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Somewhere around 1000 bots and about full bot science upgrades I decided to test the effectiveness of a no belts base. An alternate save of my base, some more bots being built, more power to the grid, and poof. Who needs belts? Not this guy!

First up was the furnaces. I killed the old inline furnace and designed a little modular framework. I used Green inserters as the furnace output set to Iron Plate < 20k. Active Provider Chests were used on the outputs. I found that the bots actually liked to move the plate to storage chests closer to where it was needed rather than the chests I planned nearby. This actually worked out VERY well. The Requester chests asked for 100 ore which seemed a nice balance between not running empty and not over stuffing.


Here is my whole Iron Furnace


I have a smaller one of these making steel, and a 50+ furnace running copper. Essentially all setup the same way.

I found that feeding 30 some odd active chests worked better with more Passive Provider chests so my Ore Belts dumped into this little system close by. I learned quickly that the queuing of bots to pickup and deliver was directly impacted by the number of (read lack of) passive chests they could choose from.

Notice this is 6 inserters per side on blue belt. This does a fair job of emptying two compressed blue belts into chests and fits the footprint of one sub-station.

For reference here is the rest of my base. I know...the ratios are all botched. I am also still moving things around. You can see near the top I've gotten much neater and bot friendly. Incidentally My Storage Chests are located in 3 areas. Above my Iron Furnace, Above my Copper Furnace, And a larger set around the small pond in the middle of my base.


Biters are on and bases are BIG so i have lots of eco friendly power. LOTS of Solar


Hope you enjoy!

Interesting, I am also working on a no-belt base. I posted my red circuit in the show your builds thread, some other designs:

Nice stuff there. I've been thinking of adding Bot Mining. It seems low volume really and could be single networks at each ore location or tied to the primary network. I like to do that anywhere by chaining bot stations anyway. I have mixed emotions about copper cable though. I feel like its so much unnecessary bot bandwidth to move so much cable such short distances...or maybe I'm wrong and it should be produced on the scale of plate.

My philosophy is that bots produce input and output for clusters of assembly plants which use inserters between them. See my red circuit plant below, the bots feed it copper, plastic and green circuits, and the output of the central copper wire plant is inserter directly into the red plants. The added benefit or direct insertion is that you keep the stack bonus, although it's not as useful here.
Another example is the logistics chest plant above, where the bots supply steel and circuits, and the steel chest -> smart chest -> logistic chests chain is made with direct insertion between the plants.