Electric trains, but UPS-friendly
Do you want to reduce your dependency on fossil fuels and use solar or nuclear power to run your trains?
Do you think just plopping down an energy distributor that magically transports power to your trains wherever they are is too easy and too unrealistic?
You don’t want to risk slowing down your game for electric trains?
Solution: battery-electric trains.
What’s in the mod?
- One battery-electric locomotive, equivalent to the vanilla locomotive.
- Four tiers of battery packs, equivalent to vanilla locomotives powered by coal, solid fuel, rocket fuel and nuclear fuel.
- Three tiers of stationary chargers: standard speed, 5x speed, 25x speed.
- Chargers available with standard and low power priority. Low priority is on the same level as accumulators and won’t slow down your factory during a power shortage.
- Recycling recipes: battery packs can be recycled to get 90% of the used batteries back when you want to move to higher tier battery packs. (Can be disabled if you want to use other recycling mods.)
- Cheat mode: freely adjust top speed, acceleration power and braking force of battery-electric locomotives. (Increases top speed of all wagons, too.)
Performance
- One battery-electric locomotive is as computationally intensive as one vanilla locomotive.
- One recharger is as computationally intensive as one electric furnace.
- No run-time scripting to drive trains or charge battery packs.
- Run-time scripting is only used to rescue partially discharged battery packs when mining or deconstructing a battery-electric locomotive and can be disabled, if you want.
- Suitable for bases of any size.
Noteworthy
- Discharged battery packs don’t disappear and must be taken out of locomotives to recharge them.
- Fast refueling: swapping battery packs takes less than a second and one battery pack lasts as long as a fully fueled vanilla locomotive. A single refueling/recharging station should be able to handle all your trains.
- Running real trains on batteries is stupid because you need way too many. Expect to be producing a lot of batteries. One Factorio battery holds 4 MJ (based on the Personal battery), which is as much as one piece of coal, so you need 150 batteries for a basic battery pack. They’re reusable forever, though.
- Mining/deconstructing a battery-electric locomotive with a partially discharged battery pack inside will return a discharged battery pack instead.
- Low-priority chargers never take energy from accumulators, so if you rely on solar power, make sure to recharge all battery packs during daytime or use standard-priority chargers.
- All graphics are based on (old) Factorio graphics, so they don’t look out of place.
- The battery-electric locomotive sounds less like a combustion engine, but there’s still room for improvement.
Recommended mods
Mod compatibility
- Bob's Vehicle Equipment: You can choose which one of the mod’s locomotive equipment grids to use for battery-electric locomotives.
- EvenMoreLight: Adds more lights to battery-electric locomotives.
- Krastorio 2: The Krastorio 2 equipment grid for locomotives can be used with battery-electric locomotives.
- Space Exploration: Trains and chargers can be used in space.
Feedback
Feel free to request compatibility with other mods and please report any bugs you notice.
Factorio 2.0 notice
The mod should work with version 2.0 and Space Age but it hasn’t been tested that much yet. If you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to report them.