Effective way to move ore to smelters from storage?

[Rylant]

Hey all,

So I have recently expanded into the world of trains now that I am running out of ore deposits in my immediate home base area. At first, I thought about having a Copper unload station, an Iron unload station, etc, but because many of the veins in my world are joined, I thought it might be better just to have an Ore unload station which then sorts and sends each type of ore to its respective storage. Now that I have a fair amount of ore in storage, I am wondering the best way to ensure that each of my smelters are receiving a balanced load to smelt. Essentially, I want to send out 20 belts of Iron ore, 16 belts of Copper, not much in the way of coal as I have moved to electric furnaces, and just 1 belt of Uranium is necessary for my Nuclear Plant.

So, how do I ensure that I am taking and sending out 20 belts of Iron and 16 belts of Copper and that they are balanced? I don't want to send out 12 full belts of iron, 6 half full belts of iron and 2 belts of no iron to my smelt. I would also prefer to not use bots. Right now, my storage is tons of chests with fast inserters, starting at one end of the storage and ending at the other end of the storage, and I would belt the ore to the balancers and then to the smelt. Any insight here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rylant

[Engimage]

The only simple way of sorting mixed ores are bots. You unload ore to active providers, use storage chests to store some ore an then use requester chests for specific types of ore to load your smelters. You can use requesters to unload onto belts using stack inserters if you prefer to.
The downside of this method is that you have to balance incoming ore yourself using circuit network to control trains so that you don't end up filled with a single type of ore. Yo do it properly you have to read logistic network cargo contents from a roboport and let incoming trains hang in a pre-unload stacker station waiting until its ore is < 20000 or something like that

[Rylant]

The only simple way of sorting mixed ores are bots. You unload ore to active providers, use storage chests to store some ore an then use requester chests for specific types of ore to load your smelters. You can use requesters to unload onto belts using stack inserters if you prefer to.
The downside of this method is that you have to balance incoming ore yourself using circuit network to control trains so that you don't end up filled with a single type of ore. Yo do it properly you have to read logistic network cargo contents from a roboport and let incoming trains hang in a pre-unload stacker station waiting until its ore is < 20000 or something like that

Right I understand that people tend to prefer to use bots to sort. I have already set up a huge sorting system using belts and inserters, and it separates all of my ores and sends the Copper ore, to the Copper ore storage. Iron to iron, etc. So, right now, I have already separated it and sorted it. The issue is, I literally have hundreds of chests filled with copper ore, and I want to have an effective way to send balanced belts to the smelt from there. The problem is, that the chests aren't balanced. I have hundreds of partially filled chests in storage. I am looking for a good way to ensure that I am pulling and sending balanced belts. So my belts aren't pulling from an almost empty chest of copper ore, when there is an almost full chest of copper ore 5 chests away from it. If that makes sense?

Thanks,
Rylant

[Engimage]

I advised you to use bots for that particular reason. The bot system does not have to be balanced at all and would accomplish the task anyways.

Now about balancing chest output.
This can be done using circuit network magic. This was first introduced by Factorio guru MadZuri for train unloading stations.

Lets talk about say unloading 6 to 8 chests to a belt in a balanced way.

First you have to build unloading mechanism. All (stack) inserters should unload to their dedicated belts which should be at least 2 tiles long. You can opt to unload 2 inserters to 1 belt if they use different belt sides. These belts then sideload to a resulting output belt or use a 4-to-1 splitter to merge. Having dedicated output belts is required here to make some buffer. If you will try to unload directly to the output belt I am sure it will have gaps on it.

Second you have to build some circuits. First you have to connect all chests togather using say red wire. Then you connect this red wire to arithmetic combinator which will divide the ore number by the number of chests to calculate average load and output this as say "Blue square" signal (any other virtual signal will work). Output of this combinator should be connected using red wire to all output inserters.
Then you connect every chest to its corresponding inserter using green wire. On the inserter you make Enabled condition set to "Iron Ore >= Blue Square"

As a result inserters will work only if the chest has average or above load of ore making the whole set unload in a really balanced way.

You can opt to connect all of the available chests into a single network resulting in a balanced unload of the whole system. You just have to bother building a resulting balancer for it.

P.S. The same method can actually be used for loading chests equally. However this works poorly for sorting stuff as you can't let belts back up or a system might get stuck on one of the resources.

[mrvn]

You can use filter inserters to unload ore from the train and have your iron ore and copper ore station.

The hardest part is to keep things balanced. You will require at least one mining outpost that produces pure ore of each type. And then you have to add some circuit logic to run a train from the relevant pure outpost whenever one ore type falls behind while stopping trains from outpost that you have too much of. You can do it with mixed outposts too and run trains from the 90% iron outpost when you need more iron. But it's easier to deadlock with that.

Personally I tend to mine such mixed patches in 2 steps:
1) mine only pure parts
2) mine the remaining mixed parts
Or the other way around.


You can also have a mixed station with filter inserters. Unload all iron ore to the right and all copper ore to the left for example.

[Hannu]

Bots are the trivial way, but boring, in my opinion. If I utilize mixed patch, I sort only the belts which come from miners who actually produce several ores. I give sorted ores preference over ores from miners which produce only one ore. If you sort more than 10-20 % of raw materials you have increased probability to stuck or get performance hit because one material is not used and blocks the sorting system. In such case I recommend to control situation with combinators, but there should not be need for it if you want to keep sorting simple.

[Greybeard_LXI]

I think the OP is more interested in making sure each smelter line gets the same amount of ore than evenly unloading chests which already have random amounts of ore in them.

Check out the balancers from the wiki. They do not go as far as 20 belts, but that page should give you a start.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancers

[MeduSalem]

You'd be better off sorting the ores out where you mine them...

Don't load all kinds of stuff onto one train... because then you can't reliably ensure anymore to be able to balance everything out evenly afterwards... because the balancing problem has its roots already at the mining outpost.

Even if you'd manage to build the best sorter/balancer for your storage system... eventually you will end up starving yourself to death because the trains will run full with the over excess of one type of ore, blocking all others... and even if you set filters in the cargo wagons then the slots of one type of ore will eventually run full... stalling the belts leading up to the loading stations once they can't load the ore into the train anymore and you will suffer problems there.

I tried to do it your way when I was less experienced... basically you only end up having to increase the storage system endlessly to counter the balancing issue of incoming ores (which only gets exaggerated with the uneven usage of your factory). You can't prevent the balancing problem when using a mixed-ore setup.

It would be best to do it like mrvn suggested using dedicated trains for each type of ore:

Personally I tend to mine such mixed patches in 2 steps:
1) mine only pure parts
2) mine the remaining mixed parts
Or the other way around.

If you mine the bulk in a pure fashion then everything will be balanced automatically. The remaining mixed parts won't spoil the balancing by much.

Actually I use Bots in my Mining Outposts exactly for that reason to be able to sort out the ores of mixed patches right where I mine them... so I prevent all the problems mixed-patches cause in alternative setups.

Also it makes setting up a mining outpost a cakewalk... just stamping a blueprint of Miners/Chests/Poles/Productivity Modules all over the resource patches and done. No messing around with belt spaghetti.

[mrvn]

Also it makes setting up a mining outpost a cakewalk... just stamping a blueprint of Miners/Chests/Poles/Productivity Modules all over the resource patches and done. No messing around with belt spaghetti.

I used the map generator to make one huge continious ore field and then made myself a few different sized blueprint for mining outposts. A circle of trains tracks with a station just before the exit point and inside all filled with miners and belt spaghetti, as you call it. Now I just blueprint the smallest version that contains the whole patch and miners outside the ore patch are simply left out.

[Frightning]

Hey all,

So I have recently expanded into the world of trains now that I am running out of ore deposits in my immediate home base area. At first, I thought about having a Copper unload station, an Iron unload station, etc, but because many of the veins in my world are joined, I thought it might be better just to have an Ore unload station which then sorts and sends each type of ore to its respective storage. Now that I have a fair amount of ore in storage, I am wondering the best way to ensure that each of my smelters are receiving a balanced load to smelt. Essentially, I want to send out 20 belts of Iron ore, 16 belts of Copper, not much in the way of coal as I have moved to electric furnaces, and just 1 belt of Uranium is necessary for my Nuclear Plant.

So, how do I ensure that I am taking and sending out 20 belts of Iron and 16 belts of Copper and that they are balanced? I don't want to send out 12 full belts of iron, 6 half full belts of iron and 2 belts of no iron to my smelt. I would also prefer to not use bots. Right now, my storage is tons of chests with fast inserters, starting at one end of the storage and ending at the other end of the storage, and I would belt the ore to the balancers and then to the smelt. Any insight here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rylant

The easy solution is to use bots instead, but you can achieve something fairly close to this with belt balancers (and lane balancers). There are lots of designs to be found around these boards and elsewhere where Factorio is oft discussed.