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Since every piece of ore gets you a metal plate, a single lane of a belt worth of ores when using enough furnaces to smelt all of it nets you a single lane of a belt worth of plate as well.
In theory you can make more plates if you have more furnaces and use a full belt worth but you will be limited by the output unless you use belt trickeries, a different speed of belt or mods.
A lane of a yellow belt can transport up to 7.5 items per second, for copper and iron stone furnaces make 0.3125 plates per second (0.625 per second for steel and electric furnaces).
This means that a lane of ores can feed exactly:
7.5 / 0.3125 = 24 stone furnaces, or 12 steel/electric furnaces.
Since it's the same amount of furnaces that can fully compress a lane for the plates you will usually have your furnaces in 2 rows around the belt for the plates with the right amount of furnaces depending on the type used and the belts feeding them ores on the outer edge.
As a result, they will only consume 1 lane per side anyway to produce their 1 lane per side, so putting the coal required for stone/steel furnaces on the other lane only serves to save some space.
The plus of this is that you bring a single belt worth of ores as well and use a simple splitter to equally divide its content between the two sides, making is very easy to manage all the way from the mining drills to the belt of plates after the furnaces.
Everything changes if you use yellow belts to bring the ores and red belts for the plates, in that case you can use a full yellow belt worth of ores to produce the plates for the red belt.
This kind of setup is usually reserved for late game and only reserved for electric furnaces since they don't need coal anyway.
Efficiency really depends on what type of efficiency you are looking at.
With that bit of terminology determined (just in case, y'know) it is the hallmark of the novice to mix coal and ore on the same belt lanes. Ideally, your smelting column would be using whole belts of ore and coal, or belts that have coal in one lane and ore in the other, without any mixing between lanes.
Another thing to consider is, the mismatch of coal use to ore is to your benefit.
You can feed (factoriocheatsheet.com) 666 furnaces with a single yellow belt of coal. At 48 furnaces per smelting column (stone with yellow belts, steel with red belts) that means a single yellow belt of coal can fuel 13(.875, but that's useless for yellow belts of coal) smelting columns - with steel counting as two. 27 smelting columns if you are using a full red belt of coal. Solid fuel has 3 times the energy density compared to coal, so it can fuel three times as many - 41.666 columns on a yellow belt, 83.3333 on a red, 125 on a blue.
You just have to figure out how to use splitters to make some decent smelting columns.
i noticed this when we had like 1 coal/iron lanes and the coal cont but not the iron ores.
We had a ton of lanes but still i mean the cut off point is rather high but it should be a good idea to split the lanes since the game is all about E X P A N D F A C T O R Y
Some other points:
-coal is good but once you unlock better fuels you can swap like the petrol based solid fuels
-when you upgrade to electric funaces you can push away/do away with the coal lane and plop the furnaces while moving the inserter (or 1 row of them) to the side.
-less of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with routing
-having separate lanes means it's easier to add more materials if your deposits run out at one point.
You will have your full belt once you have electric smelters.
Besides, if your mixed belt is red and output belt is yellow, you get a full yellow belt of smelted stuff.
Plop down 4 smelter stacks outputting 4 yellow belts and you should be fine for start of the game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2012165477
In this specific case I used steel furnaces and solid fuel (mostly because this is a cheat world I use to test things and I didn't have coal next to that iron patch, and you can cheat in solid fuel easier than coal).
If you are interested there are exactly 30 electric mining drills to fully compress that belt of ores (since it is a cheat world I have the mining efficiency technologies researched but it's easier to put all 30).
Of course you can feed the coal in different ways without the fast inserters (I stole this particular setup from speedrunners because it is more compact than my normal setup), and if you use stone furnaces you need a line twice as long (24 on each side).
You are forgetting about one detail: Belts have TWO sides so you can place smelters on BOTH sides. This fills up both lanes of the output belt (either directly if you use long hand inserters or after merging), and thus you need ore on both lanes of the input belt.
Your second point is useless and only agrees with what was said. I'm questioning if you even play the game. If you fully consume ONE FULL LANE of input, you will produce exactly ONE FULL LANE of output. Inserters always place on the far side of the belt, you don't need long handled inserters or merge, just normal inserters and furnaces on either side of your output belt. If you have TWO FULL LANES of input (on one belt or two belts doesn't matter) and you consume all of it, you will produce exactly TWO FULL LANES (or one belt) worth of plate. Nothing anywhere says that you have to always produce 2 lanes worth of output.
If I only need a half belt of copper plate, why bother with producing a full belt?
Now as to the point OP is trying to make, the possible benefits provided don't seem to be actually unique benefits. I'm not sure OP understands that most people are not mixing the coal and ore in both lanes of the belt but rather one lane for ores and one lane for fuel. In that situation you are equally as capable of swapping out for any fuel source (also is the case even for complete mixing unless you are mining coal directly into your ore belt). The point for the extra space when you get electric furnaces is also not actually the case because you could easily achieve the same effect with using long handled inserters for your output. As for needing more ores than coal, as long as you have a dedicated path for your ores to reach the end of your belt you will have "enough" ore. Now you may not have enough ore for the amount of furnaces you have, but you can decrease the amount of furnaces way easier than you can increase them. And you are already consuming all of the ores your inputting anyway, do you don't need more furnaces unless your getting more ores, but your output normally does not have the room for additional plates, you can't even process more than a full belt of ores with a single belt of output.
When you put smelters on both sides of the output belt, Both lines of smelters need their own dedicated belt of input; Which means you can still do 1 lane of ore, and 1 lane of coal/fuel for each and have no loss.
Each 'row' of your smelting column will look something like the following;
B for belt, I for inserter, F for furnace.
B I F I B I F I B
With the outside belts being the 'input' belts, the inner belt is 'output.
Assuming all belts are the same type, and given the fact that one 'Lane'(Or half belt) worth of input ore will equal one 'Lane' of output, No matter what you do, you cannot output more than the output belt can hold; And inserters can only place on the far side of a belt (which is why we do furnaces on both sides of the output)....
So if you have one full lane of input ore being consumed by each side of your smelting column, then it is outputting one full lane each- There's no space on that output belt's lanes to output more, even if you could feed the furnace with more ore. So, Why not use that second lane on the 'input' belts for fuel? Doing so saves you space, and saves you material, until you get to electric furnaces and move on from fueled smelting.
People do th coal +ore lane then just put 1 belt for the plates stone iron etc.
Even with the fastest belt (blue one) you can still get the last couple of furnaces clogged since they all go in one direction unless you split it halfsies (but people are usually lazy enough to not route it and just all 1 direction).
If I recall correctly though, there are a few little belt manipulation tricks you can use to solve that little clog right at the end..But at the moment, none of them are coming to mind.. I vaguely recall something to do with an underground belt being used at the end, i think.
And clearly you misunderstood.
You show the smart way - coal and ore in their own lanes. It is what I was alluding to when I mentioned smart use of splitters. You are not showing your ore mixed in with your coal in the *same lane*.
I trust you now understand the difference? Belt and Lane are NOT the same thing. One Belt has two Lanes. I established that earlier in this thread, just n case, y'know. What you do, what you've shown in the pic, is not what the TC said he sees everyone doing. So I asked where he's seeing what he's seeing, because its not what most people actually do, as far as I'm aware. But then, I don't play this game multiplayer. TC may have experiences I do not. Thus, I asked.
I could of course be wrong because his second post was way less clear about this and kind of implied injecting coal/ore in the same lane.
Since he worded it that way I kind of guessed you meant the same as what he meant in his first post (and obviously I was wrong, I should stop assuming things all the time, sorry).
Coal in one lane, Ore in the other, on a belt, as Fel demonstrated in his picture, is a way to make things narrower, and to save on resources, because you can use inserters and not long inserters.
It takes 3.2 seconds to smelt ore into plate. It takes 3.2 seconds to smelt 2 stone into 1 stone brick. Knowing that belts are so many items/sec fast, we know that each lane on that belt is exactly half that items/sec. Yellow belts are 15 items/sec. One half of that is 7.5 items/sec, which means you can mathematically determine the exact number of smelters needed to fill the belt and no more. It comes out to 48 Stone Furnaces for a Yellow belt, or 24 Stone Furnaces per lane. Since Steel furnaces are twice as fast, upgrading to them allows you to either upgrade your belts to Red (same number of furnaces needed), or cut the smelting column in half, from 24 furnaces long to 12, if you continue to use a yellow belt.
You will not find that the end smelters are only sometimes working. That was a thing from the days when you got 13.33333, 26.66666, 40 items per second for Yellow, Red, Blue belts respectively. You had to have each side of the smelting column 1 furnace longer in order to round up to produce enough plate to fill the belt completely. At that time you needed an odd number of stone furnaces to fill the yellow belt, so which side did it go on? Why choose, put an additional one on the other side, and just ignore the fact that sometimes one worked, sometimes the other did. That's not a factor in 0.17 or 0.18.