Bots based iron smelting

[herkalurk]

126 Electric smelters with beacons making them craft at speed 4, fed by 1000 bots. I have 4 trains delivering ore.

iron.png (3.66 MiB) Viewed 16218 times

I have a smaller site that is also doing steel based on bots - 98 smelters for iron and 34 smelters for steel fed by 3 trains and 750 bots.

iron2.png (6.88 MiB) Viewed 16217 times

[dood]

Efficiency mods on speed beaconed smelters is an oxymoron.
Percentages get added up so the efficiency gain becomes much less effective.
Might as well go full speed or put some prod mods in there.

[herkalurk]

Efficiency mods on speed beaconed smelters is an oxymoron.
Percentages get added up so the efficiency gain becomes much less effective.
Might as well go full speed or put some prod mods in there.

They're operating at 30% less power because of the efficiency mods while outputting double the rate. Could be worse.

[dood]

Efficiency mods on speed beaconed smelters is an oxymoron.
Percentages get added up so the efficiency gain becomes much less effective.
Might as well go full speed or put some prod mods in there.

They're operating at 30% less power because of the efficiency mods while outputting double the rate. Could be worse.

True but as soon as you use beacons, you generally abandon all hope of energy efficiency anyway.
Beacons use power too, you're not actully saving power that way and you definitely have no hope to save power on the level of no beacons and 2 rows of smelters (which would also be more space efficient).
So, might as well go full tilt on the other end of the spectrum, full effectivity.

[HurkWurk]

beaconing efficiency is only useful on rocket pads as far as i have seen.

[Hiladdar]

I set up something similar. It is set up to be scalalable both in width and height. Bots move raw resources to a requester chest. Finished resources are moved to an active provider chest. The inserted is networked to only work when there are less then say one million a designated smelted item in the logistics network. This array is set up to augment the production lines copper, steel, and iron, and only kicks into gear when inventory of a specific resource falls below a certain point. When the forges kick into action, each forge has a 20% productivity boost, with 370% enhanced speed. I set this up to augment the main smelting lines for copper, iron, and steel. This example does not include the circuit network logic.

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Copy blueprint

Hiladdar

[herkalurk]

I set up something similar. It is set up to be scalalable both in width and height. Bots move raw resources to a requester chest. Finished resources are moved to an active provider chest. The inserted is networked to only work when there are less then say one million a designated smelted item in the logistics network. This array is set up to augment the production lines copper, steel, and iron, and only kicks into gear when inventory of a specific resource falls below a certain point. When the forges kick into action, each forge has a 20% productivity boost, with 370% enhanced speed. I set this up to augment the main smelting lines for copper, iron, and steel. This example does not include the circuit network logic.

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

Hiladdar

Do you have a few screenshots to share with the class ?

[Hiladdar]

Herkalurk

Here are to images. First shows the corner of the smelting array. Second shows how what the furnace is amped up to.

In intent on providing blueprint so that if others wanted to they could replicated in the game. Next step I am working on is to set it up so that I can control and dynamically change logistics network stockade level from one central location.

Hiladdar

[herkalurk]

What is the red logic line hooked up to?

[Aeternus]

Here's mine, extremely compressed. The pattern is repeatable for a heavily beaconed production modded smelter, no space wasted. Smelter speed factor is 5.4. My megabase runs on this design, usually in 24x24 clusters.

[herkalurk]

Here's mine, extremely compressed. The pattern is repeatable for a heavily beaconed production modded smelter, no space wasted. Smelter speed factor is 5.4. My megabase runs on this design, usually in 24x24 clusters.

What kind of production rates can you get with that? Overall I've produced upwards of 30K iron plate per minute.

[MeduSalem]

Looking at the designs... I start to wonder why people are abandoning the classic 8:8 machine to Beacon design.

I mean above layouts are all less efficient than something like that:

yxxNV1X.jpg (1.02 MiB) Viewed 15685 times

Really... you don't need to reinvent a less efficient wheel. People have come up with the most efficient designs years ago.

[Aeternus]

Here's mine, extremely compressed. The pattern is repeatable for a heavily beaconed production modded smelter, no space wasted. Smelter speed factor is 5.4. My megabase runs on this design, usually in 24x24 clusters.

What kind of production rates can you get with that? Overall I've produced upwards of 30K iron plate per minute.

Depends how wide you make your smelter. With 12 wagon trains (4 locs, monodirectional) for both ore in and smelted goods out I can reach upward of 60k/min on a 24 by 24 grid. With a lot of roboports integrated into the design there's no bot stalling. It requires about 2000 logistics bots to run smoothly. For steel you can extend it to 20 iron, 24 steel rows and make it 3000 bots. This outputs roughly 12000 steel per minute. This is sufficient to run a 1k sci/min facility including rockets on 2 copper (24x24), 1 steel (20x24 iron, 24x24 steel) and 1 iron cluster (24x24) provided you go full production mods. The main hassle is pushing ore in fast enough - the unloading stations and loading stations are best done with chests on both sides of the tracks, at least in vanilla.

It doesn't scale infinitely though. At about 72*72 the length the bots need to travel become too long to be effective, and you get bot pileups near the loading/unloading stations.

Medu: While that row based design is good for maximum speed, there's no bot charging stations included. If you need something upwards of 60k/min then bot traffic becomes an issue. Might not be as big an issue in bobs mods 'cause the modules go -much- higher, but for vanilla roboports are a must. And yea, you can just squeeze a row of roboports inbetween two rows of your design too, along with power, but is that that much more efficient then my design?
[Edit]
Okay, did some expirimenting just now. That interlaced design Medu suggests can reduce the amount of smelters needed by almost 40% but will require one and a half times as many beacons if you want to keep the roboports in there. If you've got power to burn and UPS is at a premium, it may be the better design - but that's gonna burn a LOT of power in those beacons. Instead of 24*24, you'd need 24*14 in the design below to meet 60K/min output (by vanilla count).

[Hiladdar]

Herkalurk,

I tweaked the logic circuit last night for better control of this array, so that I can change it from one location. All the stack inserters are connected by a a red wire. The red wire out of the array is connected to a decider combiner. The combiner is programed with "if STEEL < 100k, then output BLUE=1" Each of the stack inserters has the following condition, "if BLUE=1 then ENABLE=TRUE". The requester chest is set to request 4k iron plates. Since this is part of the main logistics area, as of this writing there are 8.5k logistics bots servicing this are as well as the main base.

I am using this to augment the two about lines of steel being produced in main area. This array has 6 lines, each line as 12 smelters. I am trying to set this up as a pull logistics package to augment steel production when consumption exceeds what the push can deliver.

I like the question of about the production rate / per minute, so I set up a test. What I did was cut all iron plates to the steel production, made sure that part of the factory was starved, and then cranked minimum amount from 100k to 1M for a few minutes. The array was producing up to 16k steel plates per minute, depending on what else the logistics bots were doing.

What I like about this set up, is that it automatically turns itself on and off, based on the factory demand. In retrospect, I think I can increase production, by replacing the stack inserter that puts the steel into the active provider chest with a fast inserter. I think the issue may be how quickly the iron plates can be shoved into the furnace and how fast the steel can be pulled out of the furnace.