Better Logistic Options

[Zourin]

I find myself often limited by inserter speeds when there is an abundance of material backed up on a belt line, and I just need a dumb option to pipe materials in to something without needing a complex logistic solution. A few things I find I wish I really had:


1. Hopper
A dumb-chute that simply inserts everything from an attached belt line into the oppositely attached container/factory at belt speeds. Unlike the bizzare belt-gap-inserter for in-line inserting, this is a one tile peice of equipment that hooks directly up to a belt and attaches to either a chest or a factory (like a hybrid underground belt-inserter). While not able to pull items off an adjacent line or out of factories/storage, this would be handy early on such as (for example) two burner-miner's connected to a belt which feeds into a hopper which feeds into a chest, or later on in rapidly dumping product lines into storage as fast as its made. it also wouldn't be 'smart', and would continually dump materials into the container as they arrive until the container is full. This could also be very useful for smelting operations

Example: I have a twenty-furnace smelting set-up, but being a temporary fixture, I still want to manually run the metal plates around via car, so I want to collect the plates into a chest for easy retrieval. One inserter taking the output and inserting it into a chest, even a fast one, would not be sufficient to keep up with the furnaces pushing out metal. A hopper could be connected at the end of the belt line to pour all those plates into the chest.

2. Buffer Hopper
Similar to the hopper, this is meant as a Belt-Storage-Belt solution. Items are pushed out the other side by default, if the output becomes 'backed up', items begin filling storage. If no item is currently being passed through on the input belt, an item is placed from storage onto the belt line. This would be a very helpful alternative to an in-line inserter in-chest-inserter out, since inserters can't keep up with large throughputs. This way you can hold a 'reserve' of items that can be picked up for personal use without running up and down your production lanes holding the F key (although that's still an option), and also artifically 'lengthen' belts. It can also smooth out the supply of materials to factories in an arrangement prone to 'stop and go' production, such as train deliveries. These can have 'smart' options to report their contents to the logistic/wire networks.

Example. I have a 'smart' Buffer Hopper, on the output lanes of my smelting operation. I have smart inserters on a quarter of the furnaces, and hoppers/inserters on the rest. They are wired together with Red cables. If the buffer begins to empty, the smart inserters turn on and production is temporarily increased by 30% until they refill.

3. Lane Splitter
Having two lanes is great, but if you have a lane of Iron Plates and a lane of Copper Bars on the same belt, getting them onto seperate belt feeds is an expensive, costly, and inefficient procedure, epecially at high production rates. A Lane Splitter simplies this process. It can have a 2x1 setup like the Splitter, where the Left Lanes of both input belts wind in the left and right lanes of the Left output belt, and the Right lanes of both input belts are pushed to the left and right lanes of the Right output belt.

4. Car Port
Factory sized building that you can drive on to. It takes Fuel and Repair Kits and will, well, fuel and repair the car for you. Isn't automation great!? Currently, using an inserter to refuel the car for you is a pain, since it will first refuel the car, then proceed to fill up the trunk.

Also.. inserters should only fill the trunk of the car. Lets nip that in the bud.

5. Roads.
it's bad enough I drive like a blind, drunk koala, but i'm getting a wee bit tired of running into factories and things. I wouldn't mind a little 'navigation assist' while within my own factory. It can function a bit like a 'soft rail' for cars. If I'm driving fast, I 'stick' to roads like it was a rail. Slowing down would allow me to pull off the road. This way, i can avoid the temptation to use my train tracks as a car lane. That never ends well.

[immibis]

The first three things can be done with a row of inserters already, so why not just do that? I suppose those setups get a bit big with faster belts (16 inserters per group for express belts).

Car ports: Construction bots will already repair cars, and [s]inserters will already fuel them[/s] (edit: missed the bit about how inserters will fill the trunk after the fuel slot, but I would go for the reverse solution - who uses inserters to fill their trunk?). Which means that if you have roads you can already do that.

Roads: YES!

[Zourin]

There are three problems with the current options:

1. Belts have better 'moving power' than inserters and even logistic bots. Inserters are best for picking items from factory to factory, or from storage to storage. Belt to Belt, inserters become a bottleneck without devoting a large amount of space and power.

2. Splitting lanes, is not space, power, or sanity efficient compared to joining them. Doing so at belt bandwidths is barely worth the effort when you don't need items on one side of the belt to go to the opposite end of an assembly. it is also not possible before Smart Inserters, despite the two-lane mechanic being present with zero research.

3. Sometimes you'd just rather dump all that backed up junk into storage without the petty issue of doing it one at a time.

4. Bots are intellectually challenged when it comes to storage chests, so I don't use storage chests. Smart chests, sure. Logistic Storage, hells no.

5. I don't need two chests as a parallel buffer for iron plates. I sure as heck don't need the six or seven it would take to do any effective belt-inserter procedure for splitting lanes, dumping into (one) chest, or ensuring that lane backup doesn't immediately stall production farther up the line.

6. The Car Port idea is something that would be best done pre-logistic bots, even pre-trains (meaning it unlocks with the automotive tech). Bots are an end-game feature, and alter how the game is played significantly, if not outright trivialize many parts of it. it's also a sort of 'baby Bot Port', needing to be stocked with repair packs and fuel (instead of bots). As long as there's been a car, there's been a garage for it.

[immibis]

3. Sometimes you'd just rather dump all that backed up junk into storage without the petty issue of doing it one at a time.

Ctrl-click?

5. I don't need two chests as a parallel buffer for iron plates. I sure as heck don't need the six or seven it would take to do any effective belt-inserter procedure for splitting lanes, dumping into (one) chest, or ensuring that lane backup doesn't immediately stall production farther up the line.

* You don't need any chests to split lanes.
* Why does it matter if you have more buffer space than necessary?

6. The Car Port idea is something that would be best done pre-logistic bots, even pre-trains (meaning it unlocks with the automotive tech). Bots are an end-game feature, and alter how the game is played significantly, if not outright trivialize many parts of it.

True.

[ssilk]

To your first post:

1+2: a chest has 4 sides, so you can feed it with 4 inserters. That can keep up with a basic belt and a bit more and fills the chest with 5-10 minutes.
But I have the feeling, that you want to built up small stuff. Forget that. When you look at industry facilities, then in most cases the storage is the biggest part. Processing is very small, compared to that!

So what you need is space...

And I have also made suggestions for a hopper, but now I think, that it would look unnatural; when you discovered an area of 1000 tiles (5 radar ranges) around your factory, you might see that.

Instead I use logistic bots for storing stuff, or a field of chests/inserters.

3: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... anes_trick

4. For refueling/inserters: yes. Repair: when you drive into a robotic network with construction bots, they will repair it. Well. I see a car port also as a requester chest, which has the same number of stacks and you can say for each stack, what it should be filled with. The car port requests that and if a car arrives it will be filled up, if possible.

5. Soft rails is a nice name. Navigation assist can drive from navigation point to navigation point (connected together like the wires on the poles) and on crossings you can decide the direction (one of three, like with trains). Leaving road by slowing down is nice.
But also a more precise steering: when I'm fast small changes let me drive into the next accu. The steer should be depend end from speed, when I press short I make only a correction of 1-2 degrees, not 10. Just the most important of many changes for the car.


To the second:
1: this depends on, what you understand with "moving power". If it is throughput: no. Logistic bots or train have definitly a higher throughput. When you mean efficiency: yes. Nothing can beat parallel tracks of basic transport belts.

2: see 3 above

3: logistic bots. And space.

4: for raw storage chests are a must, for production: well with the new smart inserter logic I would give t a try.

5: the target is to use the stuff on the belts by production. Not storing it! That's just the wrong way, especially in the beginning where every item counts to be assembled into something more useful. In my eyes it's a sign of bad play, when you have at any point the need to store stuff. The need for storing comes later. Much, much later, when you already developed logistic bots, and they make this job really easy.

6: yes. I would like to have also a trailer. And some kind of automatic car, which can be programmed like the train.

[Zourin]

For sanity purposes, I have my smelting operations put everything into chests for a swing-by. I don't need, or want, a chest full of basic Belts. I would rather just not allocate ANY resources to it if I have enough to dump into the pack assemblers, and instead divert that material to a chip plant or science pack facility. Buffering it in a chest means I can step away for a while to 'do my thing' and not miss out in any production.

Very simply, I do batch production. I get a batch of iron plates, distribute in the proportions I feel are necessary. It frees up real estate (ten reloads and I stil wind up in narrow crevices between a lake and a large/medium biter camp), and the chests come already set-up for when I (eventually) get logistic robots. My science facility is actually a bunch of standalone assemblers because they can queue up stacks of science packs without any belts, any wasted space, and I just need to swing by and do a little maintenance every now and again. My 'lab' setup is 3-4 labs feeding out of a common chest. I know exactly how many red/green/blues by hovering over the chest. Attach an inserter to any assembler, and the assembler will stop after a handfull of runs. Standalones run longer. I even stopped running coal to the smelting plants, and just did a quick siphon-buffer into a wooden chest along the way to the power plant.

In the end, i'm not wasting thousands of metal plates on belt lines, i'm not wasting hordes of power on inserters. Total automation is nice, but wasteful, until you get Logi-bots to move things from chest-to-chest for you, but now that takes a massive amount of effort with the new oil mechanics interrupting everything.

The tunnel trick is actually really useful.

[ssilk]

Well, you can play it like so... I recommend to try different playing styles.

And isn't that great, that a game allows completely different styles of playing?

[Zourin]

indeed.

I tried the fully-automatic-belt-feed-madness for a while and realized that 'stone age logistics' had some merit, especially when presented with car trunk space I never used, and the prospect of having to rip it all down once I got logi-bots. My bases are much cleaner, although I still do a lot of point A-B-C-D running around, I don't have to worry so much about not having smart inserters AND smart chests so early. I don't need a massive logistic setup, I just need to grab copper and steel out of the chests, swing by a standalone Armor Piercing factory, dump the materials in it, grab the stocked ammo out, and i'm good. No belts, no inserters, all ammo, no waste.

Especially since the map generators like to make me 'buddy up' with a nearby large biter nest so close they can read my factory manuals. Building 'big' is not an option if I like living. I need compact, pollution efficient, power efficient designs from game-start long before I have access to modules to get to the point there I can feasibly tackle nearby spawner nests to open up space. Early game combat is equivalent to suicide due to the insane respawn rates of biters. And now I need even MORE buildings, factories, and techs before I can even get a car with 0.9. Living is tight, and I'm just on straight medium settings.

In the end, all ore gets dumped into furnaces. Doing it one at a time is just petty, but belts/inserters are required because you can't very well marry furnaces and miners in the field.

[ssilk]

I'm sure that this strategy is not boring, but also that it is much slower, than transporting by the inserters/belts. And it's also faster to build a first setup for reaching some important targets, like blue potion, logistic bots etc. and then rework that or built completely new, instead of setting up a factory as a constant.