Belt splitting for a noob

[Mezzy]

Hi,
I’m a complete noob at this game having only bought it a couple days ago.

Okay so here is my question, I have a belt being fed from both sides with electric miners, mining coal.. So I have a single belt with 2 lines of coal.
Line 1 goes to my steam boilers, but I want to split off Line 2, to go and feed my smelters.
I tried putting a splitter in the belt , but it still lets coal through to my steam boiler lane.


Can’t take screen shot atm to explain my issue

I’ll try this

cccccccccccccccccccc [ ] cccccccccccccccccccc
cccccccccccccccccccc [ ] ——————————-
[ ] ——————————-
[ ] cccccccccccccccccccc

C= coal
- = empty lane
[ ] = splitter


Cheers Mezzy

[Fel]

I'm not sure why you want 2 half belts instead of just splitting it normally and have 2 half-filled belts, but here are two simple examples of how to do this:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1832175628

[The Chaotic Coder]

So you want just 1 lane of belt going to each side (one for the boilers, one for the smelters)?

Here's one way to do it:


.........||
cccc[]||=
cccc[]||=
.........||
.........||

Not sure if that make sense. Basically you place the splitter and then put 2 belt sections facing toward it (the = in my picture) with a gap of 1 tile. Then put belts in the gap going out to the side. Each one will only have 1 lane of coal on it.

EDIT: Dang it, ninja'd.

Generally, though my advice would be to just let a full 2 lanes of coal go both ways. It won't be long before your steam plant will need a full belt of coal anyway, and the smelters will probably need more than 1 lane eventually, too.

[Mezzy]

Thanks for the advice ,
The reason I asked was that the Inserters seem to only pick from one side of the belt and I was having a lot of coal being stored on the belt not being used.
I’m taking by the ‘why would you’ comment that this isn’t the case ???

[Fel]

No, inserters take first from the "close" side of a belt but if there is nothing on that side they will happily take from the "far" side as well.
It's only when inserting into a belt that inserters can only access the "far" side.

EDIT: belts not being emptied is a good thing, it means you are producing more than you need, you should be more worried when a belt is emptied because that means that at best you are producing as much as what you need, but often it means that you are slowing down everything because of a lack of materials from that point.


EDIT 2: In fact for smelting it is fairly usual to have a belt having 1 side for coal and the other for ore (either iron or copper depending on what you are smelting), the inserter feeding the smelter will pick what it needs (so most of the time the ore, and when more fuel is needed it will also take a bit of coal from the other side).

[Mezzy]

Thanks for clearing that up for me Fel :-)
Makes my second question redundant now :-)
ie how to feed both coal and ore intoa furnace and still output to a 2nd side .
now that I understand how the belts work , I can look into combining coal and ore onto a single belt, I have seen various configurations that do just that :-)

Cheers Mezzy

[Fel]

You also have the long inserters (the red ones) that take/put from 1 square further when you need multiple products.

[impetus_maximus]

common method of side loading ore/fuel.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1212972896