Does Sharing Belts Limit Production?

[Tyr4el]

In a game with a friend we are using one belt down the middle of the furnaces for iron ore and coal. We're noticing that we're having iron problems despite having a lot of miners. Is there anything we can do to combat this?

[DaveMcW]

One side of one yellow belt can support 10 mines, 12 if you use a splitter for perfect compression.

Upgrade to red belts or build another furnace line if you need more.

[DerivePi]

For the future, I'd recommend keeping coal and ore separate:
- The rate of coal consumption is much lower than the rate of ore consumption
- Coal can be removed if you replace the furnaces with electric

[Tyr4el]

We upgraded to red belts and pretty much solved the problem. I added a buffer storage which keeps things running for a little bit but most times, we end up with a backlog of iron now, which is what we were aiming for. But yes, we will be upgrading to electric soon.

[Peter34]

- The rate of coal consumption is much lower than the rate of ore consumption

What I do is I use 2 Belts. Each belt has 2 lanes, for a total of 4 lanes. I then use 1 of those lanes for Coal and the other 3 lanes for Ore. Furnaces then use both normal Inserters and Long Inserters to take from this double-Belt, and it works fine.

The Ore-to-Coal consumption ratio isn't 3:1, I think it may be closer to 3.5:1 or 4:1, but 3:1 is the best that can be achieved (I mean, you could do 5:1 with 3 Belts in between the Furnaces as a "Belt spike", and 1 lane on the middle Belt being Coal, but I think 5:1 is too high a ratio).