SHould i belt every ingredient i need or use robots?

[factoriobiker]

Is there a way to reduce the number of belts, now I want to use make purple flask but i need to belt stone throught the whole base....
can the sobots help carry the stuff instead of belts?
I mean that is an idea because I am overwhelmed with belts

[Serenity]

You only really need one combined stone/brick belt. Where is the problem with that? It's just a question of organizing things properly and planning ahead a little. You probably have a bunch of spaghetti by now. Which is perfectly normal for a beginner, but it can be avoided.

Robots are either for moving a low amount of materials over short to long distances. Or for moving a high amount over a short distance. If you try to transport a large amount of stone over a long distance you will run into issues.

A better alternative to belts is to bring stone per train and produce bricks locally

[astroshak]

For your main factory, belts are generally superior. A few items here and there delivered by bot, sure. Stuff from a mall (make everything area that makes stuff for factory creation) going to you or to a building supply train. Having a Radar assembler in the mall delivering to where you are making Satellites.

Mass item transfer, however, is not something you have likely designed the factory for. Save that for when you start (if you start) making sub factories that only produce one item, and have their own exclusive robot networks.

[factoriobiker]

for sure i use trains to deliver stuff from mines....so stone, coal, copper, iron,

but just for example delivering purple flasks to research hubs....lets say i put research flask in a metal box and then bots pick it up and take it to resaearch hubs

is that even possible, i hate that i need to belt everything

[astroshak]

Yes, it is possible.

Its just not really recommended for the main factory. You are not going to have them schlepp the occasional purple flask around, you are going to have them move a lot of them around. And that is best accomplished either by belt, or in a discrete bot network where moving flasks to science labs is the *only* thing those bots are doing.

I am sorry that I did not state the main reason that bots are not so good at the main factory but are good in others. There are two reasons, actually. First, bots are best in a small network. The main factory tends to be quite sprawling in comparison. This is because you don’t want a bot at one end of your network to decide “Ok, time to go move this from there to over there”, fly the entire length of your factory, pick up the item(s), then fly halfway back to drop them off. Ideally, you would rather have a bot that is right there already pick them up.

Second, and this ties in with the first, bots need recharging every so often, based both on time spent and, more significantly, upon tiles crossed. A smaller network keeps the bots focused on their job, so more of their time is spent transporting something as opposed to flying off to recharge. Smaller, discrete networks tend to have more roboports as they are built into it from the ground up, to provide plenty of recharge stations; as opposed to sticking one every so often to expand the network, then sticking a few extras where bots seem to be clustering waiting their turn to recharge.

So while yes, it is possible to use bots to move purple science from their assemblers to the labs, it is not recommended in the main factory to use logistics bots for anything involving major throughput.

[Hannu]

Ready made science is so low throughput product that there is no issues with bots. If you transport ingredients to make science packs, there will be issues. If you want to use bots you should divide your base in several separated logistic networks. Then distance of bots is limited and need of charging and electricity consumption stays under control. You can use short belts to transport items between fabrication areas. If I remember correctly, Nilaus made a video series of such structured base.

If used correctly, bots are very effective and you can build much higher throughput with bots than with belts when you have enough infinite researches.

[jodokus31]

but just for example delivering purple flasks to research hubs....lets say i put research flask in a metal box and then bots pick it up and take it to resaearch hubs

is that even possible, i hate that i need to belt everything

Yes, you need yellow science and research "logistic system", which gives you the blue requester chest.

[starlinvf]

Is there a way to reduce the number of belts, now I want to use make purple flask but i need to belt stone throught the whole base....
can the sobots help carry the stuff instead of belts?
I mean that is an idea because I am overwhelmed with belts

Bots have 2 major problems...... very poor throughput scaling, even worse at distance, and abnormally high performance cost. This makes them almost the worst possible choice for raw material transport. They're generally best suited for low throughput situations, ideally over short distances; or tasks that require a lot of sorting or restocking of finished products.

For your situation, depending on your current layout, I would either setup a simple railway around the outskits of the Factory to move the stone. Or if its simplier, make rails near where stone enters your factory since it'll probably be near your iron smelting. And then use a single beltway or train to move finished rail tracks up to where the Purple flaks are being made. And since rails are needed in large amounts, proximity to the smelters lets you more easily expand iron/steel production without having to expand/upgrade the main bus for the butt ton of additional iron plates its gonna need if you tried it remotely.

The railway approach also has a fringe benefit of being shared infrastructure for moving other odd products across the base without needing a main bus up the middle. But again, it depends on your current layout.

If you're not aware, Rail wagons have an option to reserve slots for items (middle click to set the filter) on a slot by slot basis. So you can control how many items of something fits into the wagon, and setup ratios or conditions without risking overflow. However, it slightly complicates train scheduling since "Full" or "Empty" are an all or nothing condition... so you have to set item count conditions if you want it to move when one type is full, but not care about the count of another. When I'm lazy, I would use reserve slots on my trains to move Ammo around, rather then have a full beltway or ammo production cluster on the far ends of the factory.

[netmand]

Is there a way to reduce the number of belts, now I want to use make purple flask but i need to belt stone throught the whole base....
can the sobots help carry the stuff instead of belts?
I mean that is an idea because I am overwhelmed with belts

routing stone and brick can be quite the chore. sometimes I just forgo belts and hand-deliver those items (a steel chest full of stone yields over 500 production science packs) until I can get logistics system tech up and running (with requester chests and logistic bots) for me it depends on how much of a pain it is to lay belt to deliver stone around the factory into the place where you are setting up making production science packs.

[SyncViews]

I always belt everything for science but bots does work.

One of the big replay elements is deciding how to do it better next time, for example leaving plenty of space through the base with plenty of parallel "bus" belts to route everything you will need.

With good enough organisation you could can make everything without bots branching off this central bus, although personally I don't bother for the equipment grid stuff as will make so few of those, and a few other things like locomotives/wagons, combinators, etc.


Trains are nice but at a smaller scale they are mostly useful for moving raw materials like ore and crude oil around, if your map has lots of nearby resources you can certainly launch a rocket without really getting into trains.
On larger bases they are really useful to complete separate larger production areas, which makes scaling up production quantity a lot easier. For example ore furnaces and circuits are good early ones to have a separate mini-factory with trains linking between.