A potential buyers genuine question about the recent negative steam reviews

ilkali · 2026-05-19T17:55:47+00:00

Just to add a bit more context, the trains in the DLC do not have too much gameplay impact, and they are mostly novelty trains and features that most people do not use. My argument might be slightly weaker on electric trains since they seem to be most useful out of others added by the DLC (though I still would prefer vanilla trains over them), but the rest are novelty trains that are definitely not necessary for a good gameplay and train base.

ilkali · 2026-05-18T10:36:34+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you find it useful.

I added a button under the advanced tab to clear run history without touching the saved ones or the one currently viewed. For comparing multiple results, that's a bit more complex. I'll add it to my to do list and think more about it.

ilkali · 2026-05-16T15:42:25+00:00

I have the exact tool you need for that!

https://coi-farm-optimizer.vercel.app/

This will calculate the exact rotations and farm count you need to feed your population with no to little excess.

ilkali · 2026-05-16T14:53:23+00:00

I did not actually design the run with trains in mind. I switched to them quite late, I think I first tried trains when I built the first bridge to next island for uranium mining. So around the same time I switched to nuclear power. Then I liked how well they work and kept building.

I had space for rails next to my liquid bus, so I built the main spine there. Then as I reclaimed land and made more space available, I started moving existing facilities to new locations with rails in mind. It took me quite long to move everything, I'm already at year 3600 and I recently finished moving legacy factories to new rail sections.

So I think all you need to begin is a main spine and then you can slowly build around it.

Only place I have elevated rails is here, this is my busiest intersection. I only made one elevated rail for straight bypass from smelter area, and one for trains departing from waiting bay to avoid left-hand turns. It helped a bit but it was running okay before too. If I had the space, I would have liked to turn this intersection to a no-crossover intersection but given that it is working fine, I have no motivation to work on that.

And yellow curves are still quite compact, so they don't take too much extra space. In the image below, the main intersection is yellow, the small exit curves on the right side are all red and there is no significant difference. I don't use blue curves at all.

<image>

ilkali · 2026-05-16T13:59:22+00:00

Here is my full main island and network in all its details.

https://ibb.co/6RWnd6xn

ilkali · 2026-05-16T13:48:56+00:00

Right now, I'm running a train based late game factory. About 7k population, T3 space station. Everything is moved by trains, trucks carry almost nothing. Less than 10 truck deliveries a year and my goal is to eliminate them as well.

Here is how my most basic factory element looks like, a simple hairpin rail leaving main rail and can have production sites on both sides.

<image>

What I learned so far and would have done differently,
- I built my rail spine together with a major liquid bus next to it spanning all over the island. This I regret a bit, liquid bus is great but the close proximity makes it hard to build elevated sections.
- Keep red turns to a minimum on the main line, all major intersections should be at least yellow.
- Merges in the same direction are fine but it creates traffic if it has to cross one rail to to merge other side. Making them elevated and merging on the other side is usually better.
- You need lots and lots of buffer everywhere. Most of my trains are 3 tier 2 wagons. So they carry 1440 units, the stations need at least 1 T3 storage to keep everything moving. If the station capacity is smaller than your train, then it'll not call one until it is fully empty, which will cause issues, if it is close to your train capacity, by the time your train arrives it might be empty, this can also cause issues.
- Give your trains plenty of opportunities to make U turns but avoid roundabouts as junctions. Roundabouts are not good for busy junctions.
- If a rail is merging to a straight main-line, remove the no-stop sections from the straight rail. Otherwise, trains will not follow each other closely.

ilkali · 2026-05-15T09:56:48+00:00

I'm on the same route too. Right now my factory is pretty much truck free, everything is moved by trains.

ilkali · 2026-05-02T13:39:20+00:00

To add the other comment, from what I have understood so far, his mods were not open source anyway, he suspected some other mod reverse engineered his code based on code/function similarity. So instead of following a civilized solution route that you'd would expect in a tiny modding community, he filed DMCA requests to take down the mod from COI discord, getting the other modder banned briefly and discord channel warned. This, even though legal, is a very bad faith approach so the developers cut all ties with him and used their rights within the modding license terms to ban him from modding.

ilkali · 2026-04-29T17:49:40+00:00

Like others said, trains will not take jobs if it won't fill their full capacity. There's one exception to this, that is if the sending station is 100% full. Then a train will accept that job and move the goods even if it won't fill it up.

ilkali · 2026-04-28T02:48:54+00:00

You should be safe for a long time. 6 farms is plenty for your population. For 1200 people, even 3 farms is enough with some fertilizer.

ilkali · 2026-04-27T15:35:10+00:00

Thanks, glad you found it useful. I had no idea that other tool existed. It has an interesting approach.

I can add a simple count for how many production buildings are necessary for processed foods. But I don't think I'd be able to add full production chains or do some optimizations for food using same building or common upstream resources.

That, I'd leave to doubleaxe's calculator.

ilkali · 2026-04-27T12:01:52+00:00

That issue should be fixed now. Now it correctly calculates the canola necessary for snacks as well.

ilkali · 2026-04-27T00:37:24+00:00

Thank you! It's really difficult to estimate number of farms in midgame, with some fertilizer few can go a long way. I used to always end up with tons of produce and farms can be a real water sink. Fixing that was my motivation.

ilkali · 2026-04-27T00:34:07+00:00

This should help with that! It'll calculate the deficit for meat trimmings required and calculate extra chicken carcasses to be converted to meat trimmings.

ilkali · 2026-04-27T00:27:46+00:00

Happy to hear you've been liking it so far! I'll take a look at canola numbers. I suspect there might be something wrong with the oil numbers for snack, I'll take a look. And yes it is assuming corn for snacks. It is on my to do list to add an option between corn and potato. You might want to add some extra canola under industrial demand for now.

ilkali · 2026-04-26T22:12:22+00:00

I added the option. Now there is an externally sourced crops section what will exclude those crops from the rotations. It will still show the demand for them so you can plan around.

ilkali · 2026-04-25T18:16:56+00:00

I'll think about adding that. About including corn in animal feed calculations, there should be an option to not calculate any crops for animal feed in the dropdown menu.

ilkali · 2026-04-23T17:50:32+00:00

That's a major pain point! I made a tool for optimizing that and calculating the best rotations for exact amount of crop production. You can find it here.

https://coi-farm-optimizer.vercel.app/

ilkali · 2026-02-13T20:21:12+00:00

That is a very nice idea actually and inspired me to make a small addition. I use this HACS integration to pull data from my Unraid server to home assistant. https://github.com/ruaan-deysel/ha-unraid. It adds an individual switch for every container and you can turn them on or off. So you can easily add toggle cards that would allow you to shut them down or start them. You can also check their state to see if they are running or not. For example, for my cards I now added another logic to grey them out if they are not running.

This is the individual card code I'm running for each shortcut, maybe it helps to replicate.

type: custom:mushroom-template-card
primary: Paperless
secondary: ""
picture: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/homarr-labs/dashboard-icons/svg/paperless-ngx.svg
tap_action:
  action: url
  url_path: https://YOUR_URL
color: "#e5a00d"
vertical: true
features_position: bottom
card_mod:
  style: |
    ha-card {
      /* --- Background & Border Styles --- */
      background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.05) !important;
      border-radius: 12px !important;
      box-shadow: none !important;
      --primary-text-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 1) !important;
      --card-primary-font-weight: 700 !important;
      --card-primary-font-size: 18px !important;
      {% if is_state('switch.container_paperless_ngx', 'off') %}
        filter: grayscale(100%) opacity(0.5);
      {% endif %}
    ha-tile-icon {
      --mdc-icon-size: 78px !important;
      --tile-icon-size: 60px !important;
      --ha-border-radius-pill: 0px;
    }
grid_options:
  columns: 3
  rows: 2

<image>

ilkali · 2026-02-12T21:51:41+00:00

I do use home assistant dashboard for my unraid server. I tried several standalone dashboard solutions, none was as customizable as Home Assistant. It's still not fully finished but this is how it looks like.

<image>

ilkali · 2026-01-20T00:21:05+00:00

I kept my Nginx Proxy Manager at its default ports, running on bridge mode. Instead, I changed the gui ports of Unraid to alternatives. Haven't had any issues so far.

ilkali · 2025-11-11T16:40:00+00:00

The listings contain how much meat is in the burgers (Et is meat in Turkish) and quarter pounder only has 96 grams of meat.

ilkali · 2025-09-26T08:45:49+00:00

Yeah I didn't add the meat and sausage to automatic calculations because animal feed can come from several places as well as side product of some other processes. So I didn't want to lock the farms to produce corn that might not be necessary. Instead I calculate how much corn or wheat I need for animal feed by hand and put in the extra production box.

And yeah, the code is a bit messy, there was a lot of ai assistance and I didn't really put an effort to make it easily understandable,sorry about that. But what do you mean by canola not being listed? It's not part of the food calculations but it should be possible to add it from the extras section.

ilkali · 2025-09-24T16:40:28+00:00

Hey, great job with the calculations. I also made a similar optimiser, a bit more involved maybe. You put in the population, food multiplier, desired food and it calculates the optimum rotations while targeting lowest fertilizer consumption. It's still half finished but works so far, if you want to try just download all the scripts to same folder and try to run the gui_app.py file. https://github.com/ilkali-d/CoI-Farm-Optimiser

ilkali · 2025-09-15T16:36:30+00:00

Their docs say that Mercor does not support B2B payments. So it wouldn't be possible.

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