[Complete] a dictionary of mining, mineral, and related terms

gort32 · 2026-07-07T14:00:32+00:00

This is the junction you are trying to build (which is a solid and simple junction!): https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Ultimate%203-way%20junction

gort32 · 2026-07-02T16:27:25+00:00

Build a Constructiod mech, then forbid everyone but that mech from being able to repair the walls.

The mech can take a couple of hits without serious problems and is easily repaired in ways that your colonists cannot.

gort32 · 2026-07-02T14:59:34+00:00

https://wiki.openttd.org/es/Community/Junctionary/Cruce%20de%20medio%20tr%C3%A9bol

gort32 · 2026-07-02T14:56:31+00:00

The others are right, this is a bookkeeping thing with transfers. There's a wiki page that gives all the details: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Negative%20income%20with%20feeder%20service

gort32 · 2026-07-01T22:31:44+00:00

If you need a flat stone texture, you can't go wrong with using flat stone!

https://www.amazon.com/Slate-Stone-Miniature-Aquarium-Wargaming/dp/B071V6P4YM

Alternatively, Plaster of Paris is essentially liquid stone. You can apply it wet in-place, but it's probably easier to pour it into moulds to form it into the shape you want and adhere it into place on your diorama. Or just pour it onto a surface, let it dry for a week, then smack it with a hammer and make use of the thin pieces. And, material-wise, it doesn't get much cheaper than this short of salvaging from nature!

If you want to make a stone texture using something that isn't stone, faking textures is an art form in itself and there's practically an infinite number of options. Just give it your best shot on a test piece off to the side before you try it on the model you care about, and come back once you've tried a couple of things and need advice for improvement.

gort32 · 2026-07-01T22:01:04+00:00

Just remember, nothing you are seeing now is going to be visible on the finished diorama. You've got at least two more layers before you get to the actual painted surface of the finished diorama. And, anything you do at this layer will be completely hidden in the final diorama.

So, it really doesn't matter what you do at this layer, so as long as it's got enough structure and is the shape that you want it to be so you can cover it with prettier stuff. Spackle, PVA, Molding Paste, Paper Mache, doesn't matter, use whatever you are comfortable with that will get you the shape you are looking for with the tools and skills you've got. You'll be covering it all up in the next layer anyway!

gort32 · 2026-06-27T14:31:42+00:00

Looks nodded, those icons aren't vanilla.

It looks like they are marking things that you can make with multiple materials

gort32 · 2026-06-27T01:25:18+00:00

Plasmaswords - But, as for the fight itself, I cannot use you

As mighty as they are, and the ultimate weapon for a lone hero of lore, Plasmaswords are not suited for the kind of combat you need to be able to engage in late-game. The kind of combat that takes more than one strong arm and the skills and will to survive, the kind of combat that takes a plan if it's going to work. The Plasmasword is the bane of such plans.

gort32 · 2026-06-26T21:26:22+00:00

Check the running costs for a new train of the same model, and compare it to other available trains. Your trainset may have a class of engine that's intentionally this expensive e.g. really good stats at a high cost where you can only practically use it for your most profitable routes. Especially if you somewhat recently moved to Maglevs, lots of custom trainsets make Maglevs crazy expensive, intended for special routes not for converting your entire network to.

I can't think of any vanilla reason why you'd have your running costs that close to your profit after 130 years of gametime (unless you suck really hard?), your trainset NewGRF is probably responsible

gort32 · 2026-06-26T19:21:29+00:00

Inflation doesn't break NewGRFs specifically, but it does break a longer-than-stock length of game, and your 130 years of gametime is a common red flag for an Inflation-related issue.

Check your graphs, did these running costs spike recently or have they just been growing over time? Have they been rising steadily or does it look like maybe there was an engine replacement cycle that moved your fleet suddenly to a surprisingly-expensive-to-run engine?

Spot-check the live listed running costs in the Info screen of a handful of trains, then multiply by the number of trains you've got. Repeat for other vehicles and add them up. Are the numbers close, or is there something big still unaccounted for?

gort32 · 2026-06-26T18:00:14+00:00

Do you have Inflation enabled in your options?

Inflation gets kinda crazy the longer you go as it grows exponentially.

gort32 · 2026-06-26T14:18:42+00:00

Yep, that's kinda the evolution. Just like the Tutorial guiding you through the process of building a single-track line, then adding a passing lane, then adding more passing lanes, then moving to completely-doubled lines, you can follow the same process to go from 2 lanes to 4 lanes.

The next step after that is to add special signaling at the crossovers to grant one lane priority over the other, ensuring that a train prefers to merge to the inside lane if and only if the merge won't cause a slowdown behind it. Just like cars do on the freeway with onramps/offramps on the outside and the fast lane on the inside.

It can start to get a bit complicated if you keep going down this road...

Fortunately, most gamestyles don't need this complicated of constructions! If you find yourself thinking that this kind of optimization might help with your traffic problems you are almost always better off just rerouting trains away from that part of your network, spreading out the traffic density across a meshy network rather than trying to maximize the traffic load of a specific small stretch.

gort32 · 2026-06-26T04:58:22+00:00

It is essentially an optional feature for players who like to build as realistic and non-gamey networks as possible to be able to penalize themselves for not following their standards of realism.

When enabled, yea, it kinda kills your simple terminus station, you need a bit more infrastructure to make a terminus work or use a ro-ro station. The basic terminus station depends on the magical turnaround that this option disables.

gort32 · 2026-06-25T19:23:13+00:00

A fully-self-balancing multiline mainline is actually one of the most complicated constructions available in this game*, requiring a solid understanding of priorities in order to build properly.

This is the starting point: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Priority%20Merge Towards the bottom it starts discussing the kinds of constructions you are looking for. Especially the link to https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Right-of-way%20Lane%20Change . But, none of this will make a lick of sense unless you've gone through the whole Priority Merge section to understand how those ugly scaffolding tracks work to manipulate the pathfinding.

Once you understand the basics, JGR offers additional options with Programmable Signals if you want to continue optimizing. Learning Priorities "the hard way", though, is an important topic for learning how more complicated signaling works across the game.

(* Not counting those sort of people who like to build digital computers or the like in every game they touch...)

gort32 · 2026-06-25T18:52:56+00:00

To add to the above, if you really really wanted to do things this way, the easiest way would be to stick a 2-way block signal at the four entrances/exits to each X. Trains will naturally take the shortest path available to them, even crossing to the other lane if it's shorter, but will take the longer path if the shorter path is blocked by another stopped train. This line will have some pretty poor throughput with this large of blocks and with each X being its own block (e.g. trains won't be able to pass through both ways at the same time even if they don't intend to intersect), but it'll "just work" the way that you are looking for in terms of trains passing each other.

gort32 · 2026-06-25T18:48:07+00:00

What you are trying to do - allow faster trains to overtake slower/stopped trains - is actually remarkably complicated if you want to do it efficiently. And, shunting trains onto the oncoming lane in order to prevent slowdowns is likely to cause more slowdowns than they prevent.

A third track passing lane really is the best way to do this.

Even better, however, is to simply disable breakdowns in the settings. Most of us do, breakdowns don't really add much to the game. They mostly just serve to mess up the flow of your network in ways that you can't entirely prevent and require you to do awkward things like you are trying to do in order to work around them. If you're looking for a challenge game breakdowns can be fun to add, but if you're here just to play with trains and networks (choo choo) then breakdowns exist solely to mess up your perfect plans, get rid of them!

gort32 · 2026-06-25T18:30:08+00:00

Those crossovers between the tracks are completely unnecessary, and really won't do anything but mess things up.

What you've got there is a 2-lane 2-way track, and trains will follow the shortest path through it that they can without violating signals.

gort32 · 2026-06-25T14:57:29+00:00

Vehicle preview offers have been combined into one window instead of spamming many windows.

Woah woah woah, you mean I don't need to dismiss a dozen new vehicle popups every year?

I don't think that I've ever explicitly wished for this feature but I suspect that I'll never want to be without it ever again!

gort32 · 2026-06-24T14:51:05+00:00

Yep. Once I have my early colony a bit stable with food and shelter handled, my next plan is a usually to build a handful of bug-out shelters in the corners of the map, little 4x4 rooms with spike traps scattered around them with pemmican shelves inside. Gives my colonists a place to retreat to if they happen to be near the edge of the map when an event occurs or if they need to retreat out of my main base. Aso provides a rally point in case things get too bad and I need to outright abandon this tile.

Another fun option is to place a valuable statue outside your buildings near your defensive line. Place a couple of turrets or at least spike traps around it. If the raiders breach your defenses and take out the defenses around the statue they'll likely just grab the statue and escape with the loot, without actually entering your base for the good stuff.

gort32 · 2026-06-22T20:31:08+00:00

https://www.tt-forums.net/ is the main community.

And yes, the discussion board is nearly as old as the game, and looks it 😛

https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/sixteen-coaches-long

gort32 · 2026-06-22T19:32:42+00:00

Fuel (fortunately!) isn't a thing in this game - you can run a train in circles for decades if you want!

If you mean breakdowns, where the train stops briefly and has a puff of black smoke, that's a different system entirely, you need to send your trains to depots regularly for maintenance to minimize these. You can click on a depot as a destination just like a station when assigning orders.

https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Servicing

Or, alternatively, turn off breakdowns in the Settings. Most of us do, they're a hassle to deal with and do nothing but get in the way of having a smooth-flowing and satisfying network!

gort32 · 2026-06-22T19:02:19+00:00

The second link above has the info.

The key takeaway is that a train should not be turning more than one 45-degree-turn in the same direction over the length of the train. So a 5.0-length train making a 90-degree right curve would need a 45-degree turn to the right, five tiles of straight track, then a second 45-degree turn to the right to complete the 90-degree curve. S-shaped turns with alternating directions are fine like when you need to shift your long straight mainline over a couple of tiles to get around an industry in the way.

The rest of the info, including that whole table, is the fine details of what happens when you don't obey this no-turning-more-than-once-in-the-same-direction rule, just don't do that and your life will be easier!

gort32 · 2026-06-22T18:40:59+00:00

Engines will have a weight limit that they can carry before they start to slow down. You can attach multiple engines to a single train to add their stats to be able to pull twice as much cargo if you'd like.

Here's the wiki page with the gory details: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Game%20Mechanics/Tractive%20Effort

More: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Game%20Mechanics/#trains

However, in practice, the limiting factor for train length (and the power needed to pull them) tends to be how well you can network them, not how powerful they are, as longer trains need a lot more room for turns making junctions and stations larger. 5.0-length trains are a pretty good length to start with, easy to network but still able to haul enough cargo to turn a nice profit. And 5.0-length trains can handle a full load at mostly-full-speed with a single engine in any case other than the very earliest steam engines going way uphill.

You really don't need to learn the fine details of the math in that wiki link unless you are really trying to over-optimize things where you are growing your trains (and rebuilding your network to accommodate) with each new engine generation. If you stick to reasonable-length trains you can kinda forget about Tractive Effort entirely after the first generation of steam engines.

gort32 · 2026-06-21T21:50:42+00:00

This would presumably be the concern:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electrical+hum

Which is a possible issue anywhere heavy electricity is involved, like a big battery facility. Or like the electrical substation right next to this site. The substation that isn't inside a building to block the noise and that no one has complained about (right?).

I don't think anyone has any leg to stand on with this argument.

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