How to Use Train Abstractions in Factorio

[00:00:00]Trains are hard.

[00:00:03]How do I use them? Like this. Well, okay, but how specifically? Let me show you a technique I call train abstraction. This is a gear factory. It makes gears. How it makes gears almost entirely irrelevant. Think of all of your builds as a mystery box. Plates go in, gears come out. It doesn't matter what's in the box, as long as it does what it's supposed to do. The greater factory doesn't care how the gears got here since as long as we're outside of the box, it's impossible to tell the difference. Likewise, the gear factory doesn't know how the iron plates are made, we can abstract that one, too.

[00:00:37]Doing both may seem silly, but when inspected individually, [music] each abstraction was a huge production upgrade. That's basically all there is to a good train abstraction. Replacing builds with a train station that does the same thing, usually by importing products from a larger, more mature build. And it doesn't have to be early game only. You can replace a large midame build with a huge train depot if you feel the need for it. Anything goes.

[00:01:00]These can be a [music] very useful tool to fit increased production into tight spaces of your base.

[00:01:06]By abstracting here, I didn't have to reroute any of my belts and could focus on upgrading just green circuits [music] in complete isolation.

[00:01:14]Look at how full that belt is. When I'm not making enough of something, I like to create a new, much larger build. By transporting the materials there [music] with an abstracted train, the core of my factory can't tell the difference, and the large build doesn't get in the way of anything else. Remember that this is a sandbox game. You can get as weird with the trains [music] as you want to.

[00:01:34]Keep adding one train after another, and soon enough, you've figured out how [music] to tie solid steel into a knot.

[00:01:39]It may take you some time to puzzle out how your new train should look or function, and that's okay. Give yourself the time you need to [music] solve that puzzle. It's the fun part. Every train in your base will come out a little bit different. The end game with this, I always imagine, is a section of base with so many abstractions that it has no real purpose anymore and just exists to move items from one train to another.

[00:02:01]Sure, you could get rid of it by just routing the trains straight to their final destinations, but you could also just be proud of the mess that you've made. Imagine a base with a giant hub and spoke configuration and absolutely nothing of importance going on in the center. Maybe you can have a mall there, but no real production at all. Just an entirely useless and arbitrary architecture. If you had gone the rail network route, every train would be the same, and you'd have to spend a lot more time and resources building all the rails out before transporting a single product. To me, that's a chore, not a game. I'd rather build them in the worst way and have fun doing it. Adding new train stops may take longer individually, but it's less time spent on routing tracks in one go and more time making the small decisions that lead to uniquely messy factories.

[00:02:43][music] And that's not even mentioning the time and material investment of building one of those giant rail blueprints. Look at the rail to train stop ratio of this design that I [music] once made while playing Pyanodons. It was literally so much effort to set up that I stopped there and still haven't gone back to that save since. There's nothing to hate in this game more than having to spend hours of play time rebuilding my entire base from scratch. I'd rather expand a little bit at a time than tear down a starter base to build the real one. I've already been building. Of course, it's my real base. It's real. It's here. You can see it. Factorio doesn't have to just be about automation and perfection.

[00:03:16]You can turn it into a puzzle game with a few small differences to your play style. Get out there and make some spaghetti of your own. You can use train abstractions [music] as a patch job fix for any shortcomings. And if those don't work, you can just do it again or build larger by decentralizing and building the same thing in [music] two places.