Factorio Forums

I am currently looking for an update to the old fashioned linear furnace, as my factory needs to grow. I am currently working at 2.5k green / min and 600 red /min and need to increase my copper and iron output tremendously.

As well is the main bus topology still the best means of high output , or should i be going logistic bots?

There are a few good smelting-setups.

Some people - including myself - tend to use combined ore-coal belts on either side of two furnace-lines with the output in the middle of both lines.
If youre dealing with fully compressed input belts and enough furnaces, this leads to exactly one compressed output belt per furnace-array.

A main bus is absolutely fine for high throughput if you have enough belts per resource.
In theory, you could achieve higher throughput (but not necessarily faster transport speed) by using bots since there is - theoretically - no limit on how many bots can "process" one resource at a time.

If youre, concerned about UPS, you should use as many underground-belts as possible (e.g. as less normal belts as possible) or switch over to bots.

i have seen smelters with beacons, but no standardized " good" ones. What kind of throughput would we be talking about?

iirc Fast Transport Belt will compress at 48 (half that with speed modules) furnaces. You can feed this with Iron/coal but I really feel like at your volume it would simplify the problem to go electric.

You said you are pushing 2500 Green Circuits/Min and 600 Red/Min Feeding this alone requires something like 120 copper and 50 iron You could simplify that and say three red belts of copper and one of iron per minute.

As far as layout goes I like something along the lines of this. It's overkill in your situation but the principle is the same at lower scales. This is a double rack(2 red belts per line) but you could cut it in half. I really like having the splitters to merge in plate to the main output line.

As for the Bus idea vs bots it's really a per game philosophy. With enough bots you could go totally beltless and have huge volume. You would want to rearrange quite a bit to optimize flight times.

I did a bot only base quite a while back and my smelting looked like...


Since then I generally limit myself to personal robots only and construction bots. This is more to challenge myself as I feel that bots trivialize your logistics decisions at higher quantities.

Classic furnaces setup is passe. After releasing combinators, smart furnaces are on top (One to smelt them all.)
Some examples viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25615

Neotix wrote:Classic furnaces setup is passe. After releasing combinators, smart furnaces are on top (One to smelt them all.)
Some examples viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25615

Fun yes...On top? Meh...

"First rule of government. Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"

Shokubai wrote:iirc Fast Transport Belt will compress at 48 (half that with speed modules) furnaces. You can feed this with Iron/coal but I really feel like at your volume it would simplify the problem to go electric.

You said you are pushing 2500 Green Circuits/Min and 600 Red/Min Feeding this alone requires something like 120 copper and 50 iron You could simplify that and say three red belts of copper and one of iron per minute.

As far as layout goes I like something along the lines of this. It's overkill in your situation but the principle is the same at lower scales. This is a double rack(2 red belts per line) but you could cut it in half. I really like having the splitters to merge in plate to the main output line.

i like this!

would beacons help at all

spektral wrote:

Shokubai wrote:iirc Fast Transport Belt will compress at 48 (half that with speed modules) furnaces. You can feed this with Iron/coal but I really feel like at your volume it would simplify the problem to go electric.

You said you are pushing 2500 Green Circuits/Min and 600 Red/Min Feeding this alone requires something like 120 copper and 50 iron You could simplify that and say three red belts of copper and one of iron per minute.

As far as layout goes I like something along the lines of this. It's overkill in your situation but the principle is the same at lower scales. This is a double rack(2 red belts per line) but you could cut it in half. I really like having the splitters to merge in plate to the main output line.

i like this!

would beacons help at all

It's cheaper both in terms of fixed costs and power consumption to just build more furnaces (not true if you use prod modules in the furnaces though!).

I am looking for a 10k + ore a minute furnace, relatively simple and tileable . Space doesnt matter much, but wouldnt mind having beacons for energy reduction...

spektral wrote:but wouldnt mind having beacons for energy reduction...

energy reduction is capped at 80% - which is a pair of productivity-2 modules on the furnace, no need for bacon.

silverkitty23 wrote:

spektral wrote:but wouldnt mind having beacons for energy reduction...

energy reduction is capped at 80% - which is a pair of productivity-2 modules on the furnace, no need for bacon.

EXCUSE ME SIR! There is ALWAYS A NEED FOR BACON!

In my current factory I have opted for bot driven smelting plants


Stamping down this block of 8 four times is capable of a little over 1k iron plates per minute once you have all bot upgrades researched.

I opted for a bot system because you can then take advantage of the inserter stack size bonus as you are outputting into chests, not onto a belt.

Here is the Blueprint String if you want to use it HTH
Michael