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That is also a bottleneck, though smaller. The back-feed has a 2 full belts times 1/3 load. This merged with on full belt in the bottommost splitter, which outputs to one side only, will back up.

Concerning curves, they are on a segment with a 2/3 load. Not sure if this backs up for the inner lane or is just right. I don't really care for the packing loss of curves, all my belts have curves. Also this effect will be gone in the next version.

--[edit]--

After some testing, I found, that the backing up in PiggyWhiskey's last design isn't that bad. If the packing on the incomming belts is not constantly 100% (e.g. some curves beforehand), then it's no problem.

My understanding is the 1/3 and the full lane are split to 2. So it shouldn't be a choke point by the splitter.

On the topic of belts, here's something I came up with that I suppose there's a chance someone else might be interested in. While it is somewhat large and unwieldy due to the extra bits of track needed to cause side-loading, it is smaller than the first two versions I tried. The purpose is to accept items from both sides of the input belt instead of causing one lane to back up while the other empties out, as typically happens with side-loading from a belt with two full lanes, even after a splitter. It would be really nice if you could toggle a belt between a curve and a straight piece instead of having to place more belt next to or behind it to force it to straighten out...

http://imgur.com/MltzQNG

A simple steel smelting setup my friend designed

Tallinu wrote:On the topic of belts, here's something I came up with that I suppose there's a chance someone else might be interested in. While it is somewhat large and unwieldy due to the extra bits of track needed to cause side-loading, it is smaller than the first two versions I tried. The purpose is to accept items from both sides of the input belt instead of causing one lane to back up while the other empties out, as typically happens with side-loading from a belt with two full lanes, even after a splitter.

Drink Me

It would be really nice if you could toggle a belt between a curve and a straight piece instead of having to place more belt next to or behind it to force it to straighten out...

This is a great solution to a problem I have always had, but never really knew how to fix....

This will be making an appearance in my next factory somewhere I'm sure!

Tallinu wrote:On the topic of belts, here's something I came up with that I suppose there's a chance someone else might be interested in. While it is somewhat large and unwieldy due to the extra bits of track needed to cause side-loading, it is smaller than the first two versions I tried. The purpose is to accept items from both sides of the input belt instead of causing one lane to back up while the other empties out, as typically happens with side-loading from a belt with two full lanes, even after a splitter.

Drink Me

It would be really nice if you could toggle a belt between a curve and a straight piece instead of having to place more belt next to or behind it to force it to straighten out...

Slight upgrade (I think....I've been wrong before)

A bit more compact.
Uses a pair of underground belts and an extra splitter.
Also doesn't bounce up before sending the line down allowing streamlining the output that you want/need. Although it is 1 block longer at the bottom, and 1 shorter at the top. (although the entire layout could be pushed down 1 just as easily.

PiggyWhiskey wrote:Slight upgrade (I think....I've been wrong before)

A bit more compact.
Uses a pair of underground belts and an extra splitter.
Also doesn't bounce up before sending the line down allowing streamlining the output that you want/need. Although it is 1 block longer at the bottom, and 1 shorter at the top. (although the entire layout could be pushed down 1 just as easily.

I just tested this. Unfortunately, it doesn't accomplish the goal, at least when the input belt is completely packed. The underground belt is guaranteed to only take input from the left side, but the side-loading belt will also take input from the left side of the input belt due to the items on the belt blocking the right side. Maybe that issue doesn't show up with just two fast inserters unloading onto each side of the belt? This one seems to give one side of the belt priority over the other, just like a simple side-loading arrangement.

When I first tested mine, it seemed to guarantee that both sides of the belt proceeded at equal rates, alternating between taking an item from one side and the other. I just now tried putting different items on different sides, and the result was not a predictable 1 to 1 interleaving, and instead seemed almost random despite the input belt being completely packed. Maybe it behaves differently when constructed in different orientations? Ugh...


On a less frustrating note, here's a nice modular advanced circuit factory that produces exactly enough basic circuits and wire for its needs in a neat, compact fashion, easily tiled with single belts for each input resource. Upgrading to fast or express input belts (carrying sufficiently increased resources) would easily allow two or three of these, chained in a vertical row, to operate at full speed.

http://imgur.com/JCewooG

The loading of plastic and circuits onto the belts at the right could be adjusted to make it even more compact (or allow better chaining), such as moving the fast inserters unloading the circuits to send them up and down instead of right, but then getting the plastic onto the left side of the bottom belt would've been awkward. If your plastic factories were just to the right of this, you could have them load two seperate belts properly instead of splitting one line, which would avoid that. I have four of them a little ways north, which is probably overkill - I haven't calculated their production rate, but it's definitely more than the 3 per second this requires.

Tallinu wrote:On the topic of belts, here's something I came up with that I suppose there's a chance someone else might be interested in. While it is somewhat large and unwieldy due to the extra bits of track needed to cause side-loading, it is smaller than the first two versions I tried. The purpose is to accept items from both sides of the input belt instead of causing one lane to back up while the other empties out, as typically happens with side-loading from a belt with two full lanes, even after a splitter.

Drink Me

It would be really nice if you could toggle a belt between a curve and a straight piece instead of having to place more belt next to or behind it to force it to straighten out...

Gah... it's 1am, and you just totally nerd-sniped me with this one.

On the bright side, I think I managed to shrink it (slightly) without it preferring one side over the other (ignore the superfluous belt with blue circuits):

That is exactly, what is described in the wiki: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... s/Priority

If you use two express splitters directly in row it is guaranteed, that the both rows are joined together 50/50. Or you can try, if it works.

SpeedDaemon wrote:

Tallinu wrote:On the topic of belts, here's something I came up with that I suppose there's a chance someone else might be interested in. While it is somewhat large and unwieldy due to the extra bits of track needed to cause side-loading, it is smaller than the first two versions I tried. The purpose is to accept items from both sides of the input belt instead of causing one lane to back up while the other empties out, as typically happens with side-loading from a belt with two full lanes, even after a splitter.

Drink Me

It would be really nice if you could toggle a belt between a curve and a straight piece instead of having to place more belt next to or behind it to force it to straighten out...

Gah... it's 1am, and you just totally nerd-sniped me with this one.

On the bright side, I think I managed to shrink it (slightly) without it preferring one side over the other (ignore the superfluous belt with blue circuits):

Viola

You could shrink it another 1/2 tile in width by using outward pushing underground belts of two different types.

Small lane mixer with underground belts: Without underground belts, I suspect Tallinu's design already is minimal.

Expandable copper smelting (can be upgraded to electric furnaces later), optimized for beacons and (almost)blue belts. max is 54(missing 2) furnaces, but you can add extra with beacons.

At the bottom is a 4 lane belt balancer.

Also, pre-planning massive production of electronic circuits, based on https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =8&t=12588. However, I don't really like the double underground belt trick as it requires red belts, I want my factory to be exandable so I used a 1 width tile in between sections (later in the game that will become from top to bottom: yellow belt, red belt, blue belt.)

Talguy wrote:Expandable copper smelting (can be upgraded to electric furnaces later), optimized for beacons and (almost)blue belts. max is 54(missing 2) furnaces, but you can add extra with beacons.

~snip~

At the bottom is a 4 lane belt balancer.

That's quite a nice furnace layout.

I hadn't considered a single buffer per 2 furnaces.
My goto design was a combination of something I found on reddit for the fuel line, and Arumba's standard furnace layout.



It's quite expensive with the fuel underground belts, but when you transition to electric, these are removed to make the room needed.
It also allows the same width if you're after a compact smelting area. So you don't get the lane down the outside empty/having to move the setup across.

Also I added in the splitter with underground belts to allow a single line to output more than a basic belt can handle (Not sure if its efficient but I use 16 furnaces/8 rows before I shove that lane across). This (and another one later down the line) can allow triple the output, depending on how you handle the lane balancing/belt speed on the output. (It doesn't need to be red under ground belts, I just used them because I had some spare)

And I also use a faster belt on the merge point to get better compression. It manages to get enough of a gap to allow another set or two of items which compress when they hit the slower belts.

Also removes the need for long handed inserters....cheaper power etc etc.

I haven't thought about where I would put the power lines when I switch to Electric. I might need to double the amount of power poles using the basic ones. Or perhaps mix in substations. Not sure yet.

Whats the max furnace/belt setup for maximum efficiency?

ssilk wrote:That is exactly, what is described in the wiki: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... s/Priority

If you use two express splitters directly in row it is guaranteed, that the both rows are joined together 50/50. Or you can try, if it works.

Thanks, the "Joining with Splitters" thread from that article had exactly what I needed to know. If single red or blue splitters do this reliably now regardless of placement, that'll be awesome, but at least it's possible to work around it with any of them. (Which explains why the design I posted worked - I must've done so purely by chance.) I hope they can get basic splitters to do the same eventually. It only should happen when both inputs are at full compression, really, and that should hopefully make it an achievable goal. (Prioritizing one input over another is what side-loading is for, IMHO! It's a much more transparent process there, and can be easily manipulated to do what you want.)

tobsimon wrote:Small lane mixer with underground belts:

LaneMixer.png

Without underground belts, I suspect Tallinu's design already is minimal.

Beautiful! You have taught me something new -- I never thought of using an unpaired underground exit as a side-loading point!

PiggyWhiskey wrote:My goto design was a combination of something I found on reddit for the fuel line, and Arumba's standard furnace layout.

~snip~

It's quite expensive with the fuel underground belts, but when you transition to electric, these are removed to make the room needed.
It also allows the same width if you're after a compact smelting area. So you don't get the lane down the outside empty/having to move the setup across.

~snip~

And I also use a faster belt on the merge point to get better compression. It manages to get enough of a gap to allow another set or two of items which compress when they hit the slower belts.

Also removes the need for long handed inserters....cheaper power etc etc.

I'm pretty sure that for a fixed item input rate less than the rate at which a basic inserter moves items (such as a furnace's processing rate), the electrical consumption ends up being identical for all three types. I read or heard somewhere that the power consumed by a fast inserter and the speed at which it works are increased by the same proportion relative to basic inserters. If so, the energy cost per item moved is effectively identical (they just move more items, and therefore consume more energy). If that's all correct, using a long handed inserter with a furnace shouldn't be any less efficient (pretty sure they only use more power because they work faster too, even though they're slower than fast inserters).

So you could avoid having to build and then tear out all those underground belts, and you could also avoid having to move the buffer chests and inserters during the upgrade, if you shifted the chests inward by one tile (removing the extra belts side-loading onto the main line) and used long inserters to transfer from the furnaces, across the aboveground fuel belt, into the chests. And from there, onto the single tiles of fast belt (which is a great idea).

I'm going to have to start using that kind of setup myself, now, instead of putting the coal next to the input ore - I've typically just been tearing down and rebuilding once I get electrics, often in a better place than my initial smelting that grows out of awkward bootstrap setups, but this would save a lot of work if I have a good spot to begin with.

Tallinu wrote: ~snip~
I'm pretty sure that for a fixed item input rate less than the rate at which a basic inserter moves items (such as a furnace's processing rate), the electrical consumption ends up being identical for all three types. I read or heard somewhere that the power consumed by a fast inserter and the speed at which it works are increased by the same proportion relative to basic inserters. If so, the energy cost per item moved is effectively identical (they just move more items, and therefore consume more energy). If that's all correct, using a long handed inserter with a furnace shouldn't be any less efficient (pretty sure they only use more power because they work faster too, even though they're slower than fast inserters).

So you could avoid having to build and then tear out all those underground belts, and you could also avoid having to move the buffer chests and inserters during the upgrade, if you shifted the chests inward by one tile (removing the extra belts side-loading onto the main line) and used long inserters to transfer from the furnaces, across the aboveground fuel belt, into the chests. And from there, onto the single tiles of fast belt (which is a great idea).

I'm going to have to start using that kind of setup myself, now, instead of putting the coal next to the input ore - I've typically just been tearing down and rebuilding once I get electrics, often in a better place than my initial smelting that grows out of awkward bootstrap setups, but this would save a lot of work if I have a good spot to begin with.

So I got around to a new world and I think I managed to understand what you were referring to with the Fuel Belt.
Like this?


Is inserting to the belt faster than to a fast/express side belt? I have noticed that my metal plate output line's are sometimes patchy.

Keep in mind, that this might change in with 0.12! The belts physics will change. That was also the reason, why I hadn't updated the pages for a while.

My first post.

Since others reported having trouble doing neat oil processing, here is my setup, which I don't think is too terrible:
It should be scalable. It doesn't make a balanced amount of lubricant, so you might want to add a tank to buffer the heavy oil and a pump to make sure it gets allocated to lubricant if you want the most of that. The light oil to petroleum gas arrangement can be shrunk one tile horizontally.

PiggyWhiskey wrote: So I got around to a new world and I think I managed to understand what you were referring to with the Fuel Belt.
Like this?
~snip~
Is inserting to the belt faster than to a fast/express side belt? I have noticed that my metal plate output line's are sometimes patchy.

Yeah, that's what I was describing.
I haven't actually tested it, but I suspect that side belts do a better job of merging items than inserters dropping items directly onto a belt. I think if you alternated every other furnace's long and short inserters, you could have two buffer chests outputting onto a single side belt... and make the whole setup two tiles more compact in the process. I'll try to build an example.
There we go. Keep in mind that this shot was taken with a stalled production line, plus I set it up right next to a preexisting electric copper smelting area. With fast belts at the side-loading points (or express belts if you make it big enough that the front end needs the throughput of fast belts) I think it might load the belts a bit more uniformly, but that'll need testing.

Double rail T-junction. You're welcome.

That T-junction is one BIG deadlock.