WePlay: Long Haul Logistics

A logistics network with no coverage map. Swarms of cargo planes link your outposts to your main base, at any distance.

Long Haul Logistics is an alternative to trains for long distance transportation. Instead of laying rails out to every mining outpost, defense line or remote build site, put down a launch pad at each end and let a fleet of cargo drones fly the goods back and forth. There are no roboport chains to build and no range limit.

How it works

1. Build a launch pad at your main base, inside your robot network, and fill it with drones.
2. Build a launch pad at your outpost and set requests on it, just like a buffer chest.
3. Anything the outpost's own robots can't supply is flown in from another pad that has it.
4. Cargo lands in the pad's inventory, where the outpost's robots can pick it up for construction, requester chests and personal logistics.

Drones that pile up at outposts fly home on their own to the nearest hub, so your fleet keeps cycling.

Features

✈️ Launch pads

• 5x5, rotatable buffer chest with 80 slots
• Requests use the vanilla logistics picker, with math in the number field and logistic groups
• Drone slots like a roboport. Put drones in by hand or with an inserter, and click a slot to take a stack out
• Priority from 0 to 255 per pad, like train stops. Higher priority pads are served first
• Spread loads / Fill drones switch: send many lightly loaded planes, or fewer full ones
• Copy settings with shift-click, and blueprints keep direction, requests, priority and settings

🛩️ Cargo drones

• Loaded drones carry a red cargo crate. Empty drones flying home don't
• Weight-based payload, like Space Age rockets: light items pack in by the hundreds, heavy ones a few at a time
• Runway takeoffs, wide banking turns and lined-up landings, with launch and engine sounds
• One launch per pad per second, so a busy hub sends out a steady stream of planes
• Drones show on the map, colored by trip type (can be turned off in map settings)

🔀 Fair dispatch

• Drones are shared round-robin across every pad that needs something, so every outpost gets served
• Pads count cargo already in the air, so nothing gets ordered twice
• If a destination pad is removed mid-flight, its drones divert to the nearest pad with room

⚡ Power

• 500 kW idle, 1 MW during each launch
• Loaded launches pause without power. Empty drones can always fly home, so an outpost that loses power never traps your fleet

🔌 Circuit network

• Set requests from combinators using the pad's vanilla circuit settings
• Read drone statistics, like the roboport: available drones, drones at this pad, inbound drones and total drones in the network, each on a signal you choose
• Wire an inserter from your drone assembler to keep a hub stocked, e.g. available drones < 10

🪐 Multi-surface friendly

Everything runs per surface, so it's compatible with Space Age, Space Exploration and other mods with multiple surfaces. Drones never try to fly between planets.

Research

Recipes

• Long haul launch pad: 1 accumulator, 10 electric engine units, 20 steel plates, 10 advanced circuits, 20 concrete
• Long haul drone: 1 flying robot frame, 2 electric engine units, 5 steel plates, 5 advanced circuits

Mod settings

• Fancy flight paths (on by default): turn off for straight pad-to-pad flights, which are a few seconds quicker per trip.
• Show drones on the map (on by default): show or hide the drone dots in map view.

Tips

• Hubs are pads that supplied another pad in the last 5 minutes. They keep all their drones. Other pads keep 2 for return trips and send the rest home.
• Point your outpost runways toward your main base for the shortest approach.
• Drones dock by hand or inserter, not by logistic request. Drone requests are removed automatically, so robots don't refill the slots after every launch.

Known limitations

• Circuit wires connected to a launch pad aren't saved in blueprints yet.
• Drone requests set by the circuit network can't be blocked yet. Avoid sending drone item signals to a pad in Set requests mode.
• A brand-new main base pad only counts as a hub after it first supplies another pad.

Feedback, bug reports and ideas are very welcome in the Discussion tab!

More WePlay mods

🛰️ WePlay: Radar Probe Drone Launcher

Long Haul Logistics' cargo planes have a scouting sibling! Launch long-range survey probe drones that fly far out, land, and deploy into a slow-scanning radar that charts a huge area. It's an early alternative to scouting by car, with land and water versions.

Find all my mods on my mod portal page. They're all prefixed with WePlay: so they group together in your mod manager. ✈️