Factorio Forums

Trying out Angels Smelting for the first time. I heard that setting up a smelting system gives a boost to resource production.

But I put the information into the Planner mod, and it says, using mark 1 machines (I only have red research so far, and haven't started making my main bus), that the ratio I need is as follows:

input: 12 iron ore/sec, or one mostly saturated yellow belt (I couldn't get it to read 13.3)

needs:
8 ore processing machines
16 blast furnaces
32 induction furnaces
48 casting machines

the boost I get out of all that work:
Instead of 14 bars of iron, I get a whole 18. That's a bonus of only 4 additional iron plates (per second)!

Is that right, or is the Planner mod leading me astray? That seems excessive for such a small bonus.

It would be correct. The increased ratios truly come from the pellet phase of smelting, but it's also not something you run by itself.

Smelting is best as a supplement to normal furnace operation as a very long term process. I've done up a design just for iron alone that took up over 300 Mk4 casting machines and still needed a furnace setup to keep demand met. Just trying to imagine this for every single ore would be absolute madness. I'd suggest building a rather small smelting area as backup; Its rewards will become evident after many hours.

Here's a video that explains the smelting mod quite well. Including a general idea of ratios to expect for each stage of the process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEFnpZk-OhM

Smelting is very good in the early game (when you have green science but no oil yet) when you have a lot of space and very little nearby ore input (assuming you're using the RSO mod). It does take up an enormous amount of space, and a lot of resources for not a whole lot of throughput, but it's definitely worth working towards as a sort of second-tier ore processing (though before you upgrade to basic metallurgy you'll want a normal crushing-sorting-smelting facility to give you some initial production).

I'm currently using a 10:5:30:50:72 machine ratio for each red belt of iron and copper (2 of iron, 1 of copper), and only slightly smaller numbers of machines to compress a yellow belt of each other metal that I currently have available. I'm also going to use the most efficient symmetrical setup for a single red belt of steel (once I figure it out), and that'll take even more space and machinery than an iron line. I'm in the middle of calculating the ratios I need right now and it's going to take several hundred casting machines, induction furnaces, and blast furnaces, and quite a lot of ore processors too (though not many pellet machines because I've only unlocked the most basic pellet processing). And that's without even thinking about the numbers of belts and inserters (thousands of both), or the processing setups needed to produce coke, carbon, oxygen, carbon monoxide and sodium hydroxide that are required for some of the more complex processes. It's taking so much iron for belts that I've actually had to reroute my iron ore input into the first metallurgy setup already just to produce the belts I need for the rest of the metallurgy area. I've also started rerouting copper ore to the copper metallurgy line because it's taking thousands of copper pipes for fluids.

The increase in production might not seem too significant, but it is. The full process for iron has a 187.5% yield, and the steel process converts iron to steel with a 1:0.935 ratio. It's worth prioritizing the basic research to unlock the pellet processing for iron, because you'll definitely need that productivity increase. It's the same for other metals too, in that once you research the advanced processing it's a good idea to switch to it as soon as possible.

As Light said, metallurgy may sometimes be best as a supplement to standard smelting, but I think that in the early game it's probably better to use metallurgy for your primary (if not your only) metal production setup. In the late-game resources are less of an issue (you need more of them but it's easier to input large quantities of ore) so perhaps conventional smelting is the way to go for the more common metals. However, it's pretty much always going to be worth the effort of using the maximized metallurgy process for expensive metals like tungsten and gold, and personally I'll probably use only metallurgy for all resources anyway because I like maximizing resource efficiency and I don't care too much about how much space it takes up.

Yeah, for the MK I machines the ratios are really bad IMO.

I'm running MKIV without modules yet (I'm not at that stage of the game yet), but I'm mostly running 3 : 2 : 8 : 15 : 23. Of course you need to adapt for each input, since each one has a bit different ratio and different requirements.

Late game is where Metallurgy shines, when you can build BIG and put modules. With modules the Metallurgy becomes REALLY FAST and REALLY PRODUCTIVE.

Check it out here: http://imgur.com/a/4IjEW

SHiRKiT wrote:I'm running MKIV without modules yet (I'm not at that stage of the game yet), but I'm mostly running 3 : 2 : 8 : 15 : 23. Of course you need to adapt for each input, since each one has a bit different ratio and different requirements.

What belt does that fill? A tier 5 belt needs almost as many Mk4 casting machines to fill as a red belt needs Mk1 casting machines. Your ratio looks like it would be able to output a red belt but not much more, and it doesn't look as though it's fast enough to sustain a late-game factory (unless you're using a lot of them).

Ratios are by far better in the 0.2 version of smelting