DREAMS COMING TRUE! Introducing Elevated Trains in Factorio DLC | FFF-378 "Trains on another level" 

I wanted underground rails, but this is 10 times better. I need these new rails in my life right now

Hey Nilaus! If you look at the loading/unloading gif at 8:00 you can see that the trains are changing colours as they are leaving the station. This looks like an easter egg for automated train scheduling!

Wube doing amazing with this expansion! Since they are revamping such basic things like rail shapes, I predict they will also redo fluid mechanics.

13:20 I think kovarex means that the rail doesn't automatically rotate to point in the same direction the rail you are hovering points to. That's the change they are talking about.

I just can't wait to see what Nilaus will do with this to make an awesome, fully modular, elaborate and perfect setup, and then I'm also excited to see how Trupen will do the absolute opposite.

I want to be able to move a rail off a cliff and end up in the second layer. It would make cliffs much more interesting!

12:25 The reflections look pretty good TBH. What's weird is the harsh shadow on the water. at the very least, it should be slightly blurred too, as the water surface is a ever so slightly wavy. Also shadow on water isn't something you normally notice in most situations. With very clear and shallow water, a shadow is cast onto the floor, but with deeper water, or more murky water, or even with some waves at the surface, you just don't notice that shadow.

the most important thing to me is HOW FRICKING COOL IT LOOKS!

Finally, we can make rail junctions with left turns without the junction being horribly inefficient

10:19 I suspect there could be planets where elevated rails are strongly incentivized. We now know that cliffs are prevalent on Vulcanus in some biomes, and it will not be possible to alter cliffs on Vulcanus until “extreme late-game.” There could also be a planet which has, say, a surface of only ice and water. Such a planet would mean there is no stone available and that landfilling large bodies of water is so resource-intensive that it is impractical, again strongly incentivizing the use of elevated rails.

Cloverleaf and Trumpet interchanges! The Texan in me wants more layers for a true stack interchange.

12:54 I just learned you can press R while rail planning and rotate the endpoint, then the planning works fine imho. First I was skeptical about the secound train layer, but after reading the fff it makes sense and will definitly be usefull. And now I'm just waiting for the flying biters...

“which is not how my bases look” yeah, there are no lights 😊

elevated city blocks with ramps to each station

In the US we call the wooden crossbeams under the rail "railroad ties"

The fact that this feature, combined with the curved rail changes from the previous FFF, allows for most of the basic highway interchanges to be made IN Factorio has me hyped for this expansion. I could never get into Cities Skylines far enough to build proper interchanges for a city, but I LOVE Factorio trains.

I have always thought of trains as 'drawers' in a system. Now I can design what I'm looking to design with dual head trains. 1-2-1 trains, here I come!

I can't wait to see what you come up with for these designs. Your current designs inspired me immensely and I am sure what is to come will be amazing.

I'm already imagining the maximum throughput we can get in a City Block junction. It's possible to get 100% perfect throughput on a 4 rail, 4 direction junction with this second layer. All you have to do is "Weave" the rails like lattice work.

Nilaus in the flesh?! An early present indeed!

10:30 so biters are NOT using elevated rails to come to me? Are you sure? That would be fun.

Can't wait for someone to mod Rollercoaster Tycoon into Factorio.

The things that hold the tracks in place are also called ties in some countries. Sleepers is very much a British term. Also, I wonder if you can walk along them?

The reason why the reflection is weird is because water reflection only happens below a certain angle, which I believe is about 30 degrees of angle difference. Now with this view we are seeing this at about a 75 degree angle. So IRL we would not see reflection. So your brain rightfully identified that something was wrong. And it was correct to do so. I wish they will correct it.

You don't look anywhere near as nerdy as I imagined! I've loved your content over the years dude - thank you

tbh I didn't even notice the shadows/reflections. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest improvement this will bring is that we can have separate networks cross over each other if we want, and also less issues with train routes interfering with each other. The compact part I don't really care about because we have infinite space, it's more the routing and traffic that this will solve.

The base around 14:00 is hilarious! I know this is not what we're going to see on this channel, not even for the lols, but I did laugh at that moment! Looking forwards to the next playthrough.

Literally next level!

Thank you for the update and your thoughts on it. The ability to toggle new features at the start is awesome.

the potential for junctions even jankier than my openttd junctions is awesome

Looking forward to these changes. When I saw those twisty turny rail examples the first thing I thought was "Nilaus is going to have an conniption when he sees those" ;)

The benefit of having the parts be mods seems more relevant to other mods that doesn't want to use the space age expansion for some reason.

1:15 AHH... the train disappeared!

Going to have to rebuild my rail book. Awesome!

I can't wait to play around with this tracks! They look pure fun! Great job of the devs!

Typical max incline for trains is 1.5 or 4% depending on if its freight or passanger, but that is only true for a full train length hill. If the hill is much shorter than the train the inclination much steeper...(while.. yea.. kind of not this steep)

not sure if up and down style of rails are going to be viable since you need the supports BUT intersections can now be devided into 2!! you could have the turns on the upper level and the straights on the base level

Nilaus I love your videos, and I always agree or at the very least respect your opinions. But your take at 11:42 I just can't possibly agree with. I can't even when stretching my imagination agree that the layout nor the display is confusing even in the slightest. It is so impressively easy to tell the perspective and direction of trains ESPECIALLY thanks to the shadows and reflections which are significantly different from one another. This might just be a case of our brains working differently, but I think the devs did an excellent job portraying elevated structures here. Even more so with the moving trains projecting shadows of their own as they are moving over the rails. Yeah, dude, love your stuff but could not disagree more about those rails looking confusing in the slightest.

Yay. A decades worth of rail designs down the toilet. We get to do it again!

I will admit the water looks strange but Tbh I'm glad to see something even if the reflection is a little washed out. Personally would love to see weather in Factorio, Not saying like "Level-ution" levels of implementation. I guess an example might explain, little long but I LOVE Clockwork mods, pitch black nights. I love the fear i get when night comes and i think "Maybe i should have lit the wall up more..." NOW the actual point weather could add into the atmosphere of night time biter raid defense's 🤣. Staring at the zone where my perimeters lights fade into the dark, and brief flashes of lightning to give me a glimpse of whats to come sounds amazing🤤. Personally a big fan of biters only attack at night makes the game have a nice tempo of build and prep during day and maintain at night.

UPS benefits of this will be on its own a massive improvement .. most of the time my super factories the train network is the biggest hog on UPS and its to do with overlapping rails and signals etc .. this will remove like 70% of signals massively improving UPS

10% grade is super steep for most trains - just as a thought. IRL for heavy haul freight its much much less.

Going to have so much fun reworking how I build my train networks, and keep them tidy of course

In my recent playthroughs I have been using a single two-way rail with U-turns at the end to transport ores all the way up to space science. Seems like this will be my approach in the expansion as well.

Finally! I've been wanting this for years.

One step closer to Rollercoastorio

This is very good. all by rail blueprints will have to change again for this. I think they did add a a very cluttered look just to show possibilities. how they build is without a blueprints a more organic factory

huge for cityblocks when they go over the production blocks and just deliver stuff in the block

I'm not sure separate mods implies that you can play Space Age without Elevated Rails. But it definitely means that you can play with Elevated Rails but without Space Age.

I honestly think elevated rail is a solution looking for a problem, tracks already have infinite levels, because all trains can use one track, and they can already cross over each other. All these do is add a second infinity, useful if you have a throughput problem but this has never been an issue for me

All in all I like most of the ideas they are planning to implement. But it's a bit early to like or dislike the dlc. Right now we are just talking about ideas. There is not even a release date (they are planning to have "it playable in little less than one year" - so it will be Q3/2024 earliest). However - I totally agree in one point: I am absolutely fine with paying some money for this dlc. If I compare my playtime with the price of the base game (and all the free content updates) I am at a point that I already played the base game more or less for free. Less than 1 cent per hour playtime - at least that's nowhere near "expensive" :)

14:57 - just check shadow to find out if it is up or down

This was so good that I don't know how they will top it, new content will probably be very good, but this just feels like a culmination.

Does this mean we won't see him get run over by a train anymore? 😥

I just want to know if spidertrons will walk over or under the elevated rails! (I think under would be a cool effect, but I'm guessing over is how they will work.)

It's beautiful... my brain is exploding with ideas for new designs...

Much better implementation that current underground pipes.

If they create an underlayer that we could build in, it would be interesting to see combat take place in the underlayer with new biters. Maybe we would have deep buildings (launch silo) that have deep basements to go alongside the tall buildings that prevent building on those layers.

This is one of the most anticipated updates, not just for the feature itself, but the absolute flood of rail mods we'll be getting once the modders get their hands on elevated rail.

My factory calls once more

Now you can cover all of your solar panels with rails.

I hope you will make a lot of lets plays in factorio 2.0 for us. We missing it.

Nilaus’ ego is bigger than my megabase

i dont like how crisp the new rail graphics are for the old rails but for the elevated ones they look fantastic

But can you walk on the elevated rails? I like the idea of making a bridge over water vs filling in the land right across a nice pond.

Yay. Roller Coaster Tycoon!

red line, green line, blue line... yeah we need colors 😁

Why are you confused by the reflections? We had reflections for years now. Pretty much everything reflects above water and it would be weird if only elevated rails would not.

13:55 , train on the top going from top to top left, did anyone notice this? That is not an artillery wagon / freight / fluid wagon, it's a new type.

I am happy that we can now do efficient intersections without blocking cross traffic.

For one, there should be a speed/tonnage penalty when going up a ramp, (Maybe Nauvis has a lower gravity?) The railroad sleepers should be recolored to grey to reflect the lack of wood in the recipe. I really hope they do electrification.

When I first started playing I didn't like trains, now every base I build is heavily reliant on trains. This is so going to advance my bases to the next level with the added bonus of me getting run over by my trains much less often. I die more from my own trains than I do the biters.

I think one big benefit of making the expansion as a set of separate 'mods' that can be individually disabled is for various challenges/scenarios/overhaul modpacks etc. For example, map-makers may choose to disable quality in a challenge map simply because balancing the map with quality in mind (i.e. higher quality turrets have more range, higher quality ammo deals more damage etc.) would be tricky. Similarly, some challenges may disable elevated rails, because they would make things too easy (especially if you're not meant to cross water). And then I can definitely see people who would want elevated rails and quality, but not the 'manage multiple planets' aspect. Especially if the expansion is balanced around the idea that you spend less time on the first planet than you would in a vanilla game, whereas some people would prefer to have more to do on the first planet. So, I presume the space 'mod' part of the expansion will have changed science pack recipes, tech tree, and such compared to vanilla, and some people may prefer the vanilla science tree and science packs, while still having access to other expansion stuff.

Woo! This game doesn’t quit

Now I want turning ramps

I'm wondering if the rail support will be able to place power poles on them if so would it provide power in the Z direction.

good video. one thing: in reality, trains can only go on slopes of about 2%. heavy trains much less, more like 1% at most.

A v2 width all new underground level sound very good to me, I hope Wube Will be doing a v2 of factorio after expansion, factorio for 5 more years for me 😅

I still wish for electric trains... imagine that every train that drives requires a specific voltage and you have to electrify the rails with poles and you need a huge amount of energy, so nuclear power is a necessity, also you have to transform the energy every few tiles of rails, so you need transformers and you can do that with solar power

I hope they add in bulk loading and unloading to trains to facilitate even higher throughout.

I just thought of what Renai Transportation would do with this, throwing trains onto elevated rails without needing ramps XD

Fudge wube is amazing... Now.....BOATS please!

RollerCoaster Tycoon® Udate

Devs: Hey, look at all the different ways you can have rails weaving around your base in all kinds of directions, just putting them wherever they fit! Nilaus: *Internal Screaming*

But why they doesn’t implement tunnels because of different layers to switch between but isn’t it the same if you have space age dlc? There you have to switch between different areas, planets, layers too?!?

Adding the underground rails at a later data might be nice, but if it involves too much work and changing the game structure, then I overhead rails are the most we gonna be able to get

You forget the most important thing, which js you'll never be hit by an upper train anymore!

awesome!

Railroad Ties

AAAAAAAAAAAHhhhhhhhhh... the bliss.

The skill ceiling has increased so much, this expansion is a blessing thank the devs!!!

I wonder what will happen when you ride a train on a bridge and exit it. since the bridges can go over water and Buildings I assume it must be possible to walk on elevated rails? 🤔 well. Excellent video and commentary, thank you!

I feel like the ramps should be longer, but otherwise, this looks amazinng.

This seems like a bigger change to me (in combination with the addition of different rail shapes) than the whole space update. This is going to seriously change how to build railway stations and most likely will result in a bunch fewer train deaths lol.

i was hoping for a bullet train as a tier 2 train.

Is there some way I can learn trains? I've watched some videos and things like that on trains but I just cant wrap my head around them for some reason.

Nice 👍

Hi to everyone who reads this, i have a question, how do i can make blueprints to place landfill if some part of blueprint goes into waters? somewhat annoying to not see where i need to place landfill

One rail, two rail, Red rail, Blue rail.

I probably missed it in the video, but will we be able to build the elevated rails on our existing worlds?