Factorio Forums

I'm still relatively new and just browsing the forums on things, but couldn't find anything on this.

I've been seeing designs that use fast belts before slower ones to compress a belt, so I want to know, are express belts always viable, is the increased speed better than being able to compress the belt fully?

Fast belts cost a lot more than basic belts, and express belts even more so, making it a question of what is affordable.

Naturally a fast belt that is only 80% full is still moving more items per second than a packed basic belt, but at a much greater cost.

SyncViews wrote:Fast belts cost a lot more than basic belts, and express belts even more so, making it a question of what is affordable.

Naturally a fast belt that is only 80% full is still moving more items per second than a packed basic belt, but at a much greater cost.

Resources are not an issue. But thanks.

What you need to know is that two of the same belt have a better throughput than one that's one tier faster.
However, if you have to transport really high volumes of stuff, there's one moment where it will get impractical to add always more parallel belts. At that moment, you'll want to replace your belts with faster belts.

With "regular" bases on "regular" games, there's not much a double fast belt will be not enough for. On really big bases, or with some mods that increase the costs of stuff (like marathon for example), you'll find yourself always short of throughput. Then, you'll be happy to have 4 parallel express belts for each ressource instead of 12 parallel basic belts for each ressource.