Jat'z Distribution

Armored freight trucks that keep your factory supplied by road. A logistics mod for Factorio 2.1.

Build depots where goods are made and where they're needed, connect them with road, and heavy freighters do the hauling. The gameplay is inspired by Klonan's Transport Drones, with trucks in place of drones and a rugged industrial look inspired by the Yuoki mods.

Note

Early release. Item and fluid deliveries, fuel, research and recipes all work, but balance may still change between versions. Read the changelog before updating, and back up your saves. See Try it to install it.

How it works

1. Research Freight system, after Engine, to unlock the item depots, freighters and road (and later Liquid freight for the liquid depots, Road network monitor for the monitor, and Road tunnels for tunnels under the factory).
2. Lay road. Freighters drive only on road, which you'll find in the mod's row of the crafting menu. Each depot lays a road tile under its loading zone (except on space platforms), so just run your road up to it.
3. Place a provider depot and fill it with goods.
4. Place a request depot, open it, and choose an item and how many to keep in stock.
5. Give it freighters. Put freighters in the request depot's freighter slot.
6. Fuel them. Freighters come with a full tank and burn fuel as they drive. Place a fuel depot on the road, with any fuel item in it or any burnable fluid piped in (petroleum gas burns for them), and they fill up there by themselves. Hover a freighter to see its fuel.

That's it. Freighters set off for the provider that's nearest by road, load up and bring the goods home. A status light on the request depot tells you at a glance if anything is wrong.

Want the details? The player guide covers the freighter slot and its shortcuts, fuel, buffer depots, priority, liquid depots, the circuit network, blueprints, and what happens when a road is cut.

Features

• Trucks, not drones: the Quinityn sealed freighter is an armored eight-wheeler that follows your roads.
• Smart routing: freighters pick the nearest provider by road, not in a straight line, and re-route the moment a road is cut.
• Road tunnels: like underground belts for roads. Freighters drive in at one end and come out at the other, under whatever stands between.
• They need fuel, like real trucks: a freighter low on fuel for where it's going stops at the nearest fuel depot first, fills up, then carries on. Any fuel works, item or fluid, from any mod.
• Items and fluids: separate depots for dry cargo and for fluids, and fluids keep their temperature.
• Buffers and priority: stage stock close to where it's needed, and rank depots from 1 to 10.
• Circuit network: switch depots on and off with a circuit condition, and read what a whole road network holds with the road network monitor.
• Blueprint friendly: copy, paste and blueprints keep requests, priorities and freighters, and construction robots bring the trucks.
• Cargo stays intact: armor keeps its equipment, and food keeps track of its spoilage.
• Research: unlock the system, expand it to fluids, then make freighters faster (with infinite research) and carry more items and fluid.
• See what's on board: a freighter's cargo bays are light grey while empty and take the color of the item or fluid it picks up. Other mods can declare their items' colors.
• Paint it your way: every truck and depot has three paint layers you can recolor.

The depots

Depot	What it does	North · East · South · West
Provider	Offers its items to freighters
Request	Keeps an item in stock, fetched by its own freighters
Buffer	Stocks an item from providers, close to where it's needed
Fuel	Freighters fill up here with any fuel item, or any burnable fluid piped in
Liquid Provider	Offers fluids to freighters
Liquid Request	Keeps a fluid in stock, fetched by its own freighters
Liquid Buffer	Stocks a fluid from liquid providers. Two pipe connections

Every depot is 3×3 and can face any direction. A worn "no parking: loading zone" marking shows where freighters load, and fluid ports connect to ordinary pipes.

The Quinityn freighter

A sealed freight hauler with an armored cab, three clamped cargo bays and an exposed power unit. Chipped paint, scuffs and smoky glass give it a used, industrial look.

More screenshots: every depot in every rotation · recoloring each paint layer · depots at in-game scale · freighter colors

Try it

Built for Factorio 2.1 (tested on 2.1.24). It needs only the base game and also works with Space Age.

Install Jat'z Distribution from the in-game mod browser (Mods → Install), or download it from the Factorio Mod Portal. You'll find everything in the Logistics tab of the crafting menu, in the row just above the car and tank.

To try the latest changes from main instead, build the mod from this repository with Python 3.13:

python3 tools/package_mod.py

Then copy the zip from dist/ into your Factorio mods folder and enable it in place of the Mod Portal version.

For mod authors: cargo colors

Factorio items have no color of their own, so Jat'z Distribution works out each item's cargo color from game data: its ore's map color, the fluid in a barrel, or a recipe that makes it. That covers most items, but not all. A by-product that no recipe makes on its own gets the truck's plain slate blue, and an item made from many unrelated materials takes the color of whichever recipe comes first.

Your mod can declare its items' colors instead. Jat'z Distribution uses a declared color before any of its own rules, and items made from that item follow it. Add a mod-data prototype with data_type = "item-colors":

-- data.lua (or data-updates.lua) of your mod
data:extend({
  {
    type = "mod-data",
    name = "my-mod-item-colors", -- any unique name
    data_type = "item-colors",
    data = {
      items = {
        ["my-slag"] = { r = 0.55, g = 0.36, b = 0.17 },
        ["my-crystal"] = { r = 0.25, g = 0.62, b = 0.84 },
      },
    },
  },
})

• Colors are ordinary Factorio colors: { r, g, b } or { 0.5, 0.2, 0.8 }, from 0 to 1, or 0 to 255 if any value is above 1. Alpha is ignored, and a value that isn't a table is skipped.
• When to declare: in data.lua or data-updates.lua. Jat'z Distribution reads the colors in its data-final-fixes.lua, which may run before yours.
• No dependency needed. Without Jat'z Distribution the prototype is simply unused, and other mods can read the same item-colors data.
• Several mods may declare colors. Prototypes are read in name order, and the first one to name an item wins.
• Fluids already have a color, their base_color, so they need nothing.
• Painting: freighters are painted from a fixed palette of 216 colors (each channel in steps of 0.2), so close colors share a paint.

For an example, Yuoki Industries is adding a declaration for all its items, with colors read from their icons by a small generator script.

Roadmap

• Quinityn freighter and seven depots, with in-game icons
• Roads, and freighter deliveries between provider and request depots
• Buffer depots and priority
• Liquid deliveries
• Fuel for freighters, and refueling at the Fuel depot
• Freighter wheel animation and final stats
• Research: unlocking, liquid freight, freighter speed (infinite), item and fluid capacity
• Recipes and balance
• Release on the Factorio Mod Portal

Credits

• Gameplay: inspired by Transport Drones by Klonan.
• Visual style: inspired by the Yuoki Industries family of Factorio mods.
• Road artwork: the slag path tiles from Yuoki Industries - Railways, © YuokiTani & others, used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Apart from the road art, the models and sprites are original work built in Blender. The concept art and design references are in concepts/.

License

Jat'z Distribution is licensed under the GNU LGPL v3.0, the same license as Transport Drones. You're welcome to use, modify and share it, including in modpacks; modified versions you share must stay under the LGPL-3.0, with their source available and these notices intact.

The road artwork in assets/roads/yuoki-railways/ keeps its own CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, so it can't be used commercially, and changed versions of it must be shared under the same licence. The in-game screenshots also show Factorio's own artwork, which remains Wube Software's. See NOTICE for the full details and attributions; the GPL text the LGPL builds on is in COPYING.

Contributing

Repository layout and test commands

Folder	Contents
info.json, data.lua, prototypes/, control.lua, scripts/, locale/	The mod itself. The repository root is the mod's root, so it uses the sprite helpers and sheets in assets/ directly.
assets/quinityn-freighter/	Freighter Blender model, game sprites, Lua helper and render tools
assets/depots/	Depot Blender models, pipe connector, game sprites, Lua helpers and render tools, plus the archived 1×1 depots
assets/roads/	The road tile art, from Yuoki Industries - Railways (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
concepts/	Approved concept art for the depots, with links to the freighter concept
tests/factorio/	Test mods that check the mod and the artwork in Factorio
tools/	Mod packager, test runners and CI tools
docs/	Player guide, testing guide, test results, UPS benchmark and README images
portal/	The Mod Portal page: summary, description and screenshots, synced by each release

Each asset folder's README explains its files, how to use the sprites in Factorio, and how to edit and re-render the models. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md and read AGENTS.md before changing anything; it holds the project rules for human and AI contributors. Report vulnerabilities privately using SECURITY.md.

You need Python 3.13 and Factorio 2.1; the free headless server is enough for the automated checks. Blender 4.3.2 is only needed to edit models and re-render sprites.

python3 tools/test_mod.py --factorio /path/to/factorio/bin/x64/factorio     # the mod: craft, place, rotate, drive, deliver
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python assets/quinityn-freighter/tools/validate_assets.py
python3 tools/test_factorio.py --factorio /path/to/factorio/bin/x64/factorio
python3 tools/test_depot_art.py --factorio /path/to/factorio/bin/x64/factorio