Stacked Belts should be their own item.

[whitecold]

TL;DR

The stacked belts should be their own set of belt, splitters and undergrounds, instead of depending on inserters.

What ?

The belts shown in FFF 393 should be their own set of items, that are dedicated to the purpose, with all inserters that have a stack capacity greater than one able to place on them. This would make the poorly named bulk/stack inserter redundant.
When transitioning from a stacked belt to a flat one, (or from a higher stack limit to a lower stack limited belt) the stacked one would back up and send smaller packets on down the belt.

Why ?

There are several issues with the currently shown idea:

• It feels weird to get a massive improvement for belts without having to manufacture any new belts, but instead inserters. It feels like improving inserters, not belts. In case of miners, you may get the bonus entirely with research, without any new infrastructure being built, which feels just odd.
• The cost difference of stacked vs non stacked belts is now entirely constant as it depends only on inserters, with no scaling with distance. This entirely disincentivizes ever using flat belts again when enough room is available, contrary to belt tiers, where it is usually cheaper to lay down multiple belts when you have the space available. Broad belt arrays are cool, so lets leave in a reason to use them, and make the fancy new belts appropriately expensive (aka more than twice a regular belt of their speed would cost). This would also allow for some optimizations of taking flat belts and re-stacking them into a stacked one, instead of just always using stacked ones.
• While factorio isn't strictly logical, it is very strange why inserters can move stacks between chests, assemblers, trains and belts, unloading in one go, except in the very specific instance of the belt, which now suddenly needs a special inserter to do the same trick that already works in every other case. This is quite hard to explain, and also confusing, since there are still quite some stack limits around. All inserters have them, not just the old stack inserters, and nobody will talk of a bulk limit. This can be all avoided by making it a property of a belt. You need a special belt to place a stack on it is very intuitive and does not need complicated word and name twisting.
• The graphics just don't look quite as good as flat belts, and surely could be improved by having entities that are designed for stacks. For example, in this clip the ore does not fit into the underground belt. By using dedicated graphics it would be possible to make the splitters a bit taller, add maybe some side supports on the belts to keep the stacks from falling. The undergrounds could also be made longer, even into 1x2 entities, to make them a more unique thing with its unique challenges.
• Such a massive upgrade applied to any and all belts without any possibility of differentiation allows for little granularity, and while it may just work for SE, mods would certainly love to get more control over belt stack limits than a flat one for any and all belts.

Using dedicated belts would be clearer, easier to understand, and allow for better graphic polish to make the stacked belts look as good as regular belts, without having to touch the current graphics.

[FuryoftheStars]

I kind of agree with this.

Personally, I would've done a setup where items get "packaged", then placed onto a special, single lane belt for transport. The "packaging" machine could be a simple belt to belt entity of some type (if you want to have it described in terms of what modders can do, it'd be a loader taking from a belt to an assembler with another loader offloading it to a belt), and some entities (like the new large miner) would have the ability to package and offload directly. (I realize this may not be for everyone.)

Based on some earlier FFFs, I'm guessing the devs did things the way they did simply because they were trying to minimize the number of new entities, recipes, etc.

[aka13]

I consider everything you mention a positive, not a negative. I think that such "in-place" upgrades and bonusses are way more fun, than having to iteratively rebuild stuff on top of stuff.
It's a really cool thing, that all your belts acquire hidden new cool functionality on top of them.

[camela_camera]

we need less types of items, not more

[mcmase]

This 1000%

I know this FFF came up some time ago, but I hadn't browsed the forums in a while. This is exactly why I felt the bulk/stack inserters were strange, felt strange, and looked strange, but I was unable to articulate.

Having the upgrade to a belt makes way more sense to me, its something you must upgrade your entire infrastructure rather than plopping down a new inserter. It also seems appropriate to make it one lane, and to have some slightly varied graphics (thinking a belt of "buckets" or "bins" maybe to carry things in their stack). This would essentially be the highest tier of belt but be prohibitively expensive to require a late game build, but the highest throughput. Might even replace the 4th tier of belts, which, in my opinion, are really too fast to cooperate well with a player building who inevitably will make a mistake (dreading the day when I get items mixed up on a 4th tier belt by accident.)

Anyway, I don't know the expansion schedule or if this could even feasibly be changed at this point. I'm sure many players (and probably the devs) would disagree with this concept. I, however, think this solves every concern I have with the upcoming belt/inserter changes, and for me would be a vast improvement!

[MeduSalem]

I would only favor "stack belts" to be their own thing if... IF... they would do that instead of the nausea-inducing additional green tier of belts.

Then the green tier could be the "stack belt".

I would make that one as fast as blue, but with the benefits that you can stack items on top of it.



Anyway adding more than 1 additional set I would not welcome. Because that is the reason I gave up on particular mods already; it gets tiresome.

[mcmase]

I would only favor "stack belts" to be their own thing if... IF... they would do that instead of the nausea-inducing additional green tier of belts.

Then the green tier could be the "stack belt".

I would make that one as fast as blue, but with the benefits that you can stack items on top of it.



Anyway adding more than 1 additional set I would not welcome. Because that is the reason I gave up on particular mods already; it gets tiresome.

I agree and suggested that above. The new green belts are too fast for me, and it never felt necessary to go faster than blue.

Meanwhile stacking across all belts feels strange and I also don't like the aesthetic nor gameplay feel.

This solution solves both of those problems and I cannot overstate how much I think belt stacking needs a change that makes it feel like a separate thing from regular belts.

[mrvn]

In case of miners, you may get the bonus entirely with research, without any new infrastructure being built, which feels just odd.

Will small electric miners ever produce stacks? Don't you get stacked ore only with the big miners? In that case only new infrastructure would get stacked ores and there would be another incentive to build big miners.

[gabrielpvc@gmail.com]

The reasoning behind the suggesiton feels a bit arbitrary. You argue that a bonus entirely from research and no infrastructure is odd, but you have not articulated why it is odd. I personnaly never felt any oddity coming from the existing researches that provide bonuses.

To me it feels fairly intuitive to have a "packaging inserter" which makes use of the existing belts better, and it doesn't feel very intuitive to me for the belt itself be suitable for stacks or not. The thing doing the stacking is not the belt, and I see no reason why existing belts wouldn't be able to transport the stacks. Is the stack too heavy for the belt? Does the stack require a less jittery belt to not fall over? What would be an intuitive reasoning behind the restricton?

The argument that the transportation of the stacks should scale in price with distance feels arbitrary. While the increased price per distance would be understandable as a player, I don't see any reason why this extra price would be missed if absent.

But I do agree that that graphic of the stack going underground will need a slight adjustment to not look broken.

[FuryoftheStars]

The reasoning behind the suggesiton feels a bit arbitrary. You argue that a bonus entirely from research and no infrastructure is odd, but you have not articulated why it is odd. I personnaly never felt any oddity coming from the existing researches that provide bonuses.

To me it feels fairly intuitive to have a "packaging inserter" which makes use of the existing belts better, and it doesn't feel very intuitive to me for the belt itself be suitable for stacks or not. The thing doing the stacking is not the belt, and I see no reason why existing belts wouldn't be able to transport the stacks. Is the stack too heavy for the belt? Does the stack require a less jittery belt to not fall over? What would be an intuitive reasoning behind the restricton?

So, to me, having these belts as is looks... unstable?... with stacks. To me, having specialized equipment for stacking is fine and great, but I feel like it should be to a specialized belt meant for transporting something stacked and thus would be maybe slightly wider and looking like it has rails or safety walls to keep everything in (if stacking is left as is), or alternatively have the "stacks" be actual packages that than get placed on specialized single lane belts that can only take these packages (the packages on these single lane belts, when compared to the regular belts, would look to be big enough to cover both lanes on a dual lane belt and would hold at minimum a proportionately increased number of items).

That said, the devs were going for a minimal number of new added entities and the like (which is kind of sad (not in the mean, derogatory definition)), so I doubt anything like this will get added.

The argument that the transportation of the stacks should scale in price with distance feels arbitrary. While the increased price per distance would be understandable as a player, I don't see any reason why this extra price would be missed if absent.

I must of missed that because I don't think there should be any distance related costs, either. I mean, I could see the belts themselves being more expensive, as that would simply make sense with having a dedicated belt for the purpose (and it being a later tech unlock), but that'd be it.

[Tohim]

I do like & agree with this idea, but other criticisms of it considered, I also agree that the only good way to implement it would be via replacing the role of the new Green belt. That said, I like that idea a great deal in itself; Rather than having a belt that goes faster than 45 item/second(which many players seem to be greatly off-put by to begin with), You simply have the new belt be 45 items/s & capable of stacking. Thus gives you the Stack Transport Belt, analogous to what is still currently the Stack Inserter both in practice and color. How novel! To that end, it would also be nice to have alternate sprites/sizes of accessory buildings likes Splitters and Undergrounds to accommodate for the added height/size of their contents - I'm thinking taller-looking Splitters, maybe even bigger, too? Perhaps 3x1 or 2x2 in size instead; Same for the Undergrounds: they could be 2x1 each. Bulkier belt infrastructure for bulkier cargo! Makes for another interesting logistical design challenge element to balance out the huge gain in throughput.

[mrvn]

The reasoning behind the suggesiton feels a bit arbitrary. You argue that a bonus entirely from research and no infrastructure is odd, but you have not articulated why it is odd. I personnaly never felt any oddity coming from the existing researches that provide bonuses.

To me it feels fairly intuitive to have a "packaging inserter" which makes use of the existing belts better, and it doesn't feel very intuitive to me for the belt itself be suitable for stacks or not. The thing doing the stacking is not the belt, and I see no reason why existing belts wouldn't be able to transport the stacks. Is the stack too heavy for the belt? Does the stack require a less jittery belt to not fall over? What would be an intuitive reasoning behind the restricton?

The argument that the transportation of the stacks should scale in price with distance feels arbitrary. While the increased price per distance would be understandable as a player, I don't see any reason why this extra price would be missed if absent.

But I do agree that that graphic of the stack going underground will need a slight adjustment to not look broken.

He mend the fact that miners will stack ore. If the normal electric miner suddenly start doing that when you research "packing inserter" then that is indeed a bit odd. There was no talk about specific stacking miners entities that you would have to place or upgrade.

[FasterJump]

I don't share OP views. I like the idea of unlocking stack/bulk inserter as presented in the FFF (and without having to replace 1438 belt segments in my base).

What would be the point of having to manually replace each belt by their "stack-compatible" counterpart? We already do it from yellow to red to blue (to green).

What's wrong with belts being compatible with stack/bulk inserters natively as soon as stack/bulk inserters are researched?

To answer to OP's point:
It doesn't feels weird to me, it feels awesome.
The cost of machines doesn't matter, what matter is the base design (resource flow design). There is already more interesting resource sinks than belt segment construction: infinite research and quality machines/modules.
Analogy: If you have 10 cards, you can put them on a table as 1 pile of 10 or as 10 piles of 1. How you lay it down depends on your hands, not the table itself.
You've got a point about the underground belt... Maybe just make the underground belt graphic 2 pixels taller?
Granularity: Having 2 belt types instead of one would not change anything to the base design. After the belt is built and functional, it doesn't change anything if it's named "belt" or "stack belt". You don't need 8 different items to have 8 ways of using them. You can have just 4 items that can be used together is 2 different ways (4 x 2 = 8), combining them makes it interesting. Just like our keyboard doesn't have 170,000 keys, 100 to 150 keyboard keys are enough to type over 170,000 different words. Having only 26 letters doesn't make English an uninteresting language, just like having 3 colors (RGB) doesn't make images lack granularity).

This is only my opinion, and your point of view is valid too. Having a different belt item specifically for stacks/bulks would works, but I personally don't prefer it.

[Illiander42]

Personally, I still wish we'd got native crating instead of belt stacking, because that adds more logistics to handle.

[gabrielpvc@gmail.com]

He mend the fact that miners will stack ore. If the normal electric miner suddenly start doing that when you research "packing inserter" then that is indeed a bit odd. There was no talk about specific stacking miners entities that you would have to place or upgrade.

Yes, I agree with this. To make it make sense you either need a specialized belt, some sort of "bucket belt" where several buckets attached to the belt can be filled, which would also make it more coherent to stack non rectangular things such as ore, stone and sand, which doesn't feel stackable without a bucket. The stacked ore also didn't really look very good on the preview, as it looks way too much like cardbord cut outs of pictures of ore on top of eachother instead of actual ore.

Following this logic, the stacker inserter would still be able to stack things such as plates and circuits, but not things such as ore without a "bucket belt".

Alternatively, there could be a special miner which spews out "stackable ore". On real life there are processes to make ore easier to transport, and it usually involve heating it up a bit and compressing into a specific shape.

Following this logic, the belts would remain the same, but you would be able to stack any stackable thing using a special inserter or a modified miner which compresses the ore and stacks it before moving it into the belt. Things such as sand, however, would never be stackable.

Both alternatives are not incompatible with eachother, you could have "bucket belts" to stack sand and stuff and also have processes to make things stackable into normal belts.

Making stackable things more clearly stackable, such as making steel plates more plate like, would make things more visually intuitive. And for the buckets, making it represented by different levels of "fill" would be way better than using the normal item images.

Adittionally, for unstackable things such as sand, it would be very nice if belts could be elevated and dumped unto their destination by a small ramp, instead of requiring inserters. It is very silly to fill a train with send by using an arm and picking the sand bit by bit. I know there are already mods for this but they tend to use a small dog house instead of a small ramp, which to me looks less nice.

[mrvn]

There could be different icons for stacked things. For ores and sand the icons could be a piles of different size. For steel the icons would look more like steel next to each other instead of on top. Steel is so heavy that a few beams are a lot already and just one layer of beams is plenty for a truck to handle. No need to go vertical.