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After reading the post Smart multifunctional furnace setup I decided to try and make a multi-ore furnace area that could handle multiple ores but without needing combinators or anything terribly advanced. Thus I turned to the trusty passive logistical loop.

What I ended up with was a loop for smelting of tin, lead, silver, glass, and rubber. Because I use tin and lead more than the others currently, I set it up to have 2 fast inserters of input on those 2, and 1 faster inserter for the other 3. 2 fast inserters of input is enough to feed all 9 furnaces. If I wanted, moving the loop to blue belts would allow 2 fast inserters of all 5 ores, but I just stuck with red belts instead.

Here is my result.



It seems to work fine. The center supplier is for silver ore which I'm out of at the moment, but the other 4 ores are being supplied to the loop. Each furnace has 5 smart inserters, one for each ore type the loop is providing. Output of all types is to a provider chest. What I did was set each of them to have a filter for a specific ore, and a condition to only run if the related output type has too little supply in the logistics network. For testing I just did 1000 tin and lead plate, 500 glass rubber and silver plate. Since the amount I'm making is less than can fit into a provider chest, a lack of output space should never stop a furnace from being able to function.

(The little chest with inserter on bottom left isn't doing anything, I originally set the loop up with iron ore but needed to pull that all off since I decided to stick only to the 5 lower demand materials that electric furnaces can make)

The big bug with this is the "Logistical Loop" as you can full up the belt with the over ores.

Lee_newsum wrote:The big bug with this is the "Logistical Loop" as you can full up the belt with the over ores.

Nope, not at all. The whole point of the "passive logistical loop" is that such jams never happen. This is because you are pulling items off the middle line faster than you are adding it (X basic or fast inserters go on, X+1 smart inserters pull off). New materials either from requester chest or factory are side loaded into the pull-off/put-on belt, since the sideloading has a lower priority. Thus, no new items are added to the loop system if the loop is "full" of that item (which doesn't mean the loop is physically full).

No matter how long you let this run, the items going onto the belt loop in this manner will never fill the belt. There will only be a # based on however many inserters you have adding.