Factorio Forums

I noticed these optional properties on the loader prototype "container_distance", "belt_distance", "belt_length" and was wondering what exactly the purpose of each of them is, as they are not documented in the wiki.

Specifically, I am trying to create loaders for faster belts, but the loaders do not output a fully compressed belt. It seems to work for speed=0.29375 (141 items/sec), but fails for speed=0.59375 (285 items/sec). The speed of the loaders is set to the speed of the transport belts. Also, the chest -> unloader -> loader -> chest throughput seems to be limited to around 118 items/sec for both kinds of loaders. Any help with that would also be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

GreenLightning wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 27, 2019 11:58 pm

I noticed these optional properties on the loader prototype "container_distance", "belt_distance", "belt_length" and was wondering what exactly the purpose of each of them is, as they are not documented in the wiki.

I documented them now, they're just used to determine how big your loader is.

I recall a mod a long time ago that advertised a belt speed fix for loaders, perhaps loaders simply need to have their speed set higher than that of the associated belt tier.

Bilka wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 28, 2019 6:20 am

I recall a mod a long time ago that advertised a belt speed fix for loaders, perhaps loaders simply need to have their speed set higher than that of the associated belt tier.

That probably was one of my now deprecated mods.

Loader Redux syncs loader speed to belt speed. I have yet to hear of belts not being fully compressed.

However there is a limit to how fast loaders can operate, but i can't recall he actual number.

Hi all and thanks for your input.

I am actually building on top of Loader Redux and using the same line to sync the belt speed.

I made a test to measure the loader throughput exactly. The setup is chest -> unloader -> loader -> chest with no belts in between and some circuit combinators to measure the number of ticks it takes to transfer a given amount of items. I tested several super fast loaders and the result is that it always takes 1000 ticks to transfer 2000 items. So the limit seems to be 1 item / lane / tick or 120 items/sec, which is sadly not fast enough for the belts I am targeting, namely the Terra Transport Belts from Darkstar Utilities, which have the above mentioned speeds of 141 and 285 items/sec (which is a really a lot faster than the base game speeds and still a lot faster than Bob's Logistics' belts).

In my experience, any speed above 60 item/s can cause unwanted issues, whether belt or loader. Items are moving at 7.5 tiles per second at that speed.

120 item/s would be 15 tiles a second, that's an entire quarter of a tile per tick. Not surprised that the engine would have difficulty with that. Belts would be skipping animation frames past that speed as well.

GreenLightning wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 04, 2019 10:56 pm

So the limit seems to be 1 item / lane / tick or 120 items/sec,

I heared that recent engine changes lifted some of the limitations that inserters were suffering. Have you tried miniloader?