Another steel mill not producing thread....

[dusty_bagg]

Hi, this seems to be an age old question, asked many times before but I can never find a straight answer.

Problem is, the steel mills do not produce steel. I have a station within coverage of the mill and trains supplying iron ore constantly. The mills do not produce steel or seem to receive the iron ore. I have read that in the case of mills the iron ore must be 'distributed' to the mills. How do I do this? Are there any other factors steel mills need before they will produce? This seems to be such a common problem, I fail to see how providing my save game will help.

Many thanks, J

[Alberth]

Providing a savegame makes that other people can check for teh various sources of trouble until they find the problem.
Without it, we can only do random guessing what might be wrong.

- Does the station accept iron ore? (with coverage is ambiguous, ore coverage and steel coverage are separate things)
- Does the train really unload the ore?
- Is there a pile of ore onto the station?
- Does the mill really accept ore?
- In theory, the mill may need other resources before it works, but I don't know any industry set that works in that way, so likely that's ok.

[dusty_bagg]

Thanks for your reply, I looked into it. The station appeared to be working normally but would not produce steel.

To fix the problem I added a bus station to the mill bringing passengers from a nearby town. This instantly got the mill producing steel. Had the same problem with another steel mill and again adding a passenger service to it got it producing steel straight away.

Not sure if this is a game mechanic, as can't find any more written about it, or maybe just a glitch of certain save games / generated world's, but it certainly worked for me.

[Sylf]

A copy of the sav file will tell us what was happening.
It's probably a matter of station coverage. It's not the passenger that helped the production of steel, but the extra bus stop gave the enough station coverage to the steel mill that the iron ore you were dropping off are finally being accepted at the steel mill. But that's still only a guess.

[kamnet]

Thanks for your reply, I looked into it. The station appeared to be working normally but would not produce steel.

To fix the problem I added a bus station to the mill bringing passengers from a nearby town. This instantly got the mill producing steel. Had the same problem with another steel mill and again adding a passenger service to it got it producing steel straight away.

Not sure if this is a game mechanic, as can't find any more written about it, or maybe just a glitch of certain save games / generated world's, but it certainly worked for me.

It sounds to me like you're using the ECS Industries NewGRF and not standard OpenTTD industries. If that's the case, then yes, that's how it was intended to work. Steel mill needs passengers in order to produce the steel.

This is not a requirement of standard OpenTTD industries.