Factorio Forums

Hi,
according to the wiki (or ingame), Coal Liquefaction uses 10 coal and the recipe runs for 5s. So a red belt (30 items/s) should be able to supply 15 refineries. Yet I am unable to run more than 11 Refinieries off a red belt.

Where am I wrong?

theolderbeholder wrote: Tue Sep 09, 2025 5:59 pm Hi,
according to the wiki (or ingame), Coal Liquefaction uses 10 coal and the recipe runs for 5s. So a red belt (30 items/s) should be able to supply 15 refineries. Yet I am unable to run more than 11 Refinieries off a red belt.

Where am I wrong?

Is the red belt completely full? It might only have 22 or more items/s of coal on it, despite having a total capacity of 30 items/s.

Your math is right, but you need to describe the actual problem more clearly, or post a savegame. Are the refineries running out of coal, or steam, or input oil, or not running for some other reason? Are you sure the belt is fully compressed? Are your inserters fast enough? Did you let it run long enough to reach steady state? etc.

It works 100% correctly with 15 refineries running off a red coal belt in the editor.

Vulcanus, one green belt coming out of a green balancer and is then halved into two red ones, each feeding 15 refineries. As per screenshot, coal is depleted around the eleveth refinery.

My gues would be that the spliters are triping you up. The inserters will pull from the top lane while the bottom lane will backup and prevent new coal from flowin in to that lane. So the througput of the red belt is artificialy reduced.

Try pulling directly from the belt without the spliters (long handed inserters or rerouting the belt).

Your green belt is definitely not saturated.

It would be really weird for that one red belt to be mostly concentrated in its left lane, and you can see on the green belt that the left lane looks thicker than the right lane.

To balance the lanes, rather than take one green belt out of that green splitter, take two green belts out and have them meet in a T-intersection to create one green belt out whose lanes are fed evenly, which should get you the full throughput you're looking for. (if there's actually enough coal entering your balancer)

theolderbeholder wrote: Wed Sep 10, 2025 8:25 am
Vulcanus, one green belt coming out of a green balancer and is then halved into two red ones, each feeding 15 refineries. As per screenshot, coal is depleted around the eleveth refinery.

One side of your belts are not saturated. I'd run your mine's outputs into four 2 belt lane balancers then do an 8:1 green belt balancer or 8:2 red belt balancer. It'd be easier to tell why if we could see the mine, though, but even from the pic we can see some miners are starting to deplete.

Yep, probably the balancer. Which is the design I used for the past eight years
The depleting mines are just on the fringe of the coal field and don't go into the balancer, but "on top" of another line. There curently are 5 red belts fully compressed (the last mines on each belt don't produce due to "output full") going into the green balancer, I had assumed this would yield two green belts of output behind the balancer.

Obviously not. Anyone got a nice design which works even with less than 100% input?

it's hard to see, and it might be an artefact caused by zooming, but could that be a blue belt in between green belts?

nethus wrote: Thu Sep 11, 2025 8:46 am it's hard to see, and it might be an artefact caused by zooming, but could that be a blue belt in between green belts?

It is. *facepalm