Assembly Line Wiki
Assembly Line Wiki
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Overview[]

Transporters are a subcategory of transportation machines that allow point to point movement of items. They operate in pairs of a Transporter Input and a Transporter Output and cannot operate independently. Transporter inputs and outputs are linked via an id, which is an integer from 0 to 99. While Transporters exist in both games, their functionality and costs differ.

Transporters are the only machines in the game capable of moving resources to a location not directly adjacent to itself.

Transporter Inputs can accept items from any direction. Transporter Outputs will push items from themselves into the adjacent location they are facing.

Transporters in Assembly Line 1[]

Transporters are a late game transportation machine that introduces the ability to transfer resources and products across assembly lines. This allows for the creation of multi-line production chains.

While it is technically possible to produce AI Robots on a single line, to do so at suitable rates will almost certainly require multiple lines. A single line is capped at 56 starters producing 3 resources per second, so in theory a player could produce enough resources to produce an AI Robot in 50.95 seconds (not considering that the required resources of each type are not divisible by 3). In practice however, this does not factor in the numerous stages of production the resources must go through and how ratios come in to play, as well as making this happen within the 200 spaces that remain on a fully unlocked floor. To that end, most players will typically leverage at least 3 lines in their bot production.

A global cap of 30 pairs of build transporters exist (though technically, they are capped, unlocked, and upgraded separately). When transporters are first unlocked, they may create up to 5 transporters. As they are unlocked separately, it is possible to build only inputs or outputs before they become functional.

Transporter inputs and outputs are paired 1 to 1 and duplicate ids are not possible (for example, if an input with id 1 has already been placed, the menu for another transporter input will skip from 0 to 2).

While transporters are most well known for their ability to move items across lines, they can operate within a single line just fine and can be used to create more compact builds.

Transporter performance across lines can sometimes be inconsistent and difficult to precisely predict. This is due to the fact that only the currently loaded line is actively being run by the game. All other lines use polling periods to capture recent averages for items flowing into transporters as well as profit being generated. For this reason, players may observe significant differences between what goes into a transporter input and what is produced on the other side.

While a player may never observe issues with 1 product at a highly consistent rate of 1 or 2 a second, high volume use cases such as the aluminum for AI Robots or very slow period cycles like producing an AI Processor once every 40 seconds are more likely to cause issues. A player can troubleshoot these issues with the following steps:

  • Close the game and power cycle the device to clear the cache and delete all entities
  • Reload the line with the input and let it run for several cycles
  • Switch to the output line and see if the issue has been resolved
    • with long cycle times, waiting to switch to the output line until right after the product enters the transporter is recommended
    • with very short cycles (or simply many items per second), 20 or 30 seconds is adequate

Transporters in Assembly Line 2[]

Transporters in AL2 carry both functional and quality of life enhancements. There are 2 distinct sets that are unlocked independently; Transporters and Advanced Transporters. As with AL1, unlocks are independent between inputs and outputs. There are no upgrade options for either type.

The standard AL2 Transporter Input and Output are bound to a single line. A player may duplicate ids on a different line, though these transporters will not interact. The cross-line capability of AL1 Transporters is instead found in the Advanced Transporter, which supports transporting products either within or across lines.

Lines in AL2 start out almost 3 times larger than AL1 and can be expanded to nearly 40 times the total playable area (10k usable spaces per line vs 256 in AL1), and so transporter limits and capabilities have also been scaled up. AL2 transporters are also far more performant and consistent across lines (largely due to the fact that other lines besides the currently loaded line continue to run in the background in AL2).

Transporters in AL2 do support duplicate ids. Multiple inputs will combine to the same output. If there are multiple outputs with the same id, only 1 will output the resulting products. This mechanic can be leveraged to funnel multiple intermediaries into a single input to reduce complex routing for later game production lines. Transporters in AL2 do not have global caps or per line caps on placement.

While AL1 Transporters are generally regarded as an end game feature, the standard AL2 Transporter is more aligned to mid-game based on it's pricing for placement and upgrade relative to nuclear production. The Advanced Transporter also is also earlier in the player's journey as high level starter upgrades and late stage blueprints on the AI Robot Bomber technology tree are significantly more expensive than unlocking the Advanced Transporter.

Assembly Line 2 Desktop[]

Advanced transporters are not featured in AL2 Desktop as the entire game is on one floor. To offset this, ids up to 999 are supported for 1000 unique values. Pressing minus in the transporter interface of 0 does nothing, while pressing plus when the interface of 999 will go to 100.

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