Bay 12 Games Forum

OH my oh my oh my. 

What about a raising bridge? Don't those act as tracks as well? Can you have a pressure plate that only opens for carts?

They do. I haven't taken that approach personally, so I'm not sure what options that approach provides.

Pressure plates can be set to trigger on track (b-T-p-T). With the default weights, it triggers any time any cart hits the p.p., but not for creatures or fluid or anything else.

You can switch destinations by using a roller. The track setup is a bit weird: see DFWiki Minecart page at http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Minecart#Switching

Basically, you have a T shape with your track:

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This shows the track for a minecart that enters on the left and exits on the top or the right.

Build a roller that pushes westward on the L square.

When the roller is off, nothing happens: the cart will derail and then continue traveling to the right.

When the roller is on, the cart derails, ends up on the L, and then the roller pushes it west, which then makes it turn northward.

Make sense?

Are you using dfhack? The dfhack maintainers just released an auto-gem plugin.

I really have to say, minecart gifs are the best gifs to come out of dwarf fortress.

well, I don't know about that... I've seen some !!FUN!! gifs of firey destruction...

How do you make them, by the by? And do you have a schematic for the setup?

For making the gifs, I'm using a program called LICEcap for Windows/Mac.

As far as schematics go, I've got schematics of individual components at my DFwiki user page, namely track itself, the "track circuit" for waiting/release, and the "route circuits" for updating the position of each cart. My plan for the page is to write a complete how-to guide for a minimal setup using my concepts, but I'm going to have to wait until I can find the time to do so.

That being said, I'm curious for feedback about what makes sense or not, if anyone cares to glance over my madness. I admit that my documentation is quite premature. My thinking is just that this is something I've wanted to do in DF ever since minecarts got released, and it seems I'm not alone. Not saying my approach is the best-- I just love the idea of megaprojects involving seriously creative engineering, and my hope is to help inspire more of that.

http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=11721

So, I tried to add another route to show off as a technical demo, and I found a timing problem. So here it is with 3 (or 6, if you count two way separately... which I do!) routes working simultaneously. Two minecarts are actually being used to transport goods, the third is on continual loop just to monkey test, so to speak. The fourth minecart in the system is currently set to forbid, but feel free to reclaim that if you want things to break!

EDIT: I just loaded this up and realized a better place to unpause is 1 z-level up, at 137. Two minecarts are about to be launched from the workshops area.

I take it that you set which route is intended for a given minecart by using a suite of tracks with pressure plates, which then join up for the routing section? Or do you set the signal by levers, or some other mechanism? I'm quite interested in your route circuitry.

I'm using a suite of tracks. So, loading up the game, cause a screenshot helps explain:

This is the workshops loading area, which leads upstairs to workshops/stockpiles. There are four entrances/exits into the loading area, corresponding to four source/destination pairs. So, the bottom track goes to the bridge, and at the bridge there is a similar looping track end specifically for sending carts back to workshops. Any cart that enters the system on the Workshops->Bridge track will end up at Bridge, regardless of what's in the cart, what the hauling route says to do, etc.

The purple black bronze wall has pressure plates that open the doors. This is just to keep dwarves from picking up the carts when they are waiting.

Inside the walled section, there are three shared track segments which control the influx of carts from the four points of entry. These are each marked by two pressure plate/roller/door setups, and correspond 1-to-1 with a "track circuit" elsewhere. When a track circuit sends release_dir, releasing, say, Workshops->Bridge, the "route stepper" or whatever you want to call it (the Route Circuit in my wiki page), gets triggered and keeps track that the minecart is en route.

Basically, this relies on having these different track entrances, so that a given track circuit knows that whenever it releases the right side, it's starting a specific route. Subsequent track circuits trigger to all possible relevant routes, so some track circuit might be used to ferry both Workshops->Bridge and Farms->Bridge, so it'd send a signal to both of those routes. The only route that would update is the one known to occupy the shared track getting released.

Also worth mentioning the white rollers. I've been calling these "switching rollers", and they're controlled by the route bits. So the Farms->Workshops route, for instance, has a bit for when it's on the track that has the switching roller it needs, and thus that bit turns that roller on.

When I was designing my aborted attempt at something similar, I planned to have a centralized "sorting facility" to receive all goods and load up each workstation's payload. That really simplified the architecture, because it meant that every other workstation would only need to send goods to a single place. Then the sorting facility was going to have a loop-route for each type of good, which would detour to a track stop for each workstation if that workstation didn't have enough of that good. The problem was that I was going to use a different track for each loop, which was going to be a problem for workstations that were down below the caves. Your single-track routing seems like the solution.

This is a neat approach! I was considering systems along these lines - I had wanted to sort minecarts by weight, and have centralized dispatch. Ultimately I kind of just settled on this scheme because it was the first thing I could think of that I could assure myself could work.

I don't really mind having separate loading zones for each destination - I figure the dwarves are going to be loading the minecarts by hand at some point anyway, might as well have them do the destination-sorting up front and make that load only happen the once. But lots of the same goods do go to more than one destination... having a centralized storage area makes a lot of sense. Now that I think about it, it doesn't really matter what track topology to use (as long as there's some way of identifying the carts as they enter the system.) The waiting/release circuitry just makes it so that the hand-off record-keeping becomes possible.

My system also doesn't do any kind of quantity checking, dwarf-assisted or otherwise. With food I'm using the hauling "Give to Stockpile" option, so the dwarves do the quantity checking, leaving excess food in the cart to get sent back. It would've been nice if it could've happened automatically, but I'm keeping the scope of the project to just the routing aspect for now.