Factorio Forums

I'm currently utterly confused of what I'm doing wrong in terms of setting up a continous supply for my steel plate production. According to the Kirc McDonalds "Factorio Calculator", I can feed 48 electric furnaces producing steel with a full red belt of iron ore. However, this does not work out in my setup. The last two pairs of furnaces always run short of iron ore. Im feeding from a rail station unloading 16 red belts and finally compressing into 2 red belts to feed the smeltery. THe input is provided by two trains with four wagons. Can anyone explain to me the design failure here?

Calculator result:


Input train station


Input to smeltery:


last couple of furnaces running low on ore:

The typical setup is a 2x24 column. For steel from ore, that is expanded by two additional columns of 24 furnaces. You appear to have the right idea there.

Are your columns 24 furnaces long? That, with a fully compressed input belt, should be sufficient.

Are you in 0.17 or 0.18? At around 0.17.60 they changed the speed of belts, from 13.33/26.66/40.00 to 15/30/45, and they changed the smelting time of iron/steel/copper to bring the columns to perfection. Prior to that, you basically needed an odd number of furnaces (for iron/copper) to consume what was on the belt, and the last two furnaces, one on either side, kind of alternated between getting the last piece of ore. Are you using an older version of Factorio, where that is still the case?

Did you put a speed module in one of the furnaces? Is one of the belt segments yellow?

The 48 furnace layout is correct, so the only other possibility is your splitter maze is not delivering a full belt.

OK, a very "stupid" question: Did you actually build 48 smelters in a row and not accidently 49?

Your 4x4 balancer is not balancing, it is missing a splitter either before or after the 2 undergrounds.

But that is probably not causing the last smelter to not get enough resources.

Double check if the ore line going into the smelter is always without gaps, that's debug options, transport lines, I think.

If that is not the case, or anything one of the other posters said, then it will work. Maybe you did not let in run for long enough? Cause it needs a bit of time until all the smelters have grabbed ore to fill their internal storage.

Ok, I think I really miscounted my furncaes. With 2x24 along a red belt it's now working. Thanks for the debug inf And geeee! I really buildt ALL my 4x4 balancers wrong all the time, as I was missing this one splitter. Just oversaw that all teh time

Since you managed to miscount here is a pro tip for counting: select a blueprint or decon planer and mark a row of smelters or whatever you want to count without releasing the mouse button. It will display the amount of items you have marked.

Good idea, thanks!