One of my trains ran out of fuel and I put a new battery pack in. Why is it still out of fuel?

Check if there are discharged battery packs in the locomotive’s spent fuel slots. There can only be two discharged battery packs in there, so if another battery pack ends up fully discharged, the locomotive won’t take a fresh battery pack because it can’t put the just discharged pack anywhere. Make sure to always unload discharged battery packs during refueling and manually take them out during manual refueling.

Why did the game tell me that I just lost a battery pack?

By default, partially spent fuel items aren’t returned when mining or deconstructing a locomotive. Fossil fuels for vanilla locomotives are expendable and nobody cares about losing one piece of coal. This mod’s battery packs are reusable, so to avoid losing a partially discharged battery pack, a discharged battery pack is placed in the locomotive’s spent fuel slots during mining or deconstructing. This doesn’t work if both slots are already taken by discharged battery packs, so you lose the partially discharged pack. Make sure to always unload discharged battery packs during refueling or take them out before mining or deconstructing a locomotive.

Why is there only one locomotive? I want faster locomotives.

Because vanilla Factorio also has only one and battery-electric locomotives are meant to be an equivalent replacement that doesn’t break game balance. If you want faster locomotives, just enable cheatsy locomotives and wagons in the settings. That’s why they’re there. ;)

Why does charging battery packs take so long and/or draw so much power?

You don’t get free energy. 1 J = 1 Ws. Charging a 600 MJ battery pack at 2 MW takes 300 s. If you want to charge it in 12 s, you’ll need 50 MW. Though if you do want free energy, you can cheat by setting the charging efficiency to a value above 1.0.

What should I do when slow chargers make my trains run out of fuel and faster chargers wreck my base’s power supply?

Try to combine a slower standard-priority charger with a faster low-priority charger. If the slower charger gets backed up, put more battery packs in the faster charger that only uses surplus energy and won’t slow down your base. If that’s still not fast enough and your trains run out of fuel, your base’s power supply is just too small. Trains are quite energy-hungry.

What should I do if this mod breaks another mod that offers item recycling?

Disable the other mod, disable this mod’s battery pack recycling in the mod settings, re-enable the other mod. If this mod is the one crashing, use the checkbox to reset the module settings because battery pack recycling is off by default. Finally, please tell this mod’s author about it so that it can be fixed properly.

How well does this mod perform?

Performance is exactly the same as with vanilla trains. There is no slowdown. If you’re currently using another electric train mod, enable the “show-time-usage” debug statistics and check how much time the mod consumes under “Script update”. That time is saved with the Battery-Electric Train mod because it doesn’t use any relevant run-time scripting.

I’m a streamer/youtuber/etc., can I use your mod?

Yes, permission is hereby explicitly granted to use this mod in live streams or pre-edited videos, both monetized and non-monetized, if the stream or videos is free to watch. You may not use this mod in streams or videos that are paywalled or “members only”. You are not required to credit the mod author, but if you list the mods you use, you may credit the author, but not in a way that suggests the author endorses you or your use.