What conditions are required for production?

[T/C]

I've created a transport chain to deliver milk from a cattle farm to a dairy. Occasionally, the cattle farm will stop producing, and I can't figure out why. The cattle farm and the dairy are both always below their monthly maximum activity, and all stops along the way are well under their storage capacity.

I've played Simutrans before, and I seem to remember that there are some unintuitive rules about industry production. However, I can't remember those rules, the wiki seems to be down, and the in-game help doesn't have the answers. Can anyone provide a checklist of the conditions required for industry production?

In case it is relevant, I'll mention that I'm using Simutrans Experimental with no custom settings. The supply chain in question has three segments -- pack horse, brig, and pack horse, and requires about 4:00:00 of game time to deliver milk from farm to dairy.

-TC



I think I figured it out. I believe I'm bumping up against the "Just in Time" rule, which stops production if too many items are in transit. I'm not sure of the details... I'll try to muddle through.

[Václav]

Not if too many in transit, but if dairy has too raw materials in own storage room (with JIT1 it may be any amount above limit).

You may have in transit for example ten times more than is dairy's storage capacity - but production in cattle farm stops when dairy has sufficient amount of raw material.


With JIT2 it is a little more difficult. There internal (own) storage room of any supplied factory may contain only such amount as is its capacity. So, it is useless to send long train to small shop.

[Vladki]

What Vaclav wrote is about standard simutrans. Experimental has its own rules for JIT, but I can't explain them.

As a general rule, to get smooth flow of goods watch the input storage of dairy. If it tends to grow over max, try to remove a few vehicles from the supply line.
Never use a train bigger then input capacity in the last link.

[Octavius]

There used to be a bug in experimental, causing industries and consumers to demand too few materials. It has been fixed on the devel-new branch.

As Vladki noted, keep delivery in batches smaller than the input store of the consumer. If the input store overfills, the consumer compensates by demanding less, which will make him run dry at other times. Use your ships to move materials for several consumers from several producers heading in the same general direction all in one ship. If your network isn't large enough to pack multiple transport chains in one ship, use small ships. Real electronics manufacturers in China don't hire entire container ships to send products to Europe, they just hire room for a few containers on those ships.

The rules are:
(amount in transit) = ( (consumtion per unit of time) * (lead time) - (input store capacity) / 2 - (input storage) ) * 1.1

The factor 1.1 comes from a default max in transit percentage of 110%. This means industries tend to keep their input storage just over half full.