Factorio Forums

Greetings everyone, first off I'd like to congratulate on the indiegogo campaign going well, I'm very happy to see that this game will continue full time development!

Now, onto my suggestion.
I had two new types on transport belts in mind, I understand that playing with the transport belts is part of the challenge, and these new ideas may make it easier, too easy according to some.

But before you say "Nah, it'll make it too easy", please take a moment to reflect upon my beautiful paint drawings.

Belt A

This belt is designed to allow you to move all the items on a belt over to one side, instead of doing to weird intersections we do now, forcing items onto one side of the belt.
It's simply a concept we all use at this time, but packed into a little more elegant, and less space consuming way.

Belt B

I don't have a fancy name for this, so I'll call it the splitter belt.
The belt itself is of course 1x1 to fit with the rest of your system (what's within the grey square), I did draw a few belts connected to it to show how it works.
What is allows you to do is splitting up the resources on the two sides of the belt onto two separate belts, this too is doable already, using filter inserters, but again this seems like a more natural, simpler, less space consuming idea.

Both of these belts may seem redundant, as their functions can already be done, but I like the idea of having different belts, and these make it seem more like the way transport belts are really used.

Belt A is very easily done with just belts, this piece would probably be too specialised.

Belt B is other story, and we have been seriously thinking about that, this is easily done with filter inserter (as you almost always have different predictable types of stuff on these belts), but yes, having it as belt piece would be nicer anyway.

PS. One piece is already ready for the next release, it is called splitter, and it does something different, it splits the incoming stuff into 2 belts 1:1.

Yeah, I figured A might be too much.

But I'm happy to hear more are going to be added anyway

I was gonna post the same suggestion!

Good news that some sort of Splitter is under work. Make things more classy
than a inserter putting items on a second item.
But I imagined the same splitter working great with another improvement:
the Pusher: smart ones would push a specified sort of items on the second
line of the seatbelt.

I know u can do that with smart inserters but that would help to diversify and improve
out factories!

Magnetic Separators are used a lot in real life factories
to put metallic items on a second floor seatbelt but that would require
much more coding

IMO improving the seatbelts transport is a very important step
to improve a factory.

Keep in the good work!

the irony is that my main use for the splitter belt is to merge 2 lanes....... if nothing moves out of one side then it all heads out the other, which makes a MUCH cleaner merge than having one conveyor hit the side of the other

Dakkanor wrote:the irony is that my main use for the splitter belt is to merge 2 lanes....... if nothing moves out of one side then it all heads out the other, which makes a MUCH cleaner merge than having one conveyor hit the side of the other

Good to know. thanks.

Dakkanor wrote:the irony is that my main use for the splitter belt is to merge 2 lanes....... if nothing moves out of one side then it all heads out the other, which makes a MUCH cleaner merge than having one conveyor hit the side of the other

It actually cost us several hours of discussion to make the piece usable in more ways while keeping it simple

kovarex wrote:

Dakkanor wrote:the irony is that my main use for the splitter belt is to merge 2 lanes....... if nothing moves out of one side then it all heads out the other, which makes a MUCH cleaner merge than having one conveyor hit the side of the other

It actually cost us several hours of discussion to make the piece usable in more ways while keeping it simple

And for that i am grateful, usually after a merge there is one side that's too full and the other is empty, which bothers me to the point that i make an inserter-sorter to even it all out

[necroing] Kovarex said, won't implement.