Factorio Forums

TL;DR

I will like you to synchronise belts speed

What ?

Yellow : half speed as the red one
Red : half speed as the blue one
Blue : twice as red and four time of yellow.

Why ?

Simply because the blue belts does not match the splitters logic by working 3 times faster than the yellow and 1 time and a half the red belt.

If it's done like my suggestion, we can efficiently use splitters as one blue feed 2 red who feed 2 yellow.

Thanks!

Are you suggesting to make blue belts faster or red and yellow belts slower?

Although I agree that your suggestion would have advantages, I'm afraid that making the blue belt any faster would make it very hard to see the items on the belt, and making yellow belts any slower would make them even more useless than they already are.

Good question!!
I suggest half-half

Yellow 11 items/sec instead of 13.33
Red 22 items/sec instead of 26.66
Blue 44 items/sec instead of 40

Or yellow 12
Red 24
And blue 48

I think it will be fair like that

I don't think that would really be a good Idea. You can not merge two red ones on one blue, so what? It can still increase throughput significantly, and by the same logic assamblers would need the same stepping as well. In my Opinion red belts are superfluous anyway. Is there a reason not to use blue belts everywhere after you can craft them?
They might be 10x - 20x as expensive (plus some oil), but for 3x the throughput (and smaler delay) the effective cost is only at about 3x - 7x and it's not like most of the resources go into that kind of infrastructure anyway. If you compare it with a productiviy module 3 (which get plugged into quite a few assemblers later on) which costalmost 10x as much each on iron alone...
Personally I usually don't bother (much) with belts before blue and don't use red at all.
Just my opinion

I would probably prefer assemblers to be more in line with belt speed upgrades by having proportionally increasing crafting speeds like (0.5 - 1.0 - 1.5)
And yes I do not like the .33 part on the belts. Everything ends up being fractional. This is good and bad at the same time.

PacifyerGrey wrote:I would probably prefer assemblers to be more in line with belt speed upgrades by having proportionally increasing crafting speeds like (0.5 - 1.0 - 1.5)
And yes I do not like the .33 part on the belts. Everything ends up being fractional. This is good and bad at the same time.

I agree with you, especially about the fractional throughput. That is really strange and bopthersome.
About the productivity I'd say such an increase in speed would be a bit too much in my opinion. One reason to switch to blue belts (for me at least) is the posibility to serve more assemblers without putting aside more space for belts. And together with speed (and Productivity) modules and beacons, assemblers can get too fast anyway (belts are not affected by beacons!)

As someone, who actually uses all the belt tiers even after the rocket, i would really like having blue belts twice as fast as reds. I do not care whether i can see the individual items or not. I see whether they get consumed and if they do not get consumed i certainly instantly see whether it is because of having the wrong items on the belt...
Getting rid of fractional items per second would be nice too.
I also would still have use cases for yellows if they would get even slower than they are now.

I even have use for a fourth tier of (green like in bob's?) belts with exorbitant costs for a lightning-fast speed of twice the one of a blue belt (so it would be able to combine the load of eight yellows into one green). But more than four tiers would not make much sense in my opinion.
The last tier(s) do not have to be usable with inserters. I seldom use blue belts directly at the assemblers (i split into lower tier belts first).

Evilmaster_Qc wrote:If it's done like my suggestion, we can efficiently use splitters as one blue feed 2 red who feed 2 yellow.

You can use splitters efficiently now as well since one blue belt can feed a red and a yellow while the red one can feed two yellow.

The fractional throughput is a side-effect of how the belts are implemented. I.e. shifting a specific number of item slots per game tick.

I agree with Oktokolo. It would be nice to have the blue belts twice as fast as the red ones.
This would make it worthwhile to upgrade main belt systems past the red.

I do not care about the fractional transport per second, though.

There is a saying: "Be careful about what you wish for."

Evilmaster_Qc wrote: Simply because the blue belts does not match the splitters logic by working 3 times faster than the yellow and 1 time and a half the red belt.
If it's done like my suggestion, we can efficiently use splitters as one blue feed 2 red who feed 2 yellow.

On the contrary. It works the splitter logic very nicely. You can split one blue belt into one yellow and one red belt and you can unite 3 red belts into 2 blue belt.
But maybe more important, 1 blue = 3 yellow is a prime number, which makes achieving complicated ratios much easier than with just 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc ways to split.



Imo, if anything is changed, additions to the ability of working with prime numbers would be much more interesting. Eg a 3-way splitter.

10, 20, 40 items pro second looks much better for all math calculations. But you get visual vibration by 60 Hz monitor.

darkfrei wrote:10, 20, 40 items pro second looks much better for all math calculations. But you get visual vibration by 60 Hz monitor.

15/30/60?

Jap2.0 wrote:

darkfrei wrote:10, 20, 40 items pro second looks much better for all math calculations. But you get visual vibration by 60 Hz monitor.

15/30/60?

13.333/26.666/53.333

i like they way they are now. diminishing returns.

Is there any specific reason why blue belt speed aren't just double the red belt speed?

Here is my thought process

Red belts are 2x faster than yellow belts => 2 yellow belts can be merged into a fully compressed red belt
Blue belts are 1.5x faster than red belts => 3 red belts can be merged into 2 fully compressed blue belts

Issues with blue belt speed:
1) This makes your base obsolete real fast:
Because the ratios are different, you can't do in place upgrades if you build planning to make maximum use of yellow / red belts at the start of the game. Since you have to rebuild a lot of the main bus, most people just straight up switch to bots at this point and i think blue belt not being double speed is a huge part of that.
For example, you have a red belt main bus and you take 1 full red belt off of it and build the section according to the 26.666 items per second.
Once you upgrade the main bus to blue belt, that section just doesn't work because you would only get 20 items per second with 1 splitter (old splitter)

2) It is awkward to work with multiples of 3 belts in factorio (or any odd number greater than 1 number of belts)
Splitters by nature work with only 2 belts at a time. Trying to handle 3 belts means we don't use half of one splitter. This makes things non symmetrical and i personally like builds that have symmetry in them. If you want to have symmetry, you are essentially locked into working with pairs of blue belts at a time, which sometimes is just too much or too expensive, especially during the transition time from red belt to blue belt.

---

Point 1 doesn't really matter as much now since we have priority splitters but point number 2 is still an issue, working with 3 belts at a time just doesn't look very good so my question again:

Is there any specific reason why blue belts are at 40 items per second instead of just straight up double the speed of red belts or more? Are speeds higher than 40 /s inefficient in terms of code / memory performance?

2 yellow belts can merge into one red belt
3 yellow belts can merge into one blue belt.

You should see this from the yellow belt perspective:
The red belt is two times faster and the blue belt is even three times faster compared to the yellow belt.

If you still don't like it:
There is a mod for that.

Sir3n wrote:For example, you have a red belt main bus and you take 1 full red belt off of it and build the section according to the 26.666 items per second.
Once you upgrade the main bus to blue belt, that section just doesn't work because you would only get 20 items per second with 1 splitter (old splitter)

40. You get 40.
How does that "break" anything?

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DoubleSpeedBelts
6.666 for black (modded)
13.333 for yellow;
26.666 for red;
53.333 for blue;
106.666 for green (modded)
213.333 for purple (modded)

So you can always split one full belt to two full belts one tier lower and back, two belts can be splitted to one higher belt.

dood wrote:40. You get 40.

No you do not get 40.
1) If you have a red belt main bus and siphon off a full red belt
2) You upgrade only the main bus but not the side lane, with the old splitters, you would get a maximum of half the blue belt, which is 40/2 = 20 into the side red belt. Which isn't full capacity.

There was also ways around it by using circuit logic and such but having to do that at every point you siphon off items from the main bus gets repetitive and boring real fast
Like i said, this isn't much of an issue now since priority splitters can guarantee a fully compressed side red belt and the leftover goes down the main bus

JimBarracus wrote: You should see this from the yellow belt perspective:
The red belt is two times faster and the blue belt is even three times faster compared to the yellow belt..

I guess 3x yellow belt speed is the reason why it is 40/s but that doesn't seem particularly well thought of from a gameplay design perspective since you don't have 3-belt splitters.
From my experience, the amount of items you consume increases exponentially as the game goes on, the belt speed increasing in a linear fashion doesn't keep up as well as it should imo.

I use Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockStacking), which essentially multiplies belt speed by 5 and i still find belt base difficulty vs throughput to be higher than for bot bases.

As far as i can tell, there is literally no disadvantages to having higher belt speeds from a balance perspective.
So i was wondering if there is any performance reason for them to be at 40/s

darkfrei wrote:https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DoubleSpeedBelts

I noticed your mod. Only thing i'm wondering is whether it will actually affect performance