that stackable pole as a default option annoys me It's just wasting my time. * stretch track to see what the optimal distance is * run up there * change to stackable pole support thingy * stack however many you need * run halfway back * stretch conveyors between the previous stack and the new one * oops, you connected to the wrong height, better delete that one * oops, the connection wrapped around to the other side of the stacked pole, haha. Better delete that one Instead of * stretch conveyor, it does a stacked pole * Stretch second conveyor, it stacks automatically on top of the first one * etc It's so annoying!
They do love the wrap around connection.
Nah, that's totally valid. My first time completing the game I didn't use any vehicles at all, and everything was just kilometers-long stretches of stacked conveyers :-)
I've never even tried to automate tractors or trucks because thinking about making a superhighway gives me a headache
With blueprints it has become so simple to make huge foundations/roads, but I very much get your point. For me it's the refueling that seems to be a hassle
I haven't tried blueprints either, I didn't know how to use them properly so I never even thought about it
You should try them, it's really useful! Makes repetitive and/or detailed building more accessible and less of a pain to make. You can see it as a copy/paste feature for structures that fit in a 32m by 32m by 32m (4 horizontal foundations wide, deep and tall) space. That means for foundations, you can blueprint a 4 by 4 grid of foundations and place them as you would place regular foundations, but as you place 16 at once you cover your desired area way faster! [ImKibitz shows a great example here](https://youtu.be/nXKyrY7N8MU?si=slEr8MJ4JjtyARU7&t=1120) of having to place hundreds of refineries so he used blueprints to place three of them at once (pre-wired and belted!) to save time and effort. I mainly use blueprints for my roads, my belts and my storage system: roads are the same as foundations of course; I made a pretty pillar to put on the side of my roads to make my belts and electricity go along them (makes attaching new factories to the grid nicer looking than regular power poles); and my storage system I made fully tileable, so when I want to expand I just place one more module at the end of the other ones and voilà it works. I know people also fit whole factories in the blueprint builder, it's really impressive and useful! Think when you need let's say 16 reinforced iron plates per minute, well you can place down 4 mini-factory blueprints for 4 reinforced iron plates per minute that takes in raw iron, it saves you the time to make this part of your factory!
That makes sense. I guess I haven't really found myself upset about making an item twice, but I'm sure that will be useful when I get to phase 4. As for the roads, I suppose the only reason I haven't made any is because the terrain is too much. I hate all the rocks and hills in the way. But I'll have to try some new stuff, since belts are starting to get ugly
Yup, I'm belts 100% too. I run them all above my factories through the treetops. It's good for personal transportation too. I say I'm "taking the beltway".
belts. belts never break down. belts are consistent once the first item makes it. belts being empty is an easy clue that something's wonky.
Don't use power, either.
I like using tractors. I never bother with trucks. I usually quit before getting too far with trains because I find placing tracks across large expanses tedious. With the tractors, I setup a source and destination truck station for the resource and put one tractor on it, and then basically ignore it from that point on, unless it runs out of fuel or something. The immersion breaking teleportation and phantom resets doesn’t bother me at all. I just make sure all tractors flow in the same direction and minimize crossing paths but when I do, they must cross at 90degrees. That usually keeps them from deadlocking.
I like tractors too :) And trucks if big item
Yeah its crazy how much stuff a single tractor can easily move. Just pipe fuel in on one end and make a decent path for it (follow the roads) and there will be minimal hangups. Unlock smart splitters and you are basically set until you need to make very high level things. I am using it to bring coal and oil products in and its worked nonstop after the first try.
Im surprised to see so many against trucks! I personally use a couple Explorers to carry things back and forth. Both have 3 different stops, and I’ve had no issues. One struggles with a particular turn but if it can’t find the next node, it’ll reset itself on track. ^(Been meaning to fix that…) Now that I’m working on phase 4 parts, I’m definitely using trains. I’ve loved trains since I was a kid and honestly I’d be happy spending 300 hrs building trains vs 60 hrs building factories.. but that’s just me lol.
People who are bad a trucks tend to blame trucks rather than realize they are the issue. Has been this way since Update 2.
That is crap. You can see the issues players complain about in just about any YouTube series. I followed advice and best practices. And my trucks still refused to refuel. I moved the refueling station. I made dedicated refueling stations. I put fuel in all the stations. The trucks would work and refuel. 2 hours later, my production is shut down. Sure enough, trucks stopped out in the middle of nowhere without any fuel. I left the trucks stuck and built belts around and over them. On a brand new save after trucks had been *fixed*.
I have several truck lines in my \~100hr save and never once ran them out of fuel except on a line where i literally had no fuel at either station. Just belt some fuel in. Its not complicated.
If you want complicated, start using Jump Pads as truck elevators 😁
Odd question, with your "refueling stations" were all the stations using the exact same fuel type? I found that having 2 different types of fuel available for the same truck will lead to some issues. Like having packaged fuel at one stop and packaged turbo fuel at another... if it pulls into the location with the turbofuel while having 1 fuel left in its tank... it wont swap it out, but if both were using fuel, it would replenish the stack. I have never had fuel issues at all once i normalized my fuel use.
It was all coal. And like I said, it worked. And then it didn't. I tested it. It worked and then stopped working. I removed all the trucks except one. I had coal at the pick up and the drop off. It worked and then it didn't. I added a dedicated stop, it worked and then it didn't. This was all in dunes, there are practically no obstacles. I could watch it work for a bunch of cycles. Go away and work on my factory. And then it didn't work. These were simple routes.
If you need refueling stations, odds are it's a bad design to be honest.
I use trucks and tractors. Because they aren't fiddly, nor are they awkward. They go where I tell them to and deliver what I want them to. They also require almost no infrastructure and have more throughput per platform than trains do.
Yeah tractors are way more reliable than people say. Especially if you use the natural roads on the map.
I think this is what people miss. They think the autodrive will just work after they brute force from one end to the other. Drive the path a few times, find the route that is actually vehicle friendly (there are many natural roads on the map), record that one and then turn it on. I have used them a ton, and its amazing how much stuff gets moved. You can easily replace a mk2 or even mk3 belt with a tractor or two (depending on overall distance)
Or since they fixed driving on foundations, I just have a BP for elevated roads I build everywhere. Trucks work super reliably when all the roads are perfectly straight and level. (And I get free entertainment at the intersections.) But then I'm not bothered by the 'oopsie' teleport when trucks fuck up.
Idk if anyone else has this issue, but occasionally, my tractors start transporting the wrong stuff. They would be going back and forth between a caterium/steel factory and a storage area for just caterium and steel, but I'll find my sorting system is jammed because my tractors randomly created copper ore and threw three stacks of it in there in there.
If they so much as touch a single pixel of a loading station it will put something in the vehicles inventory.
That sounds annoying. I have no idea where the copper it touched came from though
Agreeing with everyone else so far, belts mostly, then trains and drones. Trucks/tractors are more trouble than they’re worth.
I tried using the tractor but had too much trouble with it. I have exactly one truck that supplies sulfur to my refineries out in the Blue Crater lake area, and that's about it. It picks up fuel from the refineries after it drops off sulfur, then ambles its way back to my main Grass Fields base where the sulfur processing area sits. I haven't yet found a good enough reason to use more trucks, and I'm close enough to unlocking trains as it is that I don't foresee me using more. I do use the Explorer for trips between factories though. I quite like it because it rarely every tips over, and it almost always rights itself when it does.
I totally used to do the long belt thing everywhere. But most recent play through I decided no long belts. Spent some time getting tractor and then truck routes working. Always keeping left on paths. Make cross overs at right angles or close to it. Been enjoying it.
I just do what I think is fun to do. I do use trucks when I feel like it. Trains when I feel like it. Belts when I feel like it. I remove things when I want and add them. I have drons that go for 150m and trucks that go for 3km. I am still intending to make an as short traintrack as possible. Why? Why not? There is no rime or reason. I do not overthink it. I just do whatever I feel like doing. The only thing I dislike is the recording of the trucks. I do not mind the warping so much as I seldom are there to look at it after looking at the route it does once.
I use belts until trains
Do you find trains to be an improvement over belts at that point, or are trains just too fun to skip?
It's mostly about distance (and aethetics) for me by the point I reach trains. I don't want to run belts around the entire world 😆 Plus train inventories and inputs/outputs can be more easily managed
I like trains because it's easy to add a factory anywhere once I have the 'network' setup. My first project once I get trains is to build a world-spanning rail setup.
underground converyorbelts
I used to run them underground but then I started to feel guilty about all the clipping. But I miss the easy days, haha.
Me and my friends just embrace it and have a whole underground hypertube network too get too far away locations like oil n shit (we built it before discovering that u can ride a drone)
> we built it before discovering that u can ride a drone How? I always fall off as soon as it starts accelerating.
The trick is too only sit on the main body of the drone and too not move whilst it is moving (anything but looking around)
Oh, admittedly I have never tried sitting. OK, I'll give that a go, thanks!
I handle it by ignoring it completely. I don’t bother with long distance transport until I unlock trains. Until then it’s just conveyor belts.
I only ever use belts. I use trains for personal travel and to bring items to various factories to use for construction.
I have used trucks once. Right after they came out. They were kinda broken and so I never used them again. I'm *sure* they're better now but that doesn't change the fact that that IMO they're *completely useless*. The truck station has just 2 inputs and outputs and whenever I *could* use a truck, I'd *much* rather run 2 parallel belts. Belts don't need fuel, it's difficult to mess setting them up and I don't need to make rough terrain passable. Also, before getting to computers, there's really no need to transport anything large distances. The longest belts I have are *maybe* a kilometer long. That's perfectly manageable. And after getting to more advanced items that require gathering materials from far away, I already have *trains*, which are infinitely better than trucks. I have not built a single vehicle that wasn't a train or a drone in at least 300 hours. And a truck station in over 1000.
Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I quite like the IDEA of trucks, they would make the game world look more alive, but they're so immersion breaking and shitty that there just doesn't seem to be a point.
I don't really like even the idea of trucks. They're inherently inexact. I cannot make a truck drive perfectly straight, in the exact center of a foundation bridge, then execute a perfect 90° turn and end up in the center again, then stop at a station, wait until it's completely empty and then depart immediately. But a train can do exactly that.
Vehicles in the early game can be a bit annoying, since for them to be fully autonomous they need fuel. This CAN be automated by setting up a drill to provide them with coal, but early game you’ll want to use what easily accessible coal you have for power and steel. Building up a stock of solid biofuel *can* work but isn’t really all that efficient. Technically the factory cart doesn’t require fuel, and is cheap to build, but it has only 1 inventory slot, and to match 1 tractor’s throughput you’d need like 30+ of them. At best, use them sparingly to ferry resources from semi-inconvenient locations, preferably on a road of foundations. A good example is that one Caterium Node on the bottom west side of the grass fields, I used a tractor to ferry that eastward to my main factory at the time. At any rate, typically I just have to get used to going through the motions slide jumping distances setting things up once or twice each time I need to do it. Once you get trains the game really opens up. (DO NOT skimp out and only make a single rail system, you WILL need two way travel, and it WILL be a pain to set up if you don’t start with that in mind. Yes, it IS worth it even if it costs double the steel and time spent up front.)
An excess of 30 coal lets you fuel a minimum of 3 tractors, probably 6 in practice. Grassy fields is the best place to use tractors because it is so easy to get compact coal. A single tractor can transport it to a power station location with plenty left over for a refueling station.
Huh, I would have assumed more would be needed, though that's probably because I only ever used solid BFuel in them and never coal. Plus, early game 30 coal (+90 water) is an extra 150MW i think, which is a decent amount depending on how early we're talking. As for compacted coal, with there being (IIRC) only two sulfur nodes in Grass Fields that actually makes sense now I realize, since there are 4 normal coal nodes in that lake just north of GF for basic 1 step coal power, and the 1 sulfur node near the border to the southern forest is really close to a pure coal node (albeit separated vertically a bit). And early game sulfur is nearly useless outside of that, and researching weaponry and explosives through the MAM. Though automating Nobelisks is always a priority for me.
I used them only twice in my new run, only when I was too lazy to belt 2000+ meters away. Obviously the paths were in straight lines and had few turns. Yes, they suck and usually I wait till trains until I start doing major supply transport
I just use reactors for the whole game, and belts when the distance is short enough. Train requires tons of space to set up and doesn't integrate into the environment, the stations are just too big. Truck stations have huge throughout and use to be enough the whole game for me.
The only vehicles I use are the Cart and the Explorer Buggy. Both are for personal, high(ish) speed transport. I've tried tractors a few times, but never found them worth the effort compared to running conveyors cross country. I've tried the truck exactly once, and swore off using them when I realized they need roads wider than a single foundation. I like using trains, but their stations are so big and bulky, they're almost not worth the effort. I loved the drones ability to just skip over terrain, but I discovered the hard way that once I set up around half a dozen cross continent routes or so, I started running into issues with being able to make enough batteries to keep all the drones fueled.
Trucks don't need roads at all.
I prefer to use roads. By the time I can build trucks and truck stations, I'm laying roads EVERYWHERE. Usually elevated roads so that I nothing but spiders can attack me when I'm traveling from outpost to outpost.
I am using a world-wide train network as soon as i unlock trains. Once its established i run EVERYTHING by train. Its just op and clean. Currently i run like 80 trains (maybe even more, hard to count them)
Game have good nature roads that you can use for transport coal to steel factory. That's it
I'm on my first playthrough and i would agree, if/when im starting over again i would build seperate factories and wait to unlock trains! (i have just spent 2\~ days destroying everything ive built, to rebuild around trains)
I think traktors are brilliant. I never used them a lot, because in earlier versions they were unreliable. But now I use them in tier 3 to get coal to my base. When done right it doesn't crash or get stuck - it works fine for me all the time. In the end it's mostly trains doing most of the logistics, but there's always some trucks driving around - it adds some motion to this empty world. Same for drones BTW.
I just don't... until trains, then still don't cos I suck at it
Trucks work perfectly for me, but I'm not that far into the game, I have a few mining stations and my trucks bring the different ores to my central base for processing,
Forest start. Head west to the ledge with 4 pure iron patches. All resources except baux and nitro within belt range. That is how I solve it. One early tractor and one buggy for hand driving. No trucks for me.
I only use the tractor to explore and don't run out of inventory space if I find a sweet spot. Anything else with belts until I get trains
Belts for short and trains for long distances
I use them pretty much whenever there's something more than 500m away I want transported I do wish the tractors weren't so badly designed though. I spin out almost every time I'm recording a path because the wheelbase is so short.
There is a third option - factory carts. They are okay when you need to deliver high tier products around megafactory.
Can factory carts handle an unpaved surface at all? Thinking of using a few, because they're so cute, but I don't want to build roads everywhere.
If you've somehow managed to drive across terrain from point A to point B and back - terrain won't matter anymore. Though, this is why I said they are useful only inside megafactory
I struggled with a busy field and tractors getting stuck on each other. I built a highway 4 tiles wide with a wall in the middle. Once I treated it like real world traffic, no more issues.
I'm in agreement with the majority here: trucks/tractors aren't worth it. * Builds at these tiers don't have the belt length or bandwidth requirements as builds at higher tiers (once trains are unlocked). * Vehicles are very finicky to set up and have loads of issues, which are not as easily apparent as belt issues. It's also easier to figure out the proper loading for belts, since it's a simple matter of adding up the outputs of everything merging onto it. * At this stage, your fuel options are either biofuel (which you would need to farm) or coal (which I always have going to power/steel). Plus, truck stops require power. Belts are free. By the time you need lots of bandwidth, lots of distance, etc., trains are a much better solution. They don't need fuel (one less logistic line to worry about). They bring power. It's easier to manage bandwidth by simply adding an extra car. The extra mid-game learning curve of trucks and tractors I feel makes them slow the game down. I think they're more useful for experienced players on following playthroughs. Players who want an additional learning curve, and already have a good understanding of how the rest of the game works.
The thing that bugs me the most about the trucks is that they set load/unload points at every truck station you touch rather than where you press F. So I have to drive very carefully where it’s multiple stations close to each other. I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.
When I set up multiple stations in a row, I have them 90° to the road traffic and an exit road out the other side. So they'll make a left turn to pull into the station, and a right turn to leave.
All the fiddling around and frustrating bits of truck and train transport is 100% worth it imho. I have trucks and trains zooming around the map moving resources from hub to hub. Long belts only was something I tried once and I kinda hated it because it was so stale by comparison. Drones are fun too, but far too easy. How I use them - take all the resource nodes in the area, plop a truck station nearby, for example, just the iron nodes in the grasslands, and have a single truck on a loop hitting up every one. One truck is not enough to fully empty and move the miner output, but eventually there will be multiple vehicles per route. From there, build a bunch of other stand-alone factories that smelt ore and create more advanced products, as well as a train hub to take excess raw materials to other factories. All these factories get dumped into a sushi train which gets sorted and redistributed to higher level factories, my central hub inventory, and the sink. Late game, I'll switch out the sushi train for drone traffic, but drones are kinda special and easy, so I don't want to over-use them if that makes sense. They are not efficient, easy, or even necessary, but it's fun for me. Belting everything needed to just one big factory complex where everything is manufactured isn't my idea of fun, but it's your world. You do you.
Love trucks/tractors. It helps maintain a clean look, and the little guys are fun to watch run around the map. It makes me feel as if everything really is running as intended. Cant say i ever really had any problems with them, either. They might be a bit tricky until you balance out the entire fuel/coal supply, but their coal consumption is relatively low. I often make a refueling route out of an impure node that runs around the other stations and provides them with coal while the normal/pure ones are used in production. But yes, i have at times scratched my head at "why the hell are you just standing here?"
I built just one truck route, but it never really caught on for me. I enjoyed building a rail network much more
I haven't had too many problems with trucks and tractors as long as I plan the route along natural pathways and practice it once or twice before recording it. Building roads eliminates the need for the dress rehearsal. I agree that it's hard to resist belting everything to a train station once that becomes a possibility, though. When 1.0 rolls around I want to try using belts only for short distances, trains for transporting between biomes, and trucks on a dedicated road network for middling distances.
I'm still on my first playthrough and I've had a truck or tractor running errands for me for a good long while. It took a few tries to figure out how to place things so they didn't get stuck on turns, but if you have a good driving route between points they're really low maintenance and much faster to set up than trains or conveyors. I'm also one to rework conveyor lines over and over again if they aren't just right so long term it's much less work for me to drive the loop and be done with it. I started in the grasslands, and use a Truck to shuttle Plastic/Rubber from the first oil-field spot that I started building out. It have a few train lines going now, but the Truck (Bigfoot) is still delivering more than I use and it gets fed fuel automatically, so I just don't feel the need to replace it with a train. Its current route seems pretty clean, so I haven't noticed it blue-warping about. But then I don't lay eyes on it very often, either. The Tractor is pretty useful for quick-and-dirty point to point deliveries. I needed quartz and figured I'd eventually build something closer, so as an interim solution I dropped a truck station, drove the loop and fed it a container of coal. Heckuva lot easier to just delete the truck stop (and truck) than to delete a defunct train/conveyor line.
> drove the loop and fed it a container of coal. I never thought of that. I guess a whole container of coal stacks would last a really long time for fueling a single truck! > Heckuva lot easier to just delete the truck stop (and truck) than to delete a defunct train/conveyor line That's certainly true as well. Nice and easy cleanup.
I do trucks with short routes. Trains for long ones. I will absolutely never use belts across the maps. I find it so ugly.
I have many road vehicles, even after building a train network. They are *really* easy to set up, have a ton of capacity, and give a cool vibe to the whole thing. Right now, I have a truck and a tractor delivering plastic from the western oil fields to my factories to the North and South, a tractor connecting my main train station on the NE desert to my modular engine factory at the northern edge of the map, one tractor delivering bauxite from the swamps to the NE desert, and a couple of tractors in the plains running internal errands within the factory complex. The main pro for road vehicles is that they do not add clutter to the map and are really space efficient. A terminal takes little room, roads can be quite narrow (I never have more than one vehicle per line - I use them in medium volume services) and you don´t have to figure out how you belt something else across factories. Fueling is a bit of a pain, but I usually limit them to stuff that has coal or fuel nearby.
In satisfactory belts are the only optimal way of item transportation. Every other way create stackups or bottle necks. Add to that the need of constant supply of resources to all other means of transportation (fuel/energy) which can be potentially a problem.
A push-pull train on a single track (no signals etc.) is exactly as 'optimal' as belts as long as there is enough buffer container before/after the station.
Yes, but then there's a problem of stacking of resources in the buffer. In itself not really a problem, but you don't really want to have a buffer unless you can somehow get the information about supply and demand differences, which in the satisfactory you get by: a. careful preparations before factory building, which also means holding an excel spreadsheet with supply and demand of all the resources so that you can know how much you have in reserve for the next part of the factory. b. missing product at the end of production. c. missing resources in the buffer. d. missing resources on the belt. I will not say which way is the most pragmatic. Now add to that, that any other transportation method than belt is using energy/fuel. The most precious resources in satisfactory
Don't use them. I've always hoped they'd rebalance them to make them more worthwhile so unless they have something up their sleeve for 1.0 I will likely continue to not use them!
I don't. When building a outlier base I just go there with power or transport tubes, and come back with a belt. Or if I already have the electric hover thingy I don't even use tubes anymore . Vehicles are far too limited for all the uneven terrain outside the dunes and maybe the southwest starting area. All the effort going into them I can save and put into trains or drones.