Factorio Forums

Inserters always place output on the far side of a belt. If you want to use the full capacity of the belt, you will need to swap lanes at some point. Here are four compact ways to do that.

6-belt swapper
Gap between inserters: 3 5-belt swapper
Gap between inserters: 2
Requires 1 extra tile off the belt. Underground swapper
Gap between inserters: 2
Blocks all previous items on the near side. Pair of balancers
Gap between inserters: 2
You need two of these, one exactly 50% of the way down your production line, and one at exactly 75%.

Some more:
https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... /Belt_lane

no think new.

and this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=3916 ?
(First external link)

I found this sometimes handy, cause it enables to built completely different.

One and two are pretty standard lane swap option.

The third is just a pair of simple 'shift balancers' that moves half the input to the other lane. However, the lane swap with the underground belt is interesting. I'm not a fan of UG Belt voodoo, but it works.

The slowdown on the outside bends can be reduced by using a splitter. In that first pic, remove the middle chunk and add a splitter. You won't have packs on an outside corner then.

You can also improve efficiency by outputting into a chest and then from that chest onto the belt. You would use underground belts to allow you to do this inline. This would depend on the configuration of your belts though because by default, the new item will slide to the left or top.

Didn't know about the underground belt version