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I probably am not the first to come up with this, but I am rather pleased with it:



The mining drills cover 100% of the ore deposit, and there's no need for a separate smelting area (more solar panels!). Less importantly, one inserter per furnace is saved by inputting directly from the drill.

The only downsides are that you can only run through it in one direction (not that big a deal unless it's a ginormous deposit) and it requires fancy electric poles.

Too bad it won't work for electric furnaces, since with their 3x3 size there's no way to intersperse them with the drills without missing some coverage.

That's pretty interesting. I can't say I've ever seen it before.
Seems like a good way to set up if you've got coal on-site, but might be a bit of a burden if not, depending on relative locations of the coal and ore to your base.
In any case, good stuff

n9103 wrote:That's pretty interesting. I can't say I've ever seen it before.

FishSandwich ran his smelting on a similar idea in his old Hardmode playthrough. I think Malkasphia might have also done something similar (don't quote me there though).

I'm actually starting to think that smelting at the extraction point is the way to go... it would certainly clean up the main factory and would allow for great amounts to move through the train network....

It's a good strategy, if you don't need to use modules. And especially with trains, cause you double the capacity of trains. Can be used also separately (mining inside and furnacing outside of the field), then also electrical furnace can be used, cause this above works only well, if coal is near.

Something like this in my Lets Play?

How fast are electric drills vs. steel furnaces? I was under the impression that drills were much faster, I know its around 1 electric drill to 2 stone furnaces. If it isn't near 1:1, it might not be efficient ... if drills are faster than steel furnaces, your ore will pile up in your furnaces faster than it can smelt them and, in turn, your drills will stop when the furnaces are too full; conversely if steel furnaces are faster at smelting ore than drills are at feeding them, they may wastefully idle ... although thinking on it, they at least wouldn't burn coal and wouldn't generate pollution when waiting for ore if this is the case. If drills:furnaces are perfectly 1:1, this is very efficient because, yeah, it saves from having to use an inserter to load ore from a miner.

It is an interesting an idea.

If drills are faster than smelters, a remedy would be to build extra smelters outside of the ore field, gather up the built up raw ore from the smelters and feed them to these extra smelters to get a temporary surge of plate production. You'd just need to load coal either manually or through an inserter, and output the plates to your regular line or possibly to chests (anyone here have their iron production down perfect to the point they /never/ need more iron to make things? heh).

Even if your ratios are off slightly, a 1:1 isn't terrible. If the ratios are becoming important, odds are you're using product too fast (built too many unchecked factories). Generally, a steel/electric furnace is 2x as fast as a stone. The only way it goes faster is with a modded electric furnace, which won't fit in this kind of configuration without leaving gaps.

I've been doing 'localized' smelting in my playthroughs once I began expanding away from the initial deposits. It's among the most efficient 'compression' you can get straight off the line, and can be mobilized easily to other factory bases for R&D production, Chipfacs, refineries, and such in this basic state.

This design is remarkably easy to reproduce and is pretty efficient for space, fuel, and material investment. I may have to start using this to save myself a ton of time laying out smelting arrays. The only downside is needing to be fed fuel at a steady rate, since there's no room for electric furnaces.

Direct insertion rules. The ratio is roughly 0.98:1 (electric/steel furnace is a hair faster than the drill), and in-place smelting allows you to transfer 2x more metal over the single train.



I used to have single blueprint to make mining+smelting outposts with direct insertion using electric furnaces, but they can't cover whole ore field and have to be moved over time, and I am too lazy to do it, even with blueprints and stuff.

So I decided - screw direct insertion, I'll go with modular outposts.
It's 4 blueprints instead of 1:
1) stackable mining block - stamp these all over the ore patch.
2) stackable smelting block - scales to the number of drills
3) isle-type defenses
4) train station

They all auto-connect to electric grid and each other using conveyer belts, thus very little manual labour required.

This is, for example, stackable smelting block, as compact as it can be
Using steel furnaces is a great idea, as it adds the third option.
Not without tradeoffs though. You have to supply outposts with fuel, and need more defenses to compensate for increased pollution (assuming you are using 100% solar power)

But for the early game and starting area ore fields this is awesome solution.

User_Name wrote: But for the early game and starting area ore fields this is awesome solution.

I take it back. This is ridiculously hard to set up without medium power poles compared to usual smelting line.
(you cannot walk between columns, you have to use underground belts, more complex placing pattern overall, and you have to dismantle/move it when ore patch depletes)

Definitely not recommended for early game.
Don't even bother without medium poles, and probably don't bother until you got construction bots, at which point you probably already switched to solar, and electric furnaces became more efficient.

Indeed.
Smelting where you mine is all about time-efficiency for the player's time.
The longer it takes to set up the in-place operations, the worse an investment it is to bother smelting in-place at all.
Part of the reason I usually don't bother. And definitely all of the reason I make the operations as simple as possible when I do.

Not bad! Can't say I have ever seen this setup before. However, I see 2 problems with using this. First is like some other people mentioned, it can be a pain to set up, and in early game it might just be better to transport the raw resources to an area where you can do an easier setup.
But more importantly in mind, is I can see this particular setup becoming a problem in mid to late game, because you would not be able to produce enough resources with it. It is quote nice yes, that you can have the miners perfectly covering the ore field and not overlapping, but by doing this you can only mine so fast once you need more resources, it is more advantageous in my mind to just fit as many miner on a resource as possible to get max output. And you can't do that with a setup like this.

But depending on the situation I can see this being pretty useful. Certainty more efficient. :p

Once you get the gist of it it's pretty easy. It's a holdout pattern for electric furnaces, since you may as well swap to a standard segregated layout at that point for larger fields.

For really small fields, you can use electric furnaces on-sight in a less patterned layout and still get most of the field covered.

User_Name wrote:

User_Name wrote:
Don't even bother without medium poles, and probably don't bother until you got construction bots, at which point you probably already switched to solar, and electric furnaces became more efficient.

Electric furnace my become more 'efficient,' but I tend to have an overabundance of coal fields all over the place and it seems silly to not put them to use.

Dude, you're replying to a 2 year old post...

Yes, and? Topic still relevant, and would you rather I spam the forum with a new thread on the same topic?

This is really good. I've been mixing smelting with mining for a while when I can (much better for trains) but never got the coverage desired re the electric furnace problems. so i'd resort to 'strip mining' in that, I'd mine strips and then have to switch the buildings if resources run low. Can get away with a whole lot with coal. Perhaps incoming trains bring coal, outgoing take the plates. That'd work. You don't need that much coal to run furnaces.

You can push this narrower/denser by moving the power to the output belt position (with an underground belt)...

I like this layout for my new base, I'm on a huge peninsula, but space is starting to become a problem. I have metric tons of coal, so I haven't been using electric furnaces for my smelting.

damn I'd like to see the setup but the images aren't working anymore :c

I dont know how they had initially done this system but here is my take on how to do it. You need to unload the smelted item using the underground belt to unload items only off of the far side and need to have fuel loaded into the side closest to the mining drills. This single belt system can mess up on iron if you are smelting faster than mining or a miner runs out of ore.


The blueprint to the 2 belt system is posted below which i would only use for iron. Current setup has fuel input on top and smelted output on bottom

Just improved the blueprint above my post a bit. made it so that the 2 belts are used by 2 smelters on both sides.