belts, chests or bots for short-mid-long distance ?

[MaexxDesign]

Hello,

what's better for ups ?

short distance: belts, chests or bots ?
mid distance: belts, chests or bots ?
long distance: belts, chests or bots ?

[ptx0]

Hello,

what's better for ups ?

short distance: belts, chests or bots ?
mid distance: belts, chests or bots ?
long distance: belts, chests or bots ?

long distance, trains or belts without splitters/other interruptions.

med distance, belts without interruptions, or trains.

short distance, direct insertion.

[Premu]

There is no definite answer. Let's check the pros and cons of each method:

Trains:
++ massive capacity
+ capacity can be easily extended by adding more trains
- needs extensive infrastructure around it (stations and rails)
- not feasible to use for direct insertion to consumers

Belts:
+ Easy to handle with very forseeable behaviour
+ good capacity
+ earliest available transport method
+ doesn't need power or fuel at all
- long latency
- capacity can't be easily increased - after one point you need to build additional belts
- leads to some restrictions for designing the production

Bots:
++ Extremely flexible - allow for very compact designs
o capacity depending on amounts of bots - easily scalable
o initial speed is rather low, gets better with research
- moving time and bot behaviour can differ from your intentions if you your logistic network is set up in a wrong way
- only available pretty late in the game after signicant investions.

Crates and inserters:
+ easy to set up
- low capacity which can't be increased at all
- needs aa lot of power compared to the moved distances
- low transport speed

Based on these I recommend:

Trains are you number 1 choice for hauling large amount of cargo or long range transports. The shorter the distance or the smaller the amount of cargo the less feasible they become.

Belts are your obvious choice early on, and it's often easier to go along with them unless you completly redesign your factory. They are also great to distribute your products between your machines inside the factory, as they have a very reliable throughput which can be calculated in advance. They get clunky if the production set-up gets larger and larger, though, and you need a massive amount of belts to just provide the necessary material. They are also not a good choice for long range transport, as they are pretty expensive for that, especially if you also need more than one belt for that.

Bots are popular for mega factories for one reason -you can make scalable designs very easyly with them. Instead of having to feed a lot of belts to your machines which need to cross each other you just put down requester and provider chests. If logistic networks get too large they get unreliable, though, and may start to fly away too far to get new material. In some cases they might actually try "shortcuts" which they can't actually cross. So you should design bot based solutions with care! They are also not good for hauling a large amount of material on medium long ranges, as each bot can only carry few items and needs to recharge regularily on the path, leading to overcrowded bot ports. You can use bots for transporting small amount of goods on longer ranges, though, in case the source and the destination is in the same network - you save a lot of additional infrastructure compared to belts and trains.

Using inserters and crates to move items forward is not an efficient method. There might be some specific cases in which it could make sense - for example you want to store some of the intermediate product before processing it further in a crate (for example regular inserters before turning them into fast inserters). Otherwise just try to hand over the goods directl to the next machine if possible, or use a belt if producer and comsumer can't be placed side by side.

[ptx0]

they are asking specifically about UPS, and not playability.

[MaexxDesign]

they are asking specifically about UPS, and not playability.

That's right.

It's all about UPS.

Belts, chests or bots ?

[ptx0]

they are asking specifically about UPS, and not playability.

That's right.

It's all about UPS.

Belts, chests or bots ?

belts have a throughput limit that chests and bots might not if you have an infinite hand stack size mod for stack inserters.

bob's has this, for example. the inserters will grab more an more items from an inventory (assembler, train, chest) but they have to wait to scoop up items from a belt at 1 item per tick maximum.

if you're using vanilla, then you can probably just use belts and not be leaving throughput on the table. it's not the belt that uses a lot of CPU, it's the number of belt segments, and whether the entities using the belt are sleeping.

an inserter will sleep when it's trying to dump items onto a fully compressed belt, so long as it's backed up.

once the belt is no longer backed up - if items are moving, the inserter will be constantly awake trying to find an empty spot for the item. this is where inserter clocking comes in handy to reduce the activity so they are all only active long enough to dump a known number of items onto the belt in a single swing.

sushi belts are also bad because they typically have lots of splitters and inserters and many types of items flowing by will have the inserter constantly scanning for the proper items for whatever they're inserting into.

[DaveMcW]

Belts are incredibly optimized, and in recent versions they are multi-threaded too. Belts even beat trains unless they are thousands of tiles long.

tiny distance: (< 3 tiles): direct insert
short distance (< 5 tiles): chest
mid distance (< 3000 tiles): belt
long distance (3000+ tiles): train

Bots lose on UPS every time.