Thank you for belt compression

[zombieroboninja]

Thank you dev team for bringing back sideloading belt compression with 16.25, and compression from inserters is pretty ok too.

[Lastmerlin]

Thats not just pretty ok, thats awesome. Goodbye to the good old underground belt trick. Its really better that way, thanks a lot.

[Pothrekr]

Hi,

I might be in the minority here, but I think particularly the inserter compression looks odd, and is the only effect I have seen in game where the items on the belt will get noticeably pushed against the direction of the belt to make room for the new item. With the splitter creating complete compression now I think this was a redundant problem to solve, acheiving compression through the use of a splitter added interesting design problems and makes logical sense IMHO.

Regards
Poth

[quyxkh]

Hi,

I might be in the minority here, ...

Maybe in the minority, but not alone....

I'd like to see sideloading not be such a gimme, have the sideloading items only able to do so much shoving, in my fantasy world it'd depend on how the relative chain sizes and how far the sideloading chain got before colliding, so lone item that only got one slot into the side before colliding with a hundreds-long chain of ore would simply get kicked back on to its side bet, but as it got farther in it'd be able to bump the chains a little more. This kind of minor detail feels to me like it would be in there with the staggered lamp lighting, a bit of not-strictly-necessariy verisimilitude that pleases me endlessly. And I don't like the inserter drops much at all either, there's already ways to solve the problem, and always-works-with-no-tradeoffs solutions make me sad.

That said, I think making sideloading workable was necessary with the new splitters and I'm veryveryvery! happy to have it back.

[Deadly-Bagel]

I might be in the minority here, but I think particularly the inserter compression looks odd, and is the only effect I have seen in game where the items on the belt will get noticeably pushed against the direction of the belt to make room for the new item. With the splitter creating complete compression now I think this was a redundant problem to solve, acheiving compression through the use of a splitter added interesting design problems and makes logical sense IMHO.

It only made logical sense if you knew about the problem in the first place. Do you remember when you first noticed it? I do, I had 8 full furnace columns (4 Iron 4 Copper) on blue belts. They'd been set up some time previously but I wasn't actually consuming all four belts of either metal at the time, so it remained fully compressed until I started more serious production. Was then wondering why there were big gaps in my Electronic Circuit belts and tracked the problem back. Solving the problem wasn't fun - it involved tearing down all eight furnace columns (I was at least using bots but a ton of stuff needed moving to make room either side) and redesigning the blueprint. The solution, of course, was to have a single belt of ore up the centre and output to either side of the column, sideload the belt halfway down onto the other lane and merge the two at the bottom. Oh great, it's not just furnaces, I've got the problem with the Electronic Circuits too. With that one I had the last 4 Assemblers output onto a separate belt, the main column used a few underground belts to run next to it, and merged them at the end.

All in all I went through over an hour of work (yes, work, I'd thought this was done with for this game) for the sake of dumping a few splitters and underground belts into a blueprint and moving some belts around. The next game I knew about the hidden puzzle and designed my production lines accordingly, but it's not like I had any more fun doing it. Really, why are you arguing for this? It's inane.

Also, to clarify, items don't get pushed anywhere. They just freeze in place until there is room to move forward.

[Aeternus]

You guys are in the minority, ye. Belt compression is great - belts need all the boosts they can get given the competition they get from bots. Being able to actually get a 40/s throughput guaranteed with a blue belt allows people to plan for this and optimize their patterns accordingly.

[quyxkh]

You guys are in the minority, ye. Belt compression is great - belts need all the boosts they can get given the competition they get from bots. Being able to actually get a 40/s throughput guaranteed with a blue belt allows people to plan for this and optimize their patterns accordingly.

It's not the compression I dislike. there's plenty of times I want it. But to get it means either tick-perfect insertion or applying backpressure, and there's times when I don't want the backpressure -- when I don't want to stall that long chain of items in order to make a slightly bigger gap.

And splitters are now _much_ more sensitive to backpressure if I'm trying to maintain their output patterns.

With the item-alternation splitters you kept their output ports clear and fed them items in the ratios you wanted, both output belts had that ratio if you gave the splitter any choice in the matter at all. It was _possible_ to feed them items with exactly the wrong timing and sequence and drive them into a failure mode where they wouldn't maintain that.

I think any splitter not blessed with foresight and reason and perhaps a small amount of mindreading is going to necessarily have that kind of failure mode, because choices made on one port now constrain the available choices on all other ports for that lane, for up to nine ticks.

That was fine with me, in the extreme you could add a kicker inserter to take an item off the input belt if the outputs didn't look right, with less constraint on their choices they'd go back to doing what you wanted. I even liked _that_, it felt right. Now if the backpressure you often have to apply to produce compression on a belt reaches their output belts you get chaos, because the choices they make now aren't almost always the right thing when you want to maintain item ratios. And it seems everything that ever touches a belt is being changed to always produce that, and only that. This for something that was already easy to produce for anybody that wanted it.

[Pothrekr]

All in all I went through over an hour of work (yes, work, I'd thought this was done with for this game) for the sake of dumping a few splitters and underground belts into a blueprint and moving some belts around. The next game I knew about the hidden puzzle and designed my production lines accordingly, but it's not like I had any more fun doing it. Really, why are you arguing for this? It's inane.

Also, to clarify, items don't get pushed anywhere. They just freeze in place until there is room to move forward.

Hidden Puzzle? I would say that a large amount of Factorio game play is based on discovering you have a throughput issue and tracing it back to it's source, then designing a solution for it. If this has become tiresome work for you, I don't see this as a valid argument for the new belt compression changes. I knew about it the moment I launched the game because running the experimental release I always read the patch notes, and expect that some things will change in my factory.

I would say my comment wasn't an argument for or against, merely a statement that it looked odd and that if you cared about belt compression there was already a way to do it, a way in which I enjoyed.

[Deadly-Bagel]

New players don't read the patch notes, they wouldn't mean anything to them, especially after full release. And once you work out the golden rules of ratios and expandability, there isn't much else to really trip you up. Yeah you'll come across stuff you missed and unexpected problems but there shouldn't be anything to say "hey, that perfectly designed setup you did a few hours ago, yeah it's useless."

The post didn't read very neutral, was along the lines of "There wasn't any point doing this change and I enjoyed employing the workaround."