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it's not the best as it uses twice as many electric poles, but here is my smelting setup

Looks very nice and symmetric.

Constructive critics: Far too much for one belt lane. You see, that all furnaces are off and the inserters try to put things on the belts. That means furnaces internal stack is full. The output of the right furnaces blocks the output of the left. I recommend to use maximum 10-12 furnaces per basic belt lane (a lane is the left or right side of the belt). Every furnace produces a iron plate per 4 second (not really sure). So 10 will produce 2.5 iron plates per second. But a basic belt lane can transport in the best case only 3.6 items per second, see https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... ts/Physics . So with 10 you have a small reserve.

Change the lane: bring the output of the right iron plates to the left lane of the belt.

When done you will see, that the throughput of the input belts doesn't cope any more. You need to redo the whole inputs: two lanes, one for ore only. Or fast belts, but not sure, if that is enough.

I'm sorry, this is really nice, but for throughput this layout is really not useable.

Haha, yea it very unpractical. Wish there was a inserter that could place item on the nearest side to it without having them on opposite sides

Thats was my quick layout for my coal-fired furnaces in one of my games, that way you can use both sides of the belts. With an extra overdose of too much power poles

[EDIT] I always try to have the input-belts and output-belts of my furnace lines on the same side, so I can easily add furnaces when I need more and have access to faster belts.

Am I doing this right?


I've recently increased my iron ore output, so the input to these smelters are a bit clogged. Still deciding wether I really need to add more smelters. The answer is probably yes, because I can.


Here's my production screen(Iron has been my focus for a while, copper and steel are next). I'm not really sure how I've been producing almost 2.5k/minute of iron ore, but only producing 815/minute of iron plates without the production of ore lower because it's bottlenecked.

Gammro wrote:

How do you bring that menu up?

(new here)

Press P
Take a look into the key bindings (options)

MCDomYT wrote:Haha, yea it very unpractical. Wish there was a inserter that could place item on the nearest side to it without having them on opposite sides

You can work around that to some extent with conveyor setups like these.
They are layed out such that you don't need any gaps in your furnace line.

quadrapod wrote: You can work around that to some extent with conveyor setups like these.

Split shifter

Conveyor Shifter

They are layed out such that you don't need any gaps in your furnace line.

Wow, I worked out the spliter method myself, but seriously the conveyor method is... simply beautiful, you don't even need shifter technology. so it can be used really early game!

Thanks for that one!

Pandamonium wrote:
Wow, I worked out the spliter method myself, but seriously the conveyor method is... simply beautiful, you don't even need shifter technology. so it can be used really early game!

Thanks for that one!

Happy to help.

Conveyor Shifter is better also because all items from left section are going to right side on belt and right side have free space to put items. With Split Shifter you have 1/2 of items from left section on both sides and if you put items from right section, you have 3/4 of all items on left side and only 1/4 on right side.

But if you want setup it by inserters, you can use this mod https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=2012

Neotix wrote:Conveyor Shifter is better also because all items from left section are going to right side on belt and right side have free space to put items. With Split Shifter you have 1/2 of items from left section on both sides and if you put items from right section, you have 3/4 of all items on left side and only 1/4 on right side.

But if you want setup it by inserters, you can use this mod https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=2012

I posted both because the split shifter is more compact and doesn't stick out on the other side. If you had a second belt running next to the first or something then you wouldn't be able to fit a conveyor shifter.

Sure, both solutions have advantages and disadvantages.
I only referred to this particular setting on the screenshot.

You can still fit a conveyor shifter, but it won't fit without a gap between furnaces.

On this.. I've pondered using splitters to at least partially load-balance the outputs of a series of furnaces.

The idea has two belt rows. A common line and an output line. Each furnace outputs to its own output line, which is then split (merged) into the main line running the full length. At the end, a quick split-shift to double-the final bandwidth helps allieviate some backup. The common line and splitters can easily be upgraded to fast/express.

Those furnaces at the 'end' of the production line will still be able to place items, in fact, the load is placed more towards them with 50% common belt access, even on a backed up line. It won't hog that line because of the splitter and smelting time, so it has 50% access once every 10 seconds, which won't choke out production farther up the line.

By contrast, in a straight-serial setup, only the last furnace in the line would have belt access until the backlog drained past the second-to-last furnace, and etc.