Factorio Forums

The horseshoe circuit factory balances wires with circuits, and uses copper buffer chests. This thing SMOKES through copper, so it is advisable to buffer it when demand is low. I set my chests to store maximum two slots of copper bars (256 copper).

The factory here is using assembly machines 3 with 4x Speed Module 3's.

This will work with any combination of assembly machines, however it is important for balancing that the modules are even throughout the factory.

The substation provides power for everything, keeping it slightly less messy.

The output chests (3 of them) help take the large amount of circuits coming in, and help discharge faster. If you want to make it discharge even faster, use the same technique I have used here.


For those who prefer to keep their factory a little more lean, here's a variant that uses smart inserters to dump a limited amount of product into provider chests:



Here, the output is controlled so that the dependencies and a few circuits are made in the machine, helping it catch up when the circuits fall below the smart inserter's threshold.

Looks neat altought more so for late game.

That's the neat thing -- you can use this earlier on by using assembly machine 1's -- the ratios are still balanced at that point as well. Obviously you would need the demand for circuits to satisfy, but once you have this, it works quite well. I had one factory that two of these using assembly 3's and 4x speed module 3's were capped out, and I was considering building a third -- but at that point, 40 copper electric furnaces with speed module 3's and double ultra belts couldn't keep up

All this time thinking that 1 copper plate is 1 copper cable... And 1 copper cable is 2 copper wires...
All this time using 3 wire assemblers per electronic circuit assembler xD I was sooo wrong

Never underestmate the destructive speed which electronic circuits can eat your copper supply >.<

my take on your horseshoe factory

Nice to see it in use

tareoflight wrote: my take on your horseshoe factory

Probably the best use of a belt loopback i've seen in a while, although I don't think it achieves much for you in the end.

This is another iteration of it, this time it is much faster, but also causes some resources to idle. I made this one primarily to feed my logistics system (the factory I'm making uses almost entirely bots to do the work)



I limited the chests that grab the copper to two slots, and the slots with the wire to 4. The chests with wire also are provider chests for other operations (advanced circuits, etc).

I am running two of these. The first one runs whenever the logistics system shows less than 2,000 circuits. The second is less than 500. Not only does it provide redundancy, but if there is a large demand, this acts as an additional provider of circuits.

Running this unmoderated will easily eat up an ultrabelt of copper, and really eat into your iron as well.

The main advantage of this iteration over the last is that it takes full advantage of buffering and inserter bonuses to move large volumes of material into the system, while having a slower input rate to the chest to help smooth the demands out on the supply. Obviously, the provider chests on the circuits can be set up as belts instead if you are using a mostly belt-driven application. This design provides plenty of room for a sub station and roboport if needed.

For those of you who are on a limited "land" budget, here's a very similar design with a much smaller footprint: