Trucks hold 3 different materials max.

• Update 3, v0.7.7 (b470), 05 July 2025
• Expected behavior: since a while truck's behavior is such, that excavators will fill cargo hold of trucks to the maximum capacity before those trucks go dump their cargo in a sorter or on the ground. During this, mixed cargo is expected and normal and even intended.
• Observed behavior: while excavator load mixed materials into the cargo hold of trucks, only 3 different materials can be present at any given time. during loading, the excavator will filter the contents of their bucket, so that not more then 3 materials are present in the cargo hold of a truck. this can easily reproduced by trying to load more than any 3 different materials. Trucks will leave early to dump the current load of 3 materials before the excavator is allowed to load another material (the 4th in this case).
• Suggested fix: increase the number of different materials allowed in the cargo hold to a (unreasonably) large number or infinite. Going forward, more materials are expected to be added to the game - either through mods or through the devs. a limit of three seems rather an oversight than intentional - especially as this would be counter intuitive to the entire argument about the default setting of materials need processing in a sorting plant.

I think in non-modded we'd only get around 5 max; 1 ore, rock, dirt, maybe slag if you did dumping there, and same for waste. Unless you dump asteroids on top of each other, you're likely to only have the first 3 unless some ore veins overlap, so 4 or 5 would probably be sufficient.

Or just leave it as it is if there's a technical reason, it wouldn't be a problem most of the time.

Of course, a mod+special map that makes all ore veins super mixed might be interesting

funny you say that - I am using a user made map and modified it myself even more. the biggest I was able to find. having spent over 150 h on it already, I must say non-mixed ores seem boring to me at this point :D

as I stated though, it's seems more an oversight than an intentional limit. maybe a technical one, yes.
the dev was clear on their intention to make mixed ores and mandatory material sorting standard at map start. so intentionally limiting the different materials carried by a truck to a rather low number seem counter intuitive.

Hard coded that way

if (this.m_minedProducts.Count >= 3) return 0;

VehicleCargo.MAX_MIXED_PRODUCT_COUNT = 3

Still, that is a rather low number for what they’re planning for the future with having more materials.

I mean, it's a constant, so it can be changed by the devs whenever they feel like it, by just changing it's value, before re-compiling the game.

can agree on vanilla alone 3 isnt super optimal, a lot of maps have overlapping ores so you already end up with haul trucks only 1/4 full because stone + dirt + ore A + ore B etc is >3, 5 would certainly be much better but I dont see 8 or more being any real issue

smjjames [discord] wrote:

Still, that is a rather low number for what they’re planning for the future with having more materials.

'Materials' includes all the 'items' in the game, like steel or hydrogen AFAIK, plus, even if they added more ores specifically, that doesn't mean their placement would overlap

The only place that mixed cargos matters is in mining, everywhere else, trucks haul single products at one time.
Just because ore deposits might not overlap doesn’t mean that you won’t end up with situations where mining has more than 3 materials in the same area.

I know

In all the games I've played, I don't remember this ever being a problem though

And I'm not opposed to raising it

I remember running into this issue when I had dumped waste and slag in the same area back on my U2 map.
Rock, Dirt, Waste, Slag. Fill up with 3, and then run back half-empty.

vanilla maps have a lot of overlap all over the place, just some maps much more so than others

coal, quartz, baux, titanium

this is very annoying with aestroids too where it is very common to have sustained mixing of materials

I have run into this issue a lot as well - would love to see it fixed!

One-shotted a PoC mod

Vibe?

Or real dev-work?

Vibe? do you mean "ai assisted vibe coding"? 😄 no

I'm testing it with max 5 items and it's so nice not seeing half empty trucks running marathons

Mixed asteroid (quartz+copper) dropped on reclaimed land (rock+dirt+slag)

i can imagine one reason for the limit was the old tier 1 sorter only having 4 outputs and was originally limited to 4, but thats since nolonger a problem since you can just assign multiple types to the one port and sort from there, or just let trucks take out manually

great to see the problem found so succinctly though, good job OP

this is hammering me pretty hard right now. reclaimned land is just the worst when you have rock + slag + dirt + sand all mixed up

your trucks are running at 25 or 30% capacity at best

they get 3 mats after 1 or 2 scoops then it's off to the races

if you crash aestroids gg you better make sure that's homogeneous

deagato [discord] wrote:

I'm testing it with max 5 items and it's so nice not seeing half empty trucks running marathons

🎉

I mean this is a pretty serious issue with mining, even for t1 or t2 machines

it's less common and less of an issue but it affects throughput of those guys too

if you're mining basically anything with dirt

It was know for a long time but nobody reported it

I'm not certain that people thought it was a bug necessarily. Prior to 0.5.0 (U1), you could only carry one product. Update 1 introduced mixed mining and hauling to the game, which allowed three. Base game maps prior did a good job of keeping mines unmixed, so you weren't likely to naturally encounter more than three material types generally.

The base game maps being re-worked and the asteroids being introduced I think just pushed it to the point where three is no longer enough.