Messing with Monorails


Besides belts, Monorails will be the other logistics mechanism, unlocking after the first AI Candle goal. The working design is something like a simplified combination of Factorio trains and Satisfactory drones:

  • Monorail Towers link up using elevated rails with length and curve limits
  • Towers have three fields: name, target name, and max-cars
  • "Routes" are point-to-point deliveries by Monorail Cars
  • Towers can both send and receive cars

When a tower is filled by belts, a car is spawned and dispatched to an available tower with the target name and a free car slot, where it is emptied and removed. There's no manual placement of cars or any need for rail loops to return cars to the start point. However towers have separate inventories for input and output so it's possible to create interconnected send/receive loops.

Excuse the working colors -- bright orange is easy to see for debugging :-)

Depending on how these turn out after more game play, flexible departure rules might show up. The system is a many:many push mechanism and it might yet be useful to explore a pull mechanism too.

Monorails will be in the next release after a bit more debugging...

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Looking good!