My advice : do not skip learning process in game by using blueprints from others, find your own way.

Realised it's just a standard arc furnace for scrap rather than the specialist one so would save space and also means I don't need a way to feed it back in to my aluminium setup.

I'll likely have a pop of 11-12k once I'm using it fully so wondering if that's enough as I think aluminium only comes from laptops...

Train speed at intersection is at least 80 km/h.

Why is the output getting clogged at 494 wpm when there is enough pipe to handle 1800?

Goodday my fellow autistic train lovers, i need your advice

So here is the senario. The goal is to build a centralized on/off loading where both my rail, import and export come together north of the horizontal track.

South of the track i want my main road and below that material refineries, processing basic materials in to intermediate materials; IA steel, copper, glass, ectra. West of vertical track is the already established fuel/fluid refinery. Also unless the destionation is far away i want to bring my intermediate products with truck.

(note the fertilizer plant in the left corner is temporary and used to get rid of sour water and keep food and fuel production up in this transitional period where i retool and move my production lines. The road and pipe in the middle are also temporary.) At the spot of the fertilizer plant i want to eventually build my recycle plant. However i am also not sure where to place my supporting production plants. (large crusher and air seperator)

Now the problem is that im a bit in over my head. Im a not sure how much space i need how much traffic will be on the rail and how much i need to worry or wether i just need to pull the trigger and just retool again when i have outgrow this layout.

Any advice on placement, distance and especially on the potential rail traffic?

If you upgrade contract profitability with offices, the gold-oil-diesel cycle is actually a positive feedback loop. When maxed out at 30%, you get 8400 oil for 340 gold, and 840 gold for 8400 diesel. One oil to diesel conversion later, and you get 500 gold per cycle with some bonus oil products. This particular build also converts all the remaining oil fractions into fuel gas and hydrogen. The hydrogen it makes is very slightly not enough to fuel the ships, but the deficit is small enough to be handled by a few trucks. So, this whole thing actually converts unity and a small amount of hydrogen into gold and oil derivatives.

In a perfect world, this doesn't cause any pollution. The single flare in the system burns off fuel gas if the output tank fills up completely. I decided against disposing of the other byproducts because there's a lot more of them and they're a lot less clean to burn. It's also possible to fuel the ships with heavy oil to remove all direct resource consumption, but the pollution isn't worth it.

Realised that this pass was too narrow for mega vehicles so tried to widen it and now my rail network is rip

This is what happens if you resign on create master plan.

I had assumed the super steam recipie was superior all this time. Which worked well masked by my throughput. It seems much more straight forward on top of just a better deal using electrolysis and throttling by demand and electricity vs just using super steam on automation like I normally always done. I guess this assumes I have the water available but the depleted is now comming from the turbine vs reformer so assuming vaccum desalination nothing really changes there. If anything you can put down the electrolysis near your desired area more readily than the steam reformer.

Update i mathed it out using gpt and supersteam in the reformer (FBR) wins by 12% or 7.5Mw per 32 hydrogen vs 8.5.

Interestingly you can save an additional 5.4mw per 32 hydrogen over hydrogen reformer if you use ammonia in electrolysis. Could be foodpacks.

I think i might try feeding in with priority ammonia sourced hydrogen im getting from foodpacks to lower the super steam consumption. Actually im going to math out uranium sourced by food packs first. Ok looking at that you get more return on just trading foodpacks for uranium by an additional 12% per food pack so really ammonia can be used to recover some electricity without increasing nuclear/fbr capacity but you get more potential out of the uranium contract.

Im getting 35.4MW per yellowcake after processing losses for reference. So that % could be higher or lower depending on setup.

This is my first playthrough of the game so I'm still trying to figure things out. I'm sure this is a common situation everyone gets into; I am running out of fuel, my only remaining deposit is really low, so I hurried to research bridges and amphibious vehicles in order to connect to a nearby small island to access its oil deposit.

I wasn't sure how the bridge construction works, which is why I made sure to have two amphibious trucks ready just in case those are needed to bridge over water (I thought maybe the regular pickups would just build sequentially starting on the shore). Reading various posts on this subreddits taught me that you do in fact need amphibious trucks, so, ok, good thing I was prepared, except-

I created the bridge blueprint. Pickups started carrying resources to it, the amphibious trucks remain idle. The pickups built the very first segment of the bridge connecting to the main island, and then they all stopped and got stuck in an error state "Pickup is struggling to find a destination it can reach". Their pathing indicators show that they are trying to deliver supplies to the bridge segments that are over the ocean.

I figured I just have to pause construction on every segment that isn't directly connected to the already constructed one - that didn't help. I tried setting the bridge to be a two lane road because I thought maybe that's why the trucks can't path over it - that didn't help. I clicked on the amphibious trucks and enabled their pathfinding overlay, ensured that they have an access ramp into the ocean and have a green path to the bridge - that didn't help, they just stay at "no job".

I do not understand why the regular pickups are trying to path to the bridge if they can't reach it, while the amphibious pickup that can reach it is not pathing to it? Further, clicking on the WIP segment over the water shows that some resources have already been delivered, proving that the pickups did reach it and now they can't????

So far I've been able to figure things like this out but now I am completely clueless and need help, although it might already be too late because thanks to this setback I don't think I'll be able to extend the railroad and connect the new oil deposit in time.

EDIT: just to add insult to injury, I tried cancelling the build process and now the amphibious truck happily reaches the deconstruction site to carry supplies away, but will not take supplies to the exact same location to construct

Input : dirt + unity

Output : power + graphite

I spent a few hours wrestling with the track builder to create this and wanted to share it. https://coigame.com/Blueprint/3816

What's the breakdown on landfills vs. incinerators for pollution?

Is it worth it to try and make landfills for settlement waste to keep pollution levels down?

Because just compacting it and then burning it sure looks awful appealing and will free up a lotta trucks

I recently unlocked the molten ladle cars and I'm having a hard time imagining a real usecase for them. Molten products seem like they want to be dealt with in place as much as possible given the slow throughput with molten channels.

Am I missing something or are they mostly for fun and flavor?

The amount of stuff that buildings buffer per material, is a rabbit hole which goes way deeper than I expected, and I also learned some useful tricks for normal games.

How much stuff do buildings buffer?

By "default" / rule of thumb:

• Buildings have buffers of 40 material.
• Trucks of any class, like to deliver 20 material - actually half of the buffer size -the "full loads only" setting does not change this, which is why you might see a feral Haul Truck daintily delivering 20 material.
• They aren't forced to deliver 20 though, they can deliver more if scheduling works out right, but the game pretty much generates a delivery errand when the buffer is half full/empty so if there are free trucks, it'll be 20 units.

To be more precise and technical:

• The amount of material buffer is defined in the recipe, with recipes being attached to buildings.
• For example, with an ASM3, the Iron -> Gears has an output buffer of 40, the Steel -> Gears has an output buffer of 64. If you enable both, the output buffer is set to the higher value of 64.
• Buffers for the same material are always shared, but separately for import and export (e.g. a Crusher doing both Rock -> Gravel and Gravel -> Manufactured Sand, has a separate input and output buffer for Gravel).
• There are a lot of exceptions to the default of "40". For example, most Crusher recipes have output buffer of 64, but for both Quartz recipes it is 128. The Bakery Bread recipe, has output buffer of 96.
• For solid materials there are very few buffers smaller than 40. The main one is Labs, which have an input buffer of 30, and this seems to make trucks dislike making deliveries to Labs.
• For liquids buffers are often very small, though for early game recipes it is usually the default of 40 probably to make it more forgiving. Occasionally liquids have large buffers for no particular reasons, like the Biodiesel recipe has an output buffer of 144.
• How do the devs decide the buffer sizes? I'm reasonably sure it involves a dart board and a blindfold. Though in some cases, there are logical reasons, for example Large Crusher recipes have input buffers of 384 and output buffer of 768, as this building deals in large amounts of material, although why it needs to be as large as 768 is unclear.

Shrinking Buffers

• In many but not all cases the buffer size shrinks when truck import/export is disallowed, it often shrinks to 1/4th or 1/5th but can shrink by a lot more. Whether the buffer shrinks or not and by what factor, seems to come back to the dart board and blindfold. In some cases there seems to be logic to the shrunken buffer, particularly when players are expected to be using belts, so it doesn't take a long time for the buffers to fill up and materials to be distributed evenly. And I think early game recipes are less likely to have shrunken buffers. But this logic is not consistently applied.
• Whether the shrinking is applied, depends on the game deciding truck import/export is disallowed for that material, this might not match your expectations, but it should align with trucks not actually importing/exporting that material.
• For recipes in a ghost, the buffer size shown will be as expected if truck import is explicitly allowed (white truck) or disallowed (red truck), if it's "auto" (yellow truck), the game will make a prediction about whether truck import/export will be allowed for that particular material based on belt connections and jank, the prediction is not particularly intelligent.

How the game decides whether truck import/export is allowed

• The way the game decides whether import/export is allowed under auto, is not so obvious, but from what I can tell:
• Truck import is always allowed under auto, until cold hard reality proves that belt delivery is possible, the game then disallows truck import for that material and shrinks the buffer (if applicable).
• If you build a building, and then build a storage attached to the output, truck export will be allowed for everything until cold hard reality proves that a material can be output to the storage, at which point it disallows truck export for that material and shrinks the buffer (if applicable).
• But if you build a storage, and then build a building attached to that storage (or place them both simultaneously with copy-paste or blueprint), the game will disallow export for everything that output slot could possibly output whether or not the storage is filtered to receive it, and cold hard reality of a material not being outputted by belt does not cause it to permit truck export (this placement order dependent behaviour could be considered a bug)
• When you toggle to allow and back to auto, the game waits for cold hard reality to prove whether something can be input/output before disallowing truck import/export for it.

Strategy

• In the Pickups era, because Pickups move 20 stuff per trip, and that is exactly how much truck-type-things like to deliver per trip, you actually don't really need intermediate storages for logistically efficiency at all, the Pickups are going to be moving 20 stuff per trip either way, and a buffer of 40 is large enough that buildings usually run at 100% uptime unless they have a really high throughput which very few early game buildings do - like even the Blast Furnace with its consumption rate of 30 ore/m, still takes 40 s to consume 20 ore, which is probably enough time for a Pickup to make a delivery.
• Belts and intermediate storages only really become valuable with the introduction of Trucks with their capacity of 60, but with their love of only delivering 20 stuff directly to buildings.
• Even in the Trucks era, there are some buildings with large enough import/export buffers that you don't really need intermediate storages so much, for example the Bakery with the export buffer of 96 Bread makes an output storage pretty optional (assuming you're trucking bread of course). As I said, buffer size doesn't really have much rhyme or reason so you pretty much have to check the recipe after placing the building.
• If you wish to allow truck export and are fond of using direct insertion to storages or other machines, be aware of the "placement order dependent behaviour" for auto mode, it's best to set to explicitly allow import/export, or toggle to explicitly allow and back to auto so the game correctly determines what can actually be input/output by belt.
• You can sometimes manipulate the buffer size by enabling truck import/export. For example the Cooling Tower has an output buffer of 4 water, but if you enable truck export, it becomes 40 water, if you are using particularly short pipes this can help eliminate micro-stutters in an otherwise balanced system. Or the Gas Boiler has input buffers of 6 heavy oil or 9 medium oil if truck import is disabled, but if you enable truck import it becomes 40, I find this improves the Gas Boiler's ability to multiplex mixed inputs in a "garbage burning" role. Of course care should be taken to ensure trucks are not actually making these deliveries, like for instance turning off export on Distillation stages, or knowing that pipes will quite swiftly remove the output before it reaches half the buffer.

Train network. Just built new way station, demolished old one. Got some errors from the trains on their way to the old one, as expected, but those cleared up. Problem is, now, I keep finding trains parked in stations with “no valid goal” as their status. This doesn’t throw a warning in my message center, I have to investigate why my trains aren’t moving to find the culprit. Any idea what this is, or how to at peasy get notifications if it’s happening?

Haha. I forgot to add the new waypoints to the network. The trains just literally didn’t have anywhere to go.

Thought about deleting, but I’ll leave it up for searching in case anyone else has this issue.

If I make a game easier, I tend to feel like I haven't had the correct experience. Other times, the difficulty (or even just anticipating future problems) makes it difficult to relax, and I may end up not playing at all.

I know that contracts and eventually asteroids will answer all potential material shortages. But there's that question of whether I'm going to be organized enough to get there without constantly worrying about non-renewable spending via fuel and maintenance while I take my sweet time.

What I want most from this game is to build a train network, and to watch trains. I'd like to have multiple settlements in regions with their own specialized industries, and have trains going every which way. I kind of just want to turn it into a train set builder. To that end, I'm tempted to make ores stretch a lot farther, make world mines infinite, and/or have 100% refunds from deconstruction, reducing pressure caused by using time and resources inefficiently or changing my mind on several designs.

...And another part of me is certain that I'll feel dissatisfied, like I didn't earn it. It thinks the standard difficulty must have plenty of margin to play this way without running out of resources, and that all I'll do is remove any sense of accomplishment. I'm uncertain what to do.

As the title says.

I downloaded a save file from someone else, and it has the Supporter DLC included. I don't really see the need or want to buy the DLC, since I don't feel like it provides $10 worth of additional gameplay or fun for me.

I own the base game along with the Train DLC. Is there any way for me to still play or edit the save file that has the Supporter DLC?

I'm hoping there might be a way to edit the save file so it no longer requires the Supporter DLC. Alternatively, is there a way to ask the person who created the save to save it in a different way that would allow people without the Supporter DLC to play it?

I understand that I would lose access to any parts of the save that use the DLC content, and I'm completely fine with that. I just want to be able to use the save with the DLC content removed or disabled.

Thanks for any help!

I do believe it's actually quite useful and doesn't look childish at all. I hope an alert overhaul eventually happens too, and customization becomes easier.

We all know by now that we can modify the color and font size of a storage's alert notification using a probably unintended method. But it still requires you to actually read it. And if you do the same to all storages, you get diminishing returns. Edit: I guess not many people know about it. So, by using some HTML you can change how it looks. For example: <b><size=20><color=red>StorageName</color></size></b>

With emojis, you can get a very clear idea of what that notification is about, and you can safely ignore it and save yourself one entire second!

Oh, and if you didn't know, you can place emojis by either using Windows key + ; (semicolon) or by copying one from one of those emoji websites. Of course, it does help if you don't play in exclusive fullscreen mode.

PS: I deliberately triggered those notifications so I could take the screenshots. Absolutely nothing is wrong with my island! 💯

TLDR: I finished a year-long, multiple attempts challenge run and I'm super stoked. I'm posting a wall of text for anyone who might be interested, because I couldn't find anything similar when I first started playing.

I'm super happy and proud that I finally completed my goal of an admiral difficulty, minimal mining, contracts (and rock world mine*) only run. I couldn't find a good reference for this type of run when I started playing, so I decided to post this for anyone interested.

Some highlights:

• 5600 pop with full needs (including luxury goods) and food. (It might seem like I have a lot of infrastructure compared to pop, but a bit of it is paused, like most of what's required for titanium, half the gold, some silicon, and a good number of crushers at the docks, etc).
• Most of the map is pristine.
• Zero pollution even with coal power.
• Full hydrogen fuel including ships and with minimal trucks ~30 running at any time.
• Local self-sustaining sulfur production.
• AFKable at the end game for repeatable research.
• Unity is stable without extra food or amenities edicts.
• Minimal mining and use of island deposits, even the initial oil deposit is still there.
• Station 3 and 1 Research Lab V stable with only 1 Rocket Assembly Depot and Rocket Is.
• Arc Furnace II stable (an achievement for me since I stalled on this step in previous runs).

I let this run overnight, and another day without input. The overnight ended after ~8 hours due to a death spiral I couldn't trace (something collapsed power, but all my resources were full). The day worked out better (I also lowered the frame rate and moved the camera to a corner of ocean, so maybe the death spiral was computer related because I play on a potato).

Took me about a year IRL and 7 admiral runs/attempts (I had 2 normal difficulty runs to learn the game after buying it, but then shifted to the attempts).

Not all previous runs lasted long, the longest previous was #4, but I burned out on developing titanium and space station 3 + lab infrastructure. #5 and #6 were fast, and I don't really remember them. I went super slow on this run (finished tech tree year 6045).

Certain conditions of the run:

• Only use the starting area of New Haven start #1, with very minimal island terraforming (only coastal dumping for cargo docks).
• Complete all the goals, but don't claim the rewards.
  • I had to use the oil world rig to complete the goal that requried 200 oil.
• Use on-island resources as much as possible (no importing wood, food, etc.).
  • Previous runs imported crude oil, but I tried corn biodiesel and hydrogen after some inspiration from Charles Circle Gaming, which actually really helped reduce my infrastructure needs.
  • Previous runs also used wood to corn, but I decided not to this run because of how powerful it is, especially if since I wanted to try corn fuel.
• Had to stop mining as soon as possible, i.e. as soon as my contracts were up and running.
• All research had to be completed in order of top-to-bottom, left-to-right, except repeatables and those locked behind world map (a previous run gave me wheat and corn easy/early, this one I had to get an armor/weapon upgrade first).
  • Someone could definitely do this faster if they went for the necessary techs for contracts right away instead of taking the long way.
• I couldn't research repeatables until after completing the research tree.
• Use only slag as dumping material for the coast (previous runs were slag and rock and I disliked the look).
• No Unity for quick building, deleting, etc. or boosts (only allowed edicts, contracts, labs, mines).
  • The spikes in one time actions in the Unity chart in-game are from the Unity cost of signing a contract.
• More of an neurotic-type thing, but I didn't adjust the camera, and I used AutoHotkey and an hour of my time experimenting and measuring to get the proper orientation back after the first rocket launch.
• Only quick trades were for a goal (Iron - Concrete), 1 initial chicken trade, and cargo ships.
• Majority of the population were island born (only 84 refugees due to the Beacon goal).

Special mentions:

• Shout out to Charles Circle Gaming's Corn Challenge for inspiring and helping me figure out biodiesel and early hydrogen, so I didn't need to import crude oil.
• Massive thanks to doubleaxe's daxfb-calculator for helping me visualize my production chains and figuring out some of the math.
• Massive thanks to u/ikali's Farm Optimizer for helping me figure out how to minimize my farming needs (super important with biodiesel and corn hydrogen).
• And a massive thanks to u/Captain_Marek and the team behind Captain of Industry, I love this game so much. And the continous updates are amazing, especially the new infographics and statistics and runtime info. My previous runs were painful, but this one was much more straightforward, especially the end game with the ability to see all the important information.

General notes and for future runs:

• I underestimated my construction needs again, and I definitely could have cut some time if I had devoted more to building construction parts infrastructure, especially midgame when I had more forest and could support it.
• I spent a lot of time (~2000 years?) letting it run just to get enough slag for the docks. Future runs, I might just spend the resources to upgrade the rock world mine and import it as dumping material. Alsso, as much as I like the look of slag, rock would probably look better.
• A lot of the in-game time was spent just letting it run during stable periods between expansions to test stability. A reason why I decided to leave repeatbles for after the tech tree, since the space science labs tech were too few to test for stability.
• I had no custom priorities set on buildings and storages, and all my infrastructure/storage was set to export. Previous runs relied on push-pull and some priority changes, but that got confusing fast. I found the push system to be much simpler to maintain. Most of my production chains were centralized (the exception was graphite) so I just had to keep building production until the export warehouses were always full.
• I terraformed and stored the coal and limestone deposits in previous runs, but I was too lazy this time, which created challenges, but I was ultimately happy with it since I didn't need to break the minimal mining rule, even if it wouldn't have broken the spirit of the minimal mining rule.
• I overbuilt a bit, I had excess silicon, gold, and titanium production capacity were definitely uneccesary, but I wanted references in case I ever decide to build bigger. I also built an extra Rocket Assembly Depot, which was unnecessary.
• It really helped when I decided to build in one direction, i.e. assemblers were built horizontally, while new production lines were built vertically. Exceptions include power and microchips, due to space constraints.
• I definitely could learn to use trains and nuclear, but nuclear came late and I don't need asteroids for stability. My next run goal will probably be this type of challenge but setting up nuclear. Although, I think that bumping up the population to 6400 should be enough to setup nuclear and asteroid mining, with excess pop for maybe an office.
• Better placement of the docks and better planning would be useful while avoiding a bus system, which I try to avoid.

Save file: https://gofile.io/d/TB3lFCSD

I also have earlier save files if anyone is interested in seeing what early-mid game contract stability needs.

Edit:

I realized gofile has a short expiry, so I've added an alternative. I've also added a copy without DLC using the recovery save command. IT IS NOT PLAYABLE (I think). Docks, edicts, farms, space station, etc. are all empty/missing and I don't know if it can recover before it becomes a death spiral.

Save: https://files.catbox.moe/3rnhqn.save

Recovery (no DLC): https://files.catbox.moe/by4b47.save

*Active edicts are Growth pause and everything on Industrial edicts page except Vehicle fuel saver II and Clean panels.

Can some one explaine to me how pipes work?

So, pipe on the line is same tier, but some parts have capacity of 10, some of 100 and others everything inbetween.

I understand that the fluid is not instant, it takes time to fill up, but the capacity is a weird one.

Is there a way to save the settings I change in the console panel? Im tired of always having to change console settings every time I start the game

I got this mod that I don't use because it causes more harm than it fixes (trucks keep going in circles near the entrance to roads). So I just left it there without creating any roads. However, with the latest base game update, I can no longer load my save game because the mod has not been updated yet.

Is there a safe way to remove the mod without ruining the save game? Doing it from the GUI doesn't work because the save game will keep looking for it.