Factorio Forums

Inserters shouldn't take fuel from locomotives like in the cars.

Placing fuel on the transport belts is very annoying behavior of inserters on the unload stations. It forces using the smart inserters instead of fast inserters on the stations where you are using trains with different amount of cars and the locomotives on the both sides.

In the cars inserters could not take the fuel. They take only inventory of vehicle. This solution should be also used for the trains.

I totally agree with this, locomotives should be drop only inventories, not allowing inserters to pickup stuff from them.

And then your train runs out of fuel because the inserter stole it all.

How about add to trains options checkbox like this: "Allow loading/unloading only on stations". So inserters wouldn't steal coal from locomotive or put it in cargo wagon when train stops on signal near station.

In automatic mode a train is already loaded/unloaded only at train stops/when it waits at a train stop only.

ssilk wrote:In automatic mode a train is already loaded/unloaded only at train stops/when it waits at a train stop only.

Yeah, I was going to say, but I wasn't sure. if a train in automatic mode waits at lights near an inserter, it won't interact with the train. it only interacts with the train when it stops at a station.

The OP is complaining that he is using "double headed" trains of different lengths, so when a shorter train stops at the station, the inserters removing resources will pull the fuel out of the rear locomotive.

if you park a car next to an inserter, it will pull out everything except the fuel, This is also true for burner powered furnaces. the OP is sugesting that the inserter shouldn't pull fuel form the train either.

But I've used that to supply some remote stops with coal without needing a separate wagon. :-/

Oh, THAT'S where the coal that has been fouling my production lines is coming from! It wasn't gremlins, after all. It also explains why I could never catch it happening--it only happened when I was fooling around with the train manually.

This is quite annoying, to the point where it could even be considered a bug. There should at least be an option to prohibit automatically removing fuel.

I've had cases of trains running out of fuel in the wilderness because of this, and I had to travel by car to inspect what was wrong. Maybe there should also be a notification for this?

To me, all the complaints I've read here sound like valid penalties for poor station design.

If a fix is planned, I hope it won't disallow removing coal from train /cars/ and mistaking that for fuel from the engine. I've never had to actually use trains to haul coal, but its potentially possible and part of the open world design philosophy, I think, should be to make it as open to as many different playstyles as possible (and I could imagine Arumba or some other professional player possibly challenging themselves with something along the lines of 'Use Only Burner Tech' for which coal trains would probably become a necessity once your complex gets large enough).

n9103 wrote:To me, all the complaints I've read here sound like valid penalties for poor station design.

No. It's a problem on the big stations in the huge rail network with the multiple kinds of trains in motion.

Don't run different length double-head trains at the same station, and/or set any inserters that will be unloading from possible engines to unload specific types of cargo only.

Bad enough that you've extended a monorail system to more than one train and stop, but to make a full system of it? For shame

This would be helpful. For now, you can use smart Inserters, and set them all to extract the four ore types. Make sure you use the Copy-settings to save time.

@n9103: That would disallow a big part of trains.


The whole topic will be solved as soon as we can use smart logic on the inventory of trains and waggons. But until then, in my opinion we should disallow taking fuel out of the fuel slot of trains.

You mean it would force a lot of people to stop using an inferior design for their trains.

It would force people to either design big, space-wasting turning circles (I like them, but whatever) or double the amount of stations and tracks. Removing the ability to extract fuel from the fuel slot is simple and easy.
Oh, and you remove one possible design decision. More possible designs = better, in the average case.

Well, preventing fuel from being removed would prevent me from making my own design decision.
I've ended up placing low capacity chests at remote outposts, and have them supply coal to trains. They would also take coal if there was less than 10 coal in the box.
Good way to prevent your trains from being stranded in case you messed up something in your fueling or scheduling system and didn't notice until a good deal later. Or, a decent way to create routes that don't depend on a central refueling point, so long as they get visited by a train that did.
When I decide to set up a general repair/combat/etc supply train, I often use it to stock these outposts as well, not just with supplies, but also with the fuel in the engine. It's like 2 free slots of fuel before you actually have to worry about running out.

There is another possible issue from removing fuel from the train.

in the instance where every peice of fuel was removed, the train would leave the station, run out of fuel in it's current burner, then stop in the middle of nowhere to be eaten by biters.


Being able to remove fuel from the fuel slot is a bad idea, if you want fuel somewhere, put it in a cargo wagon instead.

I've used the locomotive to supply coal to an outpost, too, and I thought it was kind of cool. I'm not sure I would have done it that way if I'd known about setting filters on cargo car slots, though. I can see both sides of the argument.


Here's a suggestion: what if we make inserters unable to remove fuel from locomotives (treating it like input materials in assemblers), but then we allow smart inserters to take anything in their filter from any container. So a smart inserter is allowed to take fuel from a locomotive, or alien artifacts from a purple science assembler, or iron plates from a steel furnace, etc.

This way, nobody gets surprised that inserters have stolen their train fuel, since you have to literally tell it to remove coal. But if you want to do that, it's easy to set up. It also gives us some more options (not sure how useful stealing inputs from assemblers would be, but someone might want to), and makes smart inserters behave sort of like the player avatar, who can also steal materials from an assembler. If we want to carry this even further, we could allow smart inserters to put outputs back into an assembler, just like the player can.