🚢 The Problem: Maritime Congestion & The “Death Queue”
While ships have zero collision physics on open water, docks are a major logistics bottleneck. Only one ship can occupy a single dock tile at a time, and their slow loading speeds cause massive backup queues in the water. As tankers sit waiting, cargo ages, station ratings plummet, and your profits evaporate. [1, 2]
🛠️ Solution 1: Spreading Multi-Dock Stations (The “Easy Fix”)
You can merge multiple docks together under a single station name so arriving ships automatically sail into the first empty slot.
- The Technique: Turn up the “Max station spread” setting in your Advanced Settings menu. Then, use
Ctrl+Click to build your docks with a physical gap of 5 to 10 empty water tiles between them. - The Benefit: Spreading them out gives ships plenty of room to back up and turn around without colliding or stuttering their pathfinding.
🛠️ Solution 2: The Buoy Waypoint Trick (Traffic Separation)
If you have multiple fleets (like raw oil tankers coming in and finished goods ships leaving), they will fight over the same docks if left on autopilot.
- The Technique: Place an oversized Buoy 3 to 4 tiles out in the water directly in front of your designated “input” docks, and another buoy in front of the “output” docks.
- The Benefit: Add the buoys to your ships’ orders as waypoints. Because OpenTTD pathfinding forces ships to sail in straight lines toward their next target, this creates a clean “dual-highway” that perfectly isolates your fleets.
🛠️ Solution 3: The “Feeder Track” Firewall (Absolute Control)
If you want 100% foolproof logistics with zero chance of a tanker accidentally blocking a goods ship, separate the docks entirely.
- The Technique: Build a Refinery North Docks station for oil and a completely separate Refinery South Docks station for goods. Connect them on land using a tiny, 2-tile train track or road.
- The Benefit: Use a single train or truck set to “Transfer and leave empty” to bridge the inventory between the stations. This builds a physical firewall between your shipping fleets.
📦 Visual & Functional Upgrade: The NewGRF Station Sets
If you want your massive multi-dock ports to look like unified, realistic harbors instead of random wooden planks stuck to the shore, avoid basic “eye candy” objects and use functional Station Sets:
- CHIPS Custom Docks 1.0: A great “set and forget” mod. By adjusting the NewGRF parameters before you start a map, you can cycle through 144 visual combinations of concrete wharves, heavy cranes, and warehouses.
- CHIPS Station Set / Industrial Stations Renewal (ISR): If you hate being locked into a single choice, use these sets instead. They let you use your train station menu to dynamically “paint” asphalt, pipelines, and cargo piles around your functional docks in real-time as your empire grows.
- MariCo (Maritime Construction): Perfect for framing the water portion of your hub with beautiful concrete sea-walls and deep-water shipping lanes.
Would you like me to turn this specific Docks and Buoys summary into an intro paragraph, or do you have enough material here to create a second, standalone post for TTD Clarity?