What do converyer belts actually do??

[Sabaithal]

Had no problem getting by without them, yet they're introduced like they're supposed to be a major mechanic. Except nothing in the game explains what their actual purpose is, just placing them.

[lukeliu]

They only work with level 3 buildings. Level 3 buildings suffer from a serious penalty in efficiency without placing the right belt. If you can manage to correctly "belt" them, they can output almost 4 times as much as their level 2 counterparts.

[Friggles größter Fan]

Note that the penalty of a factory is removed as soon as a conveyor belt connection becomes available; it is not required that the conveyor belt networks provides enough resources for the factory, i.e. you can connect 100 factories to a single resource producing building with all factories achieving the highest production speed.

Interestingly, it is also possible to connect a mine to a mine shaft, which is not in the influence radius of the mine, via a conveyor belt. In this case, while the mine gains the bonus of the conveyor belt, it is still not able to mine the resource of the far away mine shaft.