no conveyor belts mod

[RedInfernoX]

I hate the whole chaos with the conveyor belts and I can't manage it very well either. It's more of a chore.
I'm looking for a mod that allows me to do without conveyor belts very early in the game?

[Khaylain]

I think you'd probably be better served with finding another game that gives you the gameplay you want instead. The belts are an inherent part of the puzzle in Factorio.
Hope you find something that fits you better.

[Mad Gnome]

Unless you want to cheat in bots, but that defeats the entire purpose of this game really. There might be a mobile version of a similar game more up your alley.

Otherwise go look at some of the guides for how to lay out a main bus, it helps organize the belts significantly than a randomly laid out spaghetti base.

[Serendipitous]

You offer guides on main bus for someone who specifically said he doesn't like belts. Main bus is quite bad even if you like them, lol.

[Fletch]

Originally posted by Serendipitous:

You offer guides on main bus for someone who specifically said he doesn't like belts. Main bus is quite bad even if you like them, lol.

What's a simper alternative to main bus belts? The point of the main bus is that it organizes things considerably, and simplifies the entire base layout. Spaghetti belts is fine in the mini-factories you split off the main bus -- or you can just spaghetti the entire base, but I wouldn't call that easier or simpler. Spaghetti designs will be plagued with resource throughput issues and the player constantly battling those problems adding more rigatoni or linguini trying to fix.

For belted bases: its either main bus or spaghetti. Are there other alternatives?

[That Fish Guy]

Just use grabber/inserters to go from assembler to assembler?

[Hurkyl]

Rather than mods, you could work on vanilla designs that let you rely more on moving goods around by hand than by belts. For example, I often make these sorts of pods super-early when I'm just starting automation, and spent some effort to make them easier to use (e.g. to drop iron and copper plates in a single chest rather than needing two separate chests)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382693881

I'm not sure how far you can reasonably get with this sort of thing. Especially after oil processing, you start needing lots of assemblers to make things, such as red circuits and blue science.

But these sorts of pods that are hand-fed with materials can at least get you started. And maybe you could combine them with some very simple belt patterns -- e.g. short belts that just transfer items from a hand-fed chest to a line of assemblers.

Ultimately, you probably really want to work out some sort of design patterns for belts that are manageable for you. But maybe designs that don't rely on belts can get you further. And maybe the limitations of these sorts of designs might help shed light on what belts are really good for, helping you use them.

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Another non-mod example is that I think you can use the map editor to place "linked chests" -- chests that share contents. So you can effectively use them to teleport goods from one place to another.

[Serendipitous]

Originally posted by Fletch:

Originally posted by Serendipitous:

You offer guides on main bus for someone who specifically said he doesn't like belts. Main bus is quite bad even if you like them, lol.

What's a simper alternative to main bus belts? The point of the main bus is that it organizes things considerably, and simplifies the entire base layout. Spaghetti belts is fine in the mini-factories you split off the main bus -- or you can just spaghetti the entire base, but I wouldn't call that easier or simpler. Spaghetti designs will be plagued with resource throughput issues and the player constantly battling those problems adding more rigatoni or linguini trying to fix.

For belted bases: its either main bus or spaghetti. Are there other alternatives?

The fact that you only consider two alternatives - main bus and "spaghetti" is pretty telling, ngl.

Anything is simpler. Main bus is plagued with throughput even more than any other variant. Because you are trying to balance your 4-8 belts between many production units. And expanding the bus without hard rebuild is impossible. It's a problematic approach that offers a notion of simplicity but doesn't deliver.

Just build everything in modular style, much simpler to track. You need blue science production? Well, calculate what it need in raw resources and lay belts of them to the place from your mining patches. Then build how many smelters you would need and how many assemblers you would need. Everything is self contained, expandable and simple. Spaghetti only happen if you try to fit everything into a little space.

You can also connect everything by train, not belt. Not need for anything complicated, just one track and one train between each station.

There are plenty of approaches aside from main bus.

[Fletch]

My "main bus" is just two parallel belts of the same item type. Throughput not an issue, cause I upgrade belts in place. If you have Space Age, there is the new "turbo belt" + "stack inserter" to get incredible throughput on those two belts. Likely I'll never need more than two belts for anything outside of some massive megabase.

FWIW, I do use trains, but those do trains unload onto belts.

Back to OP: If you dislike belts, your best bet is to rush bots and build out a bot-base using requestor/provider chests for everything. The electrical demands to power those bots will be huge, so nuclear would also be a priority I'd think.

[Serendipitous]

Originally posted by Fletch:

My "main bus" is just two parallel belts of the same item type. Throughput not an issue, cause I upgrade belts in place. If you have Space Age, there is the new "turbo belt" + "stack inserter" to get incredible throughput on those two belts. Likely I'll never need more than two belts for anything outside of some massive megabase.

FWIW, I do use trains, but those do trains unload onto belts.

Back to OP: If you dislike belts, your best bet is to rush bots and build out a bot-base using requestor/provider chests for everything. The electrical demands to power those bots will be huge, so nuclear would also be a priority I'd think.

Upgrading belts does not remove the issue of the fact that you have 4 belts coming in at the start bu by the end you don't even know how much you have and you have to dance around trying to balance it with priority splitting here and there. And if you want to expand factory you need more parallel belts going in. not way around it.

It is also time and resource consuming. Oh and you need to plan belts ahead so for a new guy who doesn't know what is what it's basically a recipe to shoot himself in the leg.

FWIW, I do use trains, but those do trains unload onto belts.

It's not about using or not using trains. It's about the fact that you most likely have centralized smelting array and therefore main bus or spaghetti are your only obvious options.

[Strategic Sage]

You don't need a mod. You can just decide not to use belts.

[Serendipitous]

Originally posted by Strategic Sage:

You don't need a mod. You can just decide not to use belts.

How would you go about it before getting bots and trains?

[Morpheus]

Originally posted by Serendipitous:

Originally posted by Strategic Sage:

You don't need a mod. You can just decide not to use belts.

How would you go about it before getting bots and trains?

deliver items yourself to the machines(?)
i mean, he could do that, as a challenge, imagine not putting a single belt until you get logistics...

[Serendipitous]

Originally posted by Morpheus:

Originally posted by Serendipitous:

How would you go about it before getting bots and trains?

deliver items yourself to the machines(?)
i mean, he could do that, as a challenge, imagine not putting a single belt until you get logistics...

Right, the obvious answer somehow slipped my mind. Kinda insane tho... Well, you can put stuff in the chests near the machines so they would feed from it, make it slightly more bearable.

[GarbageCollector]

Originally posted by Serendipitous:

Upgrading belts does not remove the issue of the fact that you have 4 belts coming in at the start bu by the end you don't even know how much you have and you have to dance around trying to balance it with priority splitting here and there. And if you want to expand factory you need more parallel belts going in. not way around it.

You can go modular at any time afterwards. Having a bus doesn't lock you in in any way. You want to build a modular setup for something new? You can do this in the way you suggested just as easily if you have or don't have a main bus. I don't understand the objection.

Originally posted by Serendipitous:

It is also time and resource consuming. Oh and you need to plan belts ahead so for a new guy who doesn't know what is what it's basically a recipe to shoot himself in the leg.

I couldn't possibly disagree more. I don't see any issue with freestyling red and green science but by the time you're working on blue, an unplanned and uncentralized mess a new player will likely find themselves in at this point will only get much, much worse as they continue to expand. Spending a few minutes to think out and organize the main path of my base's expansion was by far the most effective tool to help me past that beginner hurdle of everything turning into a mess.

Maybe you mean something else than I do when you say "new guy" though. I'm sure for advanced players with great foresight, the shortcomings of a bus make other options more valuable. For what I would consider a new player, not at all. The "notion of simplicity" is very real for some of us.

[Serendipitous]

Originally posted by GarbageCollector:

You can go modular at any time afterwards. Having a bus doesn't lock you in in any way. You want to build a modular setup for something new? You can do this in the way you suggested just as easily if you have or don't have a main bus. I don't understand the objection.

.

And why even go bus in the first place? It's incredibly time and resource consuming action. And then you build all your production again because it sucks. Maybe don't build it in the first place. Especially since the op said they hated belts, so perhaps offering him something that relies heavily on them is not exactly right approach.

I couldn't possibly disagree more. I don't see any issue with freestyling red and green science but by the time you're working on blue, an unplanned and uncentralized mess a new player will likely find themselves in at this point will only get much, much worse as they continue to expand.

Disagree with what? The fact that it is one fo the most resource and time consuming way to organize your base? Well, it's a fact.

Unplanned centralized mess is somehow makes it better? You are basically offering him to not do anything of his own and just copy someone's main bus design, because that's the only way for it to be a "planned" mess, because we are talking about new player. So instead of actually learning the game he would settle in a few copied patterns and them will come here to complain that those don't work very well on other planets, lol.

Main bus is probably the worst approach when it comes for expansion.

Maybe you mean something else than I do when you say "new guy" though. I'm sure for advanced players with great foresight, the shortcomings of a bus make other options more valuable

The guy will burn out trying to build 100500 smelting arrays by hand. He doesn't have foresight therefore he doesn't know what you take for granted, with stuff like bots and mall.

Which is why i argue that starting small and isolated is way better because it makes every step much more compact and easier to think about.