Logistics Belts, or Routing Belts, an alternative to bots

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MoriMori
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Logistics Belts, or Routing Belts, an alternative to bots

Post by MoriMori »

I'm a fairly new player to Factorio, and I have been skimming through the Friday Facts blog posts, and stumbled across the Bots vs Belts argument, in particular the lackluster nature of belts when compared to bots.

Admittedly, I haven't even reached bots at this point, but they seem like a very cheap and easy solution to the spaghetti problem of routing supply and demand with belts around your base, which gets unwieldy very quickly, especially for a newer player like myself.
Bots do definitely look like a very easy solution to this, but at the same time, it feels like a very cheap cop out, for all the reasons outlined in those two blog posts.

The blog posts focuses on throughput, and how belt throughput is much lower compared to bots.
But there is another, very important argument to bots as well - they provide automatic, easy routing of items compared to belts, so complicated production setups would be much easier using bots than belts, and I haven't seen any ideas or suggestions to improve that (admittedly, I didn't read through the dozens of pages in the comments to the blog post)

Without further ado: Logistics Belts
I'm terribly sorry if this is already in a mod, but I couldn't find any

tl;dr - Provide automatic item routing facilities to belts as an alternative to bots. Add more options to belts to simplify routing and reduce complexity.

Now, before anyone grabs their pitchforks and says that Factorio is all about complexity - I agree! But bots remove a lot of the logistical complexity of having to route your items already, so why not have a middle option?
I used to play a lot of modded Minecraft, and there is a similar concept there to Factorio's belts, called pipes - which are essentially just three-dimensional item-carrying belts. There are some mods out there that provide 'logistical pipes', pipes that automatically route items to their destinations based on what is requested. In fact, they work almost the same as Factorio's bots, but with the added complexity of actually having to set up your pipes.
So why not carry that idea over to Factorio, as well?

So here are some thoughts and ideas on how to implement this, as well as improve the overall "belt experience" compared to bots:
  • There would have to be a "routing splitter", that would choose the appropriate output belt for a specific item depending on where that item is requested/routed to. This would allow creating belt networks that would automatically route items to their destination.
  • Requester/Provider chests would have to be somehow linked to their inserters, so that they can broadcast their requests/provisions to the belt networks that they are on. That way, an inserter outputting into a chest would request items from the belt network it's connected to, and an inserter outputting onto a belt would provide the contents of it's associated container to the belt network as well.
  • More compact routing blocks would go a long way of reducing "belt spaghetti". For example, two-way splitters outputting at 90 and 180 degrees to the input, a three-way splitter, and so on. I realize this is possible already, but some of the belt setups necessary to achieve this have a pretty large footprint, and are very hard to do if you already have a functioning factory with very little space left.
  • Bi-directional routing splitter, that could input/output items on either lane depending on where that item is needed.
  • In tandem with the previous points of reducing belt footprint, a combined chest/inserter item would also help a lot, allowing to compact a factory even more.
  • Perhaps, some kind of 'tracker' item would have to be attached to every item entering a logistic belt network! That would add additional gameplay in the form of having to create a 'tracker' factory to 'tag' your items in the new logistic network.
  • 'Stacks' or 'Palettes' would complement the 'tracking' feature very well, allowing whole stacks of items to be delivered to a destination instead of a single one, potentially also serving as a massive performance improvement.
  • Two-way single-tile belts would offer lower throughput, but make routing and delivery of items even easier.
There are probably many more ways to make this idea even more exciting, at least for me, personally, but this is just off the top of my head. The above featureset would provide functionality on par with bots, but would still be fairly fun to use, in my opinion. This would also create more possibilities for massive 'bus' belts, since the belts could carry any type of item instead of just the ones they were designed for.

If I really get into it, I might look into creating a mod that does exactly that, or maybe this will inspire someone else to do so.

So, what do you guys think?

mp0011
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Re: Logistics Belts, or Routing Belts, an alternative to bots

Post by mp0011 »

Yes, and no.

Fully automatic underground logistic belts = invisible, less annoying, teleporting bots.

I had once proposed system depending on overground (and uderground) uni-directional pipes with routers controlled only by circuit logic, so You must cleverly connect each router to boxes...

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