Inverter belt (Its not a NOT belt, but im not sure of that)

[En_Dotter]

Hey ppl! Its my first post and topic and i want to suggest something.

In some cases you would like to have one side of the belt with one item and another side with a different, but its not always easy to do it unless u fiddle with the belts a bit. Why not just add an inverter belt? Inverter would just be like a normal belt (taking stuff as is from its input side), but would invert left and right (top and bottom) item position.

Lets say this is a normal belt:

Code: Select all

+-  >output
||  > belt
||
+-  >input

Inverter would look like this (but more symmetrical or w/e art fits):

Code: Select all

+-   >output
\/   >inverter belt
/\
-+   >input
 

You can think of it as one side going a bit underground and the other one going a bit above the other one at the intersection.



(It aint the best ASCII art but i hope you get the picture)

[Koub]

[Koub] Topic moved to the correct subforumm
btw there's an easy way to do this, not with a single belt, but :

Factorio - Belt lane inverter.JPG (15.58 KiB) Viewed 6248 times

I'd also be very surprised if there wasn't a mod for that somewhere. And I think this belongs to mods more than to vanilla.

[GotLag]

The 0.12 belt optimisations killed cheap (i.e. not ontick()) modding of splitters.

[En_Dotter]

The main reason i suggested this is to avoid using a lot of space for inverting the belt content. I never said it impossible, just fiddly. Problems arises if you are trying to make a compact base and sometimes you make a mistake in your design and you need to invert stuff, but you dont have room.

[ssilk]

Please have a look into this article: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24061 New Types of Belts (And why they are NOT a Good Idea!)

[atloomis]

Room really isn't an issue in Factorio, there's always more land to be claimed.

[mattj256]

Hi En_Dotter. Good to have you here!

I've played this game almost 400 hours. I really like the puzzle aspect of the game: that you can do what you need using a small number of parts.
The inverter belt would be great as a mod. I don't think it belongs in the vanilla game.

I couldn't find a mod that does exactly what you want. This is the best I can find:

Belt Sorter (by judos)
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/judos/beltSorter

The main reason i suggested this is to avoid using a lot of space for inverting the belt content. I never said it impossible, just fiddly. Problems arises if you are trying to make a compact base and sometimes you make a mistake in your design and you need to invert stuff, but you dont have room.

I would love to tell you that this never happens to me any more, but no, I still make plenty of mistakes. When I'm in this type of situation I pick up one piece of transport belt upstream of the area I want to work on, vacuum up all the items on the the belt, arrange the inserters to place items correctly, and reconnect the upstream belt. I rarely have two different items on the same belt unless it's feeding directly into an assembly machine that's going to use both items. (So it doesn't matter which item is on which side of the belt.)

I hope you enjoy the game!

[En_Dotter]

Tnx for responses guys! They were helpful.
I just gotta make one little comment. In most of the games that involve crafting and management i hear a lot of responses that sound like "there is a mod" or "it is easy to mod it by changing this and that" and other similar statements. While i really appreciate any kind of help, most of the time i suggest things that i think would benefit the original (vanilla) game. Don't get me wrong, but answers involving mods and modding are not something i am looking for. I play mods after i get "fed up" with the vanilla to spice things up and stuff like that. I suppose thats just a play style preference after all.
Again tnx for responses and i cant wait for this game to go "live".

[ssilk]

Tnx for responses guys! They were helpful.
I just gotta make one little comment. In most of the games that involve crafting and management i hear a lot of responses that sound like "there is a mod" or "it is easy to mod it by changing this and that" and other similar statements. While i really appreciate any kind of help, most of the time i suggest things that i think would benefit the original (vanilla) game. Don't get me wrong, but answers involving mods and modding are not something i am looking for. I play mods after i get "fed up" with the vanilla to spice things up and stuff like that. I suppose thats just a play style preference after all.
Again tnx for responses and i cant wait for this game to go "live".

Well, we had such kind of discussions already.

So I made a sticky for it: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=30240 I want to make suggestions, but I got links to mods!!

[mattj256]

Don't get me wrong, but answers involving mods and modding are not something i am looking for.

Just for the fun of it I made some more compact designs.

Notes and caveats:

• Unlike koub's layout, the designs below require that you know in advance which type of thing is on each side of the belt.
• These layouts require more resources to construct that koub's layout, and require more energy.
• I used filter inserters but if it's a very high-volume belt you'll need stack filter inserters.

Now I'm curious: can you give me an example of the situation that you're talking about where the lanes on a transport belt need to be reversed?
(Preferably a screenshot.)
I've played over 400 hours, as well as watched dozens of YouTube videos, and I've never seen this as a major problem.

I think it's likely this goes back to playstyle.

Here's a video that helped me a lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DOHLCCrE_M

I try to be pretty careful about only mixing items on a transport belt if it's feeding directly into assembler(s) that are going to use those items.

[ssilk]

You can built this with
- one splitter
- 1 rotated basic underground (or express)
- 1 rotated fast underground belt and a splitter.

It takes then 10 tiles space.