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Hex:Feet

Apr 25, 2021 @ 2:21am

Not fast enough

So this is probably the most annoying problem I have had since starting the game:
When I for example want to smelt iron then I do some ovens... but when I just let a transport belt go next to these then only like the first 10 get iron (this problem gets worse with better ovens)
Is there a simple solution to this? The inserters are to fast and the ovens too. I dont want to use like 10000 Splitters (also because this would take too much space)
So please a simple solution here

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Showing 1-10 of 10 comments

Fel

Apr 25, 2021 @ 3:04am

A yellow transport belt can feed and get plates from 24 stone furnace per lane (or half that for steel/electric furnaces).
A red belt can do twice that and a blue belt three times but that's not early game.

If only a portion of the furnaces manage to put their plates on the belt, it can be because they had a certain amount backed up in their output slot that they are unloading first but that gets solved on its own as you continue (or you can CTRL+click those furnaces with m empty hand to take all of the available plates into your inventory without even opening their UI).

Premu

Apr 25, 2021 @ 3:05am

There a three tiers of belts in the game - yellow transports 15 items/s, red 30/s and blue 45/s. This limit is something you have to deal with, as long as you use belts. They have a limited throughput

A fully saturated yellow belt with ore provides enough for 24 furnaces (or 12, if you split the belt with one side coal, the other one iron.) A setup using 24 furnaces fed by a full yellow belt produces an output belt full of the respective plates.

Later on you can upgrade to the higher tier belts - for example a setup with 24 stone furnaces and yellow belts can be simply upgraded to steel furnaces and red belts, and it will consume the whole belt as before.

A splitter will not increase that throughput, though - if you split up one fully saturated yellow belt into two, each side will receive just 7.5 items per second. Your throughput is already limited before you split it up. You need your miners to fill up a second belt instead which you feed into a second smelting array, which will give you two belts of plates.

Hex:Feet

Apr 25, 2021 @ 3:12am

So basically I (at the start) use yellow belts and stone furnaces with which I can get 24 ovens running for every belt. Thank you!

tom

Apr 25, 2021 @ 3:24am

Originally posted by AngryAgressiveAustrian:
So basically I (at the start) use yellow belts and stone furnaces with which I can get 24 ovens running for every belt. Thank you!

yeah, and then you upgrade to red belts and steel furnaces, the ratio is the same iirc

Fel

Apr 25, 2021 @ 4:35am

24 is per lane so it's 48 for both sides of the belt.

There is a great cheatsheet for those things:
https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#material-processing

drkfnix

Apr 25, 2021 @ 5:46am

Also, you need 30 electric miners (15 per side) to saturate a yellow belt.

RiO

Apr 25, 2021 @ 9:30am

Originally posted by drkfnix:
Also, you need 30 electric miners (15 per side) to saturate a yellow belt.

That leaves production bonuses out of the picture though, which means you can quickly start to make do with less. It's also highly impractical to aim for an exact full saturation from an ore field. Its non-regular shape means you can't simply stamp down 15-in-a-row. Moreover the heart of an ore field will have higher yield per square than the edges, which will run out first and skew the numbers.

If your aim is saturation, then it's far less of a hassle to simply overbuild your miners and then use a belt balancer to reduce whatever partially filled belts you get from a field, down to a smaller number of fully compressed belts.

It doesn't even draw more power than the unrealistic option of building miners specifically to fill one belt and no more. That's because miners will only draw power (and generate pollution) when running and they won't run if their output is backed up.

It will of course take more resources to build all those miners. But realistically: once you start scaling out, you'll need them anyway. And once you're scaled out and have automated enough of the work, those resources you spend on miners have become a rather small trickle, relatively speaking.

Last edited by RiO; Apr 25, 2021 @ 9:33am