Factorio Forums

Hi,
does labs design always look so weird? Does anybody have more elegant solution (no robots)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDRiklzGg8Q

With all those circuits you have probably already tried what I use, but if not, here they are.

Set the labs in parallel rows with four tiles between them.
Side load red and green packs so you have a belt with one side red and the other green and send them between the labs.
Do the same for blue and grey.
Use long handled and regular inserters so you pick from both belts.
Then run a line of purple and yellow packs around the outside of the labs, loading with regular inserters.
When you get science packs you can run another belt around the outside and pick from it with long handled inserters.

Another solution is to load all the packs into one lab and have inserters pull from one lab to another.

Id normally want at least a dozen labs to start, so yep, that seems a bit much for just 2 labs

You want to make use of both half of the belts, so then you only need 4 belts (you forgot space science in your design, so say red/green, blue/black, yellow/purple and white ).

Also generally I think its perfectly OK to have packs queuing up on the belt, so you don't need all the circuit stuff at all if you want to make things simpler / more basic.


But regardless of how you set up feeding the first labs, the ability to use an inserter to take packs from one lab to feed another, makes adding additional labs "behind" the ones fed by the belts really easy and a lot more compact than routing belts to every lab.

You can daisy chain research labs with no big ill effect. Make a grid of 5x5 labs. Have 2 belts go along the top and 2 belts along the left side with fast and long inserters feeding into the lab. Then put fast inserter between the labs to daisy chain them top to bottom AND left to right. There you go with a simple setup for 25 labs.

And the nice thing is you can start this of with just one lab feeding it red/green science on one belt with a yellow inserter. Then grow it out as needed. You can probably grow this out to 16x16 = 256 labs. At some point though I would rather start a second field.

Nothing says you have to go top to bottom and left to right. Add a second field going bottom to top and left to right. And then 2 more going right to left. You end up with a big square of science labs (32x32 = 1024 labs) with 2 belts going down the middle.

If you don't like science bulbs collecting at the end of the belt you can also make the belts loops so the bulbs go round and round. For a really big setup have the belt go down one 32x32 field and then up the other 32x32 field. Same for left/right. So you have a total of 4096 science labs. Hope you have fast enough belts to carry enough science bulbs for all those labs.

Honestly, sushibelting is such an elegant solution that I don't understand why one should daisy chain research centers (even if, well, you're free to do as you prefer ).

While sushi is an elegant and smart solution it requires some insight in circuit networks to understand what is really happening there.
Here is a simple solution that works from the start and can be expanded to a late game with no effort

Though I kind of invented sushi belts way back when belt logic first came out, I actually prefer this:
It's simple and reliable and easily expanded: I like to use about 50 labs with 2x prod1 modules. Later I transition to bots, but if you don't want to use bots you can splice in a 4th belt for space science:

BlakeMW wrote:Though I kind of invented sushi belts way back when belt logic first came out, I actually prefer this:

the best way to do labs.png

It's simple and reliable and easily expanded: I like to use about 50 labs with 2x prod1 modules. Later I transition to bots, but if you don't want to use bots you can splice in a 4th belt for space science:

a 7th lane.jpg

I love it!