Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Variable Speed customisation between 2 circuit connected points on a single belt

What ?

Although 3 belts worth of speed is enough what I'm asking for is to connect a belt to the circuit network and be able to customise the speed the belt is moving at between connected sections

Why ?

to better optimise throughput and workflow of certain actions and allow for variable belt speeds between yellow and blue or even potentially stop a belts movement when no items are present increasing overall UPS with large belt driven factories.

You can turn belts off. Do you have any practical examples where a variable speed would be useful and not just a pain to implement?

With 0.16, there will be significant performance optimizations with belts, so this will be less of an issue.

Is there any statistical evidence about how much the current speed of a belt (yellow vs red vs blue) affects game performance? I kind of doubt that the speed as such is a major performance drain.

I can see this being useful to moderate/slow certain places in belt factories to say deliver precise ratios just by using belt speed but I fear that the UPS effect of something like this would be a drop because more checking is going on to set the speed than is saved by not moving the belt when lines are full. Right now (as far as I am aware) if a belt is backed up and not interacted with it has 0 effect on UPS vs same belt not existing

eradicator wrote:Is there any statistical evidence about how much the current speed of a belt (yellow vs red vs blue) affects game performance? I kind of doubt that the speed as such is a major performance drain.

the way it sounded to me, the belts would be extremely optimized (50-100x) in areas with few to no gaps.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176