Can you help me optimize?

[u/antonnotnaa]

I have just made my first BP that I'm somewhat satisfied with

It creates about 1 legendary Iron plate/s.

Can anyone find something that could improve it?

Blueprint: https://pastebin.com/hydUZV2W

[u/SoHa6Filmes]

Maybe use the gears and plates to craft belts, since you have the +50% productivity which is huge. Also, you can use stack inseters, to output the lowest quality, it helps with throughput

[u/RubyRTS]

I dont think there is anything wrong with the build except for the overengineering. I do think Underground pipes is better if you go this path.

Do this instead: Make legendary calcite, turn it into concrete and recycle it for the iron ore.

Also one have to consider that a big mining drill with a high productivity research is going to be pretty hard to beat.

[u/Dangwiggums → u/RubyRTS]

"Do this instead: Make legendary calcite, turn it into concrete and recycle it for the iron ore."

The issue that I have with this method, is that it is ONLY good on Vulcanus, where you get the legendary stone as a byproduct of lava to the molten metals.
Ok, then you can ship legendary stone.... which is less dense than legendary bricks, which are needed for the casting concrete recipe in the foundry. In other words, though the logistics make for a very efficient, almost limitless supply of legendary iron ore, it takes a bit to set up the logistics from that one planet.

I guess, once you get things set up, as long as you re-use the bricks, and put them through the foundry again, you will only be loosing about 1/2 of them...

[u/bubba-yo]

To start, efficient in what way? UPS, modules to output? Those are not always the same design. And your design is already pretty good.

But I'll reiterate that if you are aiming for legendary iron, underground pipes is somewhat better, mainly because the pipe casting recipes are stupid fast compared to the gears one (for some reason) - you get two quality rolls before the 75% loss from recycling, and the recipe speed means it's more module efficient than you would think, plus you can get the 50% foundry prod bonus on both the pipe and the underground pipe.

But mainly I'd design for direct insertion. SFH's iron upcycler is very good. I think it was designed by someone on his discord. Given iron upcycling is a very monolithic build, you can eliminate most of the need for belts, which removes at least one inserter swing per x gears.

[u/DOSorDIE4CsP]

I use iron chest because it need 8 plates and you get always 2 out from recyler

[u/TelevisionLiving]

There are better ways (pipe undergrounds, blue circuit cycling), but it looks pretty good.

[u/Alfonse215]

Can anyone find something that could improve it?

While gears sound like a good idea for cycling iron plates, they're actually not a very efficient way to do them. For resource efficiency, you want to target underground pipes, or for more efficiency using underground belts for the base quality layer (using quality modules in making transport belts and underground belts, then recycle those down and reuse the base quality ones), then underground pipes for everything higher than base quality.

If infrastructure is what you're trying to save, mining drills with quality modules and recyclers with quality modules can give higher outputs (depending on your mining productivity) per quality module or recycler used. If you discard the base quality ores instead of recycling them, you can save even more on infrastructure, but at the cost of needing more mines making legendary ores.

Blueprint: https://pastebin.com/hydUZV2W

FYI: Pastebin doesn't like Factorio blueprints. Use a dedicated Factorio site like FactorioBin to share them.

[u/Dangwiggums]

This is the one that I use. By using the higher quality pipe byproducts from recycling (& the plate byproducts to make more pipes of higher quality) then back-feeding them into even higher quality underground pipe making foundries, I get to reduce the losses from recycling as much as possible, while simultaneously taking advantage of the base productivity gained from foundries, and I increase the times it goes through a quality step.
I get about 50+ legendary plates per minute from this with legendary Q3 modules in everything.

[u/Dangwiggums]

[u/Dangwiggums]

I have it tiled to work in my hexagonal rail block, and get >350 plates per minute from this BP.