Factorio Forums

FasterJump wrote: Sat Aug 23, 2025 11:40 am An infinite research could allow to grab from closest cargo bay.
Level 1: can grab from cargo bays directly connected to the landing pad
Level 2: can grab from cargo bays connected to the ones enabled by level 1
Level 3: can grab from cargo bays connected to the ones enabled by level 1-2
Level 4: can grab from cargo bays connected to the ones enabled by level 1-3
Etc.

Or maybe allowing to connect more landing pads to the original would work better, as it would still be one large storage.

That’s pretty much what my latest mod in combination with Cargo Bay inserters implement

Cargo Bay Limit Research – adds research to control how many cargo bays can be used. (shameless plug )

Cargo Bay Inserters – adds capabiliy for inserters to interact with cargo bays. (by Quezler)

crimsonarmy wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 10:01 pm You still ignore that chests can give maximum throughput.

Um... no they can't. Unloading the landing pad into chests only allows you to have two inserters on each chest, which means the throughput is ultimately still constrained by the inserter unloading from the chest onto the belt. It is literally no different than unloading directly onto a belt from the landing pad.

The reason hacks like silos and tanks are an improvement is because they increase the surface area and allow you to have more inserters unloading onto belts than you have coming out of the pad. You can't do that with chests.

nzer wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 8:39 pm

crimsonarmy wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 10:01 pm You still ignore that chests can give maximum throughput.

Um... no they can't. Unloading the landing pad into chests only allows you to have two inserters on each chest, which means the throughput is ultimately still constrained by the inserter unloading from the chest onto the belt. It is literally no different than unloading directly onto a belt from the landing pad.

The reason hacks like silos and tanks are an improvement is because they increase the surface area and allow you to have more inserters unloading onto belts than you have coming out of the pad. You can't do that with chests.

They can: see the below image and blueprint (this design doesn't do maximum throughput but the concept could be expanded to)
Copy blueprint

nzer wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 8:39 pm

crimsonarmy wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 10:01 pm You still ignore that chests can give maximum throughput.

Um... no they can't. Unloading the landing pad into chests only allows you to have two inserters on each chest, which means the throughput is ultimately still constrained by the inserter unloading from the chest onto the belt. It is literally no different than unloading directly onto a belt from the landing pad.

The reason hacks like silos and tanks are an improvement is because they increase the surface area and allow you to have more inserters unloading onto belts than you have coming out of the pad. You can't do that with chests.

Yes and no , chest are faster than belts, but slower than tanks imo, this is because when transfering from "chest to chest" the transfer speed is faster than "chest to belt", but if you are using tanks or cars, you can use "more" inserters around the landing pad.

crimsonarmy wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:17 pm They can: see the below image and blueprint (this design doesn't do maximum throughput but the concept could be expanded to)

That's a good design for chest only, but i believe nzer was refering to more cursed techniques like :
Instead of having only 1 row of inserter around the landing, you can use 2 !

Honestly, +1 for this

A promethium science tier research to get more landing pads would be a very good quality of life upgrade. Promethium science is pretty underwhelming, so having some sort of end game benefits on it would be pretty nice.

I ended up with something like this and this pretty much maxes the possible output of the pad as far as I can tell, I could only add some red inserters, but that would only give me half of stack inserter per wagon which is just pointless.
Some notes from earlier posts

- You could plop a pad next to you and call down the items instead of flying back to base to pickup them for construction purposes
You already can do this, for most planets you don't actually need to import anything of substance: Vulcanus needs nothing, Fulgora needs nothing, Gleba maybe benefits from calcium for liquid metals and tungsten for artillery, but its a minor thing. The only planets that actually must import stuff are Nauvis and Aquilo. But you don't see people running around with Vulcanus's landing pad around, which suggest that imho, this use case would be very minor.

- You could export stuff to orbit and then import somewhere else on same planet
Aside from the fact that ships don't drop stuff that they are also requesting, you could just use a train to do same in more efficient and probably faster manner.

- It is desired to centralize factories around the landing pad
I mean, possibly? But it would still happen if you had a limited amount of landing pads.


As for the unsolved issue of where the manual drops from orbit should land, just have a button in the landing pad gui like "Make this the default landing pad"