Train Foundry for Smart Train Combinator

Train Foundry for Smart Train Combinator

The train factory for your Smart Train Combinator network. If you drive your trains with Smart Train Combinator, this foundry closes the loop: it reads the train shapes your combinators already define, builds those exact trains for you, and sends them out pre-wired to your STC stops — no blueprint, and no hand-editing a single schedule.

During assembly, the industrial hall comes alive: robotic arms move while work lights and welding sparks follow the train's construction.

> Requires Smart Train Combinator. > Prefer defining trains with a blueprint? Get the companion mod > Train Foundry instead — you can run both, > one building of each per surface.

Built around Smart Train Combinator

Smart Train Combinator already knows everything about your trains: which shapes run on your network (solid/fluid, wagon type and count, storage or not) and how their stops are named. This foundry taps straight into that:

• Your combinators are the catalogue. The window doesn't ask you to draw a

train — it lists the exact shapes your STC combinators describe on the surface. Add or change a combinator, and the list follows.

• The trains slot right into your STC setup. Every train leaves with the

loading/refuel/stop/unload schedule and a train group built to Smart Train Combinator's own station-naming convention — so its interrupts match your STC stops immediately, exactly as if you'd wired the train by hand.

• You only choose the cargo. Pick a shape, pick what it carries — that's it.

The foundry handles composition, fuel, schedule, group and dispatch.

So instead of blueprinting a train, tuning its schedule, and hoping the stop names line up, you press two buttons and a matching train rolls onto your STC network.

How it works

• Place it anywhere buildable. While you hold the item (or a ghost for robots),

a full preview of the building follows the cursor — in the game view and on the map — so you see exactly where the tracks and walls will land. The foundry lays its own exit track; just connect your network to the exit afterwards. It can even be placed on water: the footprint is filled with landfill automatically.

• Pick a train shape. The foundry's window lists the distinct shapes your

Smart Train Combinator combinators describe on this surface: solid or fluid, wagon type, wagon count, and the storage variant. There is no blueprint chest — the shapes come straight from your combinators.

• Choose the resource. Click a shape, then pick what the train carries (the

picker only offers items for a solid shape, fluids for a fluid shape).

• Feed the parts. Each build pulls its locomotives and wagons from the

foundry's internal stock — fill it by hand or with inserters. Each component shows an available/required ratio, green when covered, red when short.

• Off it goes. The finished train leaves with a ready-made schedule — a

loading stop plus refuel, stop and unload interrupts — and a train group that encodes its shape. The station names match Smart Train Combinator's own naming, so the interrupts line up with your STC stops out of the box.

Or draw the train yourself

The shapes read from your combinators come with a fixed composition: one head locomotive plus its wagons. When that isn't the train you want, switch the list to Custom and draw it.

+ New custom template opens a composer that lays the train out as a row of slots, the way a chest lays out its inventory. The first slot is a train stop: it marks the head of the train, the direction it leaves in. Every slot after it takes a locomotive, a cargo wagon or a fluid wagon — click it to pick from a filtered list, or click it with the item in hand. The free slot at the end lengthens the train, up to the capacity of the foundry chain; emptying a slot shortens it.

The button above a locomotive turns it around. That is what double-heading and a tail locomotive facing the other way are made of — a train that pulls in both directions, which the default shapes could never describe.

The important part: a custom train serves exactly the same stops. Locomotives appear in no station name, so a double-header with four wagons produces the very same loading station, train group and interrupts as the default four-wagon shape. The composer shows the generated station name as you build, to compare it with your existing STC stops at a glance.

Two rules keep that promise: every wagon must be the same type, and the same quality — a station name carries a single wagon icon and a single quality, so a mixed train could never match a stop. Locomotives are free: type, tier and quality as you like.

Fuel, handled for you

You never have to pick a fuel per train. The foundry fills every locomotive with the best unlocked fuel available in its stock, and only starts a build once one compatible fuel is present in a full load. The generated refuel interrupt covers every fuel the locomotive can burn (it tops up at 10% and leaves once full). A solar locomotive needs no fuel and gets no refuel interrupt. The window shows a fuel row, and the circuit's missing-components output asks for every candidate fuel so at least one is delivered by your logistics.

You do decide what "best" may pick from. The gear button next to Accepted fuels