Roads and Paths

Resources are moved along Roads by the Road Carrybot

Resources are moved along Paths by a Building's Stackbot

Bots can travel along Paths or Roads, and in certain cases over terrain.

You can also add Transport Rules to buildings to make the transport of resources on your roads and paths more efficient.

Road Types

Roads and Paths can be upgraded by RoadLayers by unlocking the Research Cobbled Roads and Paved Roads

Name	Upgraded By	Construction	Speed Boost
Dirt Road/Path	-	-	+0%
Stone Road/Path	Road Layer L1	Stone	+50%
Brick Road/Path	Road Layer L2	Bricks	+100%

Roads + Road Posts

Roads are the main trunk routes of your colony. Each road has a carrybot who moves resources between the road posts at the ends of each road. Roads have a minimum length of 4 tiles and a maximum length of 6 tiles.

Road posts can hold a maximum of four resources at any one time. When a carrybot moves a resource from one road post to another it will only be able to drop off the resource if there is enough room and if not, the carrybot will wait until a space becomes available.

This means if too many resources are trying to move through the same roads then it will cause delays and and the productivity of your buildings might suffer.

You can also add rules to road posts to determine which resources are allowed to move through the road post.

Roads + Road Posts Placement

To build a road, select 'Road' from the building menu [1], click on an existing road post and then click on the tile you want to end on. When drawing a road you can hold [Control] when clicking a tile to fix a waypoint in your prospective road.

Hotkeys

Use C + click on a road post for copying the road post's blacklist and whitelist rules.

Use V + click on a building for pasting the road post's blacklist and whitelist rules.

Use ALT + click on a tile to place a stand-alone road post (if enabled under game options).

Hold ALT to continue a new road/path from a completed road/path.

Hold ALT to delete paths that cross a road without deleting the road when using 'remove' on a path.

Hold CTRL when placing the end road post of a new road to continue building a new road from that tile.

Hold CTRL and drag mouse and left click to continue a new road from a completed road, 6 tiles long.

Paths

Paths are used to connect buildings to roads or to connect buildings to each other.

Every building has one or more stackbots who are in charge of delivering and collecting resources that are either coming into or being taken out of that building. Therefore the building needs to connected to at least one road or path for the building to receive resources from the network.

You can select a building and the connections panel will tell you the roads and paths and other buildings that the building is connected to. You can also select a connection to visualise the route.

While you can place buildings directly on roads, sometimes it's better not to. In this situation you can place a building offset from the road and then create a path from the building's entrance to a road. A building can use multiple paths and have connections to several road posts.

Another benefit of paths is that if buildings are directly connected by a path (which is not interrupted by a road post), then resources can be delivered and collected directly, without needing to go to the road posts.

As shown in the image here, if a Residence and a Well are connected by paths then the Well's stackbot will deliver directly to the Residence. But if you have too many other Residences connected to the same paths at too far a distance then you could end up producing Water faster than the stackbot can deliver it.

!Remember that paths only connect buildings to roads or each other. They do not have any effect if just linking two road posts.