Factorio Forums

Hey guys

I have 2 belts side loading onto a single belt providing copper and iron plate for a science pack automatic production line, both lanes of the side belts being used. The problem I am having is when the single production line belt is full only one lane from each side feeder is moving onto the single production line because there is always an iron or copper plate blocking the other lane. Is there a way to solve this short of reducing the amount of copper and iron plates being produced/used?

Thanks

Just build the second belt.

Hi Ouroboruss,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're describing is when your side-feeder belt, that has items on both sides, only feeds from one of its sides onto a belt, because that belt only needs an occasional item..... Right?

As far as I know, there's nothing you can do about that really... If anyone has a solution for that (perhaps some circuit magic), that would be very interesting.

Try just putting a green wire between two belt segments near the end of the belt feeding from the side. It probably won't be *perfect*, but I think you should be able to set it up so it disables one segment as long as there's more than one or two items on the segment in front of it. Haven't tried it but I expect when it enables it'll move items in pairs which should basically give you what you want.

this will give you balanced 'side loading'.
it will take from both halves of both belts.
mind the direction of the half used undergound belts. (R to rotate)

impetus maximus wrote:mind the direction of the half used undergound belts. (R to rotate)

To clarify, you can press R while hovering cursor over an already placed underground belt to reverse its direction (into underground VS out from underground).

Yoyobuae wrote: To clarify, you can press R while hovering cursor over an already placed underground belt to reverse its direction (into underground VS out from underground).

yes, thanks.

impetus maximus wrote:this will give you balanced 'side loading'.
it will take from both halves of both belts.

balanced.side.loading2.png

mind the direction of the half used undergound belts. (R to rotate)

Wow, took me a minute to understand what this was doing. Is that what the original poster was looking for? I have plenty of mixed belts and never worried about this.

i think the OP (welcome to the forums BTW!) was talking about how it was only taking from half a belt when side loading.
"only one lane from each side feeder is moving onto the single production line"

Mr. Tact wrote: I have plenty of mixed belts and never worried about this.

There are, in my experience, two frequent situations where it matters. (Edit: I take back the first one, on consideration I realized that it's wrong. The second reason is still valid though.) The first is when you want to drive two different side-loaded belts from one single full belt. You only get full throughput if you draw evenly from both sides of the source belt. The second case is where you don't want to scale your production out beyond what your consumers need but your build is such that half of your producers are dropping only on one side of the belt (due to inserter behaviour) so you need to re-balance the demand across both sides evenly.