Factorio Forums

Very nice and compact design.
Have you stress-tested it? How many items can it handle?

It handles 2 full blue belts.

It is expandable: 2 splitter cascades for single blue belt + 1 extra.

Whenever you have unsorted material on the same belt, you need to have a control for overflow. At some point, iron or copper, as an example, will become unbalanced. Too much iron could jamb the sorter and prevent copper from making it to the furnaces upstream. To prevent this, I use a wire connected to smart chests that buffer my sorter and link it upstream to the rail station at the mining operation. If too much material is in the buffer chest, the mining station will not load that material into the wagon. How do you control for overflow?

This is a partial view of my sorter layout. I tried to arrange it without the buffer chests and I kept having problems, so this is my current solution. Like your, I wrap the belt into an S loop and smart insert off of the loop onto underground belts. Depending on the capacity of the furnaces (and the belt leading to it), I can arrange 4, 8, 12 or 16 inserters onto a belt for product delivery. Since the size 4 has inserters directly onto the belt, you can only use one side of the belt for delivery.

How do you control for overflow?

By buffering and consuming.

you can only use one side of the belt for delivery

try this:

Hey OPrime, I've been using your sorter design in my latest game, I'm doing a playthrough right now focusing on trying out other people's designs.



This setup uses DaveMcW's train unloader which doesn't seem to work as well upside down, and uses the OPrime sorting system with some probably unnecessary modifications.

I might post more of it once I get it fully hooked up after my testing tomorrow, I've got 52 out of 60 copper furnaces working but I think I can maybe get the last few going if I fix my train station issues. After that I will test if I can get 60 copper furnaces and 60 iron furnaces fed by trains running thru this sorter setup. Maybe add coal and stone to the mix but those resources are not as important to me so we'll see.

Smelters also looks almost like mine setup)