New Hope Level 2 - Backed up smelting

[RainbowCrane]

Hello,

I'm on level 2 of the New Hope campaign and I'm having issues dealing with the volume of ore once I access the mining outposts, partly due to the backlog at the outposts and partly because I probably didn't do a good job planning my base. I have 3 lines of 10 furnaces (mostly steel, some still stone) doing iron, one of those iron lines being redirected to steel. Another line of 10 is doing copper.

I was careful with not overbuilding before heading out to the stations because I dug a resource hole for myself the first time I started - I was unable to manufacture rail because I used up my resources on research, overbuilding combat items to clear out biters I probably didn't need to clear, etc. Am I just going to have to deal with an idle unemptied train for a while while I now focus on building up smelting, or is there a better way to plan ahead so I have capacity when the cars start coming in? Seeing all that unprocessed ore is freaking me out .

On a related note, in order to efficiently empty rail cars and do processing is it better to create multiple "main lines" of raw ore heading to the smelter so that there isn't one trunk line backed up with ore? With 6 inserters/car emptying into boxes, then 6 inserters from those boxes to the line, the inserters for the later boxes never seem to get a chance to empty their box. What's the proper way to pull from the 6 rail car box buffers to keep all inserters functional on a red belt?

Thanks,
RainbowCrane

[Deadly-Bagel]

In Factorio it is very difficult to find a balance between production and consumption. Typically (except for some purpose built factories) you won't be producing everything all the time so the consumption of resources can vary greatly, especially when you're still building the factory. Therefore having a whole train full of ore is actually a good thing, it means you've overproduced it and you won't have to worry about adding miners or anything for a while.

For multiple "main lines", you only need to add more when one belt is not capable of transporting the amount of ore you need. This means they are completely full of ore (no gaps) but the ore is moving at full speed, and you still don't have enough iron being smelted. Typically in a freeplay game I aim for 4-5 blue belts of iron ore going to the furnaces.

For unloading from the train, there are many solutions. I find the fun in Factorio is coming up with your own, but it helps to have some pointers. Try to use splitters to evenly distribute the six lanes, if you get stuck you can look up solutions (eg "6 to 1 splitter") but generally the trick for splitting belts in odd numbers is to loop an output back to an input. For example a 3 to 1 splitter, use splitters to merge four inputs to two outputs and loop the extra output to the extra input.

Anyway that ensures the chests are unloaded evenly which has a few benefits but to be honest it's a bit of an elitist strategy. If your train is bringing ore faster than it's being unloaded then either way you won't have a problem.

[RainbowCrane]

Thanks for the tips Deadly-Bagel. I'm playing a random map on peaceful mode right now to try to learn more about belt routing, balancing, etc. I'll play with things more there where I don't have to worry about biter issues and figure out my solution for rail car unloading and how smelting works best for me.

I noticed while watching a Lets Play that one thing to do with rail cars that stop at multiple loading depots is to ensure that each resource loaded at each depot has a bit of space reserved in the car, I'll need to remember to do that next time. One of my issues was that the car was full of iron ore and couldn't load copper, which was my real problem. If I'm backed up on iron ore I suppose it doesn't matter if the rail car rides around half full of iron, as long as I've left space for everything else . Live and learn.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Yeah that would be a problem if you're using mixed wagons, though typically in freeplay you would have dedicated trains for iron and copper. That way they can run independently, just as long as your rail network is solid so they don't keep crashing into each other =P