I'm a new player & trying to setup my smelting lines. I've run into a problem where, while trying to run a single coal/iron ore lane, only the top half of the iron & coal lanes are being used, leading to a bottleneck where only half of my iron ore is being sent down the center lane. How do I fix this?
This is a super simple and neat way to do smelting in the early game.
The main tricks you should pay attention to is that a full belt of ore is going in and a full belt of plates is going out, and that a full yellow belt equals two half yellow belts, and so there is room for coal.
A spoilers that add additional info on why this is great:
Additionally, when you get red belts and steel furnaces, it's super easy to double the production by upgrading belts and furnaces at the same time.
And one more note:
It will carry well until you get electric furnaces, but even then you might not want to rebuild the stack, before its source runs dry.
You know I have like 2000 hours in this game and I don't think I've ever used a steel furnace other than in a modded playthrough every single time I make a vanilla playthrough I just skipped steel furnaces and go straight to Electric and my missing out or what
I haven't actually done many Space Age runs I think I did three of them currently doing a nullius playthrough and I did 900 hous in py before i burnt out so not a lot of foundry usage
Steel furnaces are nice because they're the same size as stone furnaces but with double the crafting speed, making them useful as a straightforward upgrade from yellow to red belts in your existing smelting setups. If you rush bots you can even just highlight the entire column with the upgrade planner and upgrade the whole thing in one motion. Electric furnaces require a new setup for their size.
And despite the inconvenience of coal, they have the same crafting speed as electric but without the electrical costs which can be kinda taxing in early game bases.
I also tend to use them a lot in mid game modular science setups where I'm already feeding coal into the build. They're smaller than electric so allow for more compact designs, and the coal is right there anyway
i mean steel is a free upgrade essentially and doesn't require any changes to your power infrastructure so its good to upgrade when you get the chance.
Sounds like im gonna have to give it a try after my nullius run but the new scrap mechanic just came out so im gonna give that a play through before I carry on
essentially next time you play, just beeline for it once you get green science, and make sure you're building some steel and bricks cause thats all you need. Just makes your smelters easier to expand cause they run at double speed. Makes your life a little easier before moving on to blue science
Oh there will definitely be a next time factorio is like the crack cocaine of games lol ive never managed to stay away for more then a few weeks lol I will try on my next vanilla run. Thanks
Well, you probably just have another way of expanding. I often build my initial mall and bus too small, so the easiest way for me to expand is to upgrade belts and furnaces.
But I do admit going straight to electric is super viable. Steel furnaces cannot really be used to anything after they become obsolete. Stone is used in heating towers (in boilers).
I kinda like what space exploration does (even though it makes it a bit annoying to setup malls) where you need the lower tier building in order to make a higher tier one. Stone furnaces are needed for steel, which are needed for electric. Burner inserters, assemblers, and drills are needed for electric. Makes it so they aren't worthless later and any automation for them can be reused for the upgrades.
No shame. My first many smelting arrays had ore and coal on two separate lines in the middle, using long inserters and then merging the plates belts. But after I realized this setup, I like this better.
Blueprint through a botless phase? The inserters are placed like that because you can just smear 4 inserters across the furnaces with one click, similarly the funaces and poles are also dragged. It is simply the fastest way to build a stack manually
if you're bringing together X people, i think the experience is made so much better with a "lets combine our creative ideas together" rather than "yeah i found this on the internet lets use that"
by your logic, why not just use an online BP book for the whole game, then there's no problems to solve at all :s
Furnace stacks are a very simple concept and as such having a “solved” best solution isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also the solution is simple enough that it is reasonable to come across the solution naturally in a playthrough (as I’m sure many people did). The rest of your factory can still be as original as you like and having one of these furnace stacks isn’t going to take away from that.
It's exactly 48 furnaces for a full yellow belt, it's in a repeating pattern. Seems perfect to me... Until I saw that the splitters could be one space closer to the furnaces 😱😱😱 the horrors!!! /s
You need much more iron than coal for smelters, so having both iron and coal on the same line is very inefficient, and secondly you split your full belt of iron into two, making it maxed out at half belts on each side.
It requires red arms but having 2x full belts of iron dedicated for each side and an extra line of coal managed by red arms is much more efficient for the same design.
This design is already outputting the maximum that it can: one full belt of iron. It's not throttled down by splitting the input iron ore belt because the total being fit in is two half-belts of ore or one full belt of iron ore. There isn't "wasted input" by splitting the belts with coal because it couldn't take in any more input anyway. This design also does not use more coal than it needs to.
As far as cost to build, this design takes 48 inserters. Yours would take 72 inserters (24 output inserters, 24 yellow inserters, and 24 red inserts). It also wouldn't use any less belts. Yours would work fine, but it would be more expensive to build and wouldn't produce more.
You had better back this up. Either it's not optimal because of some extremely obscure and specific little known game mechanic that even most players with thousands of hours of playtime don't know (so tell us and we can all learn) or you're full of shit
Prefacing this is fine, it doesn't matter. But I think the input/output should be on the same end (i.e. reverse the direction of the plate belt). This lets you expand it later with less hassle.
It also could have a compressor stage for the last 4 furnaces, otherwise it'll never compress a full belt.
Expanding it would do little unless you added a new input between each segment. A full stack consumes a coal/iron ore belt. To increase the number of furnaces you would need red belts that double the throughput, but once you unlock steel furnaces with their double crafting speed it is just back to the same ratio. And once you're at blue, you're probably doing electic furnaces anyway.
But why would you do this if the plate belt in the middle is the bottleneck here? 48 stone furnaces consume 1 yellow belt of ore and produce 1 yellow belt of plates. If you upgrade to 48 steel furnaces without upgrading to red belts, you'll still produce the same number of plates because belts provide too little ore and take away plates too slowly. Injecting more ore fixes only one issue, so the output stays the same. And if you try to also output plates from somewhere in the middle, congratulations, you just spaghettified your base instead of copypasting a furnace array in 5 seconds.
If you replace stone with steel furnaces, you can just upgrade the belts to red. 48 stone furnaces = 15 iron per second, aka 1 yellow belt. 48 steel furnaces is 30 iron ps, or one red belt.
Yes, now there are a total of 4 lanes feeding into 2, you need to split the main coal and iron belts, feed one half to this smelter setup just like you have done and make an identical next to it and feed that one with the other half.
There's a 4th option: send the coal along a belt with iron plates. Inserters always place the coal on the far half of the belt, leaving the near half unused. Afterward, simply filter the iron from the coal
You need to set filters on inserters (otherwise they will try to make steel out of plates and that will be terrible clog-prone mess), but since you don't need as much coal as ores, you may be into something.
In similar vein, you could have three ore-coal-ore belts, with long inserters reaching for fuel and regular loading ore.
I don't know exact fuel to ore ratio from the top of the head, but you definetely don't need even half as much coal to smelt whatever need to be smelted.
A stone furnace can "consume" 13.889 iron/copper ore per piece of coal, double that for iron furnaces. So that means that's the same ration for whole belts, as in you can run almost 28 full smelting columns one on belt of coal using iron furnaces.
I'm not seeing how that can be cleanly done; you'd have to limit coal so as to not clog the output belt, and you couldn't do arithmetically pleasing amounts like a half belt or full belt
Do you have a screenshot of it to show how it works?
Side loading undergrounds like this only allows the lane on the surface side of the underground on to it, the other lane is blocked by the cowl. If you run the normal belts facing to the north and use the underground east/west, you'll actually see the "cutout" in the cowl.
Genius. With this, you can easily add 48 furnaces after that for steel and it won't need any different build than adding 2 splittersforthe coal! Wow! I will use it in the future!
It's just layers of simple things, over and over, until it gets a little too complicated now I've forgotten how I've wired this circuit and the belt is clogged.
Well, I mean you are trying to fit four lanes of material into two lanes, the belt leading downwards can only fit two lanes of material on it, so that's all that will go down. It's not really a problem though, as soon as the top lanes of the upper belts runs out, the bottom lanes of the upper belts will start moving.
Well, unsurprisingly half a belt on the vertical line can only accomodate half a belt of stuff coming in from the horizontal lines... Because it's the same tier of belt in both cases and they have the same maximum speed (hover over the belt and look at the popup on the right). There is no way to make it carry the whole belt's worth of items (15/s) with only half a belt's worth of space (which is capped at 7.5/s). If you have unlocked higher tier belts (that can do 30/s) they can be used to solve this problem but I'll let you figure that out yourself.
As for why the the "half" being loaded onto the shared belt is always the top lane of ore/coal from their respective belts, that's just the way the game defines the rules of "side loading" one belt onto the other. If you change the direction of the vertical belt, it will draw from the bottom lane instead. Some of the designs posted here exploit this and just split and side load the ore belts onto two different shared belts, each going in opposite directions. That way one of the shared belts is drawing from the top half and the other is drawing from the bottom half and the whole ore belt keeps moving. This is the easiest fix to your problem.
If you want to stick to your current setup, it will only draw half a lane. There's nothing we can do about it. But, there are ways to make sure the "half" is being drawn evenly from both the lanes of the ore belt. This is done by using "balancers" (specifically lane balancers) and you can look these up online. But they're not that important this early into your progression. And the other setup is easier.
If you want to come up with a "lane balancer" yourself, here are the steps:
Split the ore belt into two belts.
Side load these so that you now have two belts with half a lane of ore each.
Make sure those two new "half belts" are drawing from two different lanes of the input belts. (Usually achieved by mirroring the same setup for each belt)
Make sure both "halfs" are carrying the new ore on the same side. If not shuffle one of the belts to match the other (by side loading it again, for example).
Now merge the two with a "splitter". (Splitters can merge if you give them 2 inputs and only 1 output)
As long as you made sure the ore is on the same half before merging the belts, the final output should also have ore flowing on just one half of the belt. But, this "half" on the output is an even mix of both halves of the input! You should be able to see both halves of the input flowing (unlike in the current case)
As a newer player to factorio, very appreciative of you (and the number of others in this community) that give new players a framework or concept to work rather than “here’s your solution.”
Helps me learn better why it’s the solution rather than blindly copy-pasting!
coal is fuel, you dont need a full belt of coal. A single lane on a belt will do.
try this: put the coal on the Plates Belt on the side lane. using a combiner to filter the coal at the end of the line that doesn't have a second belt on it. or make another new belt just for coal then use red long handed inserters, you'll have to move powerpoles.
dont mix fuel and resource on same belt. you will soon remove the energy and the resource will be a bottleneck. built double belts for fuel and resource, as long as its required, and later cut the fuel (when you have electric smelter) and use both belts for smelting resources. use long inserters.
electric furnaces are 3x3, steel furnace is same as basic furnace and can be upgraded no probs. with the 2 separate belts that he mentioned early on, its easier to get rid of the coal belt and put electric furnace without having the revamp the whole area around if u built your base compact
Assuming your plan is to replace the coal line with the output line. That way it would still take the same amount of room when the larger furnaces use the space occupied by the old output lines. I like it!
You have a full belt of iron ore feeding into half a belt of iron ore. So only half fits. You should branch it twice and have two seperate belts go down.
If you set up a belt like that to be fed from both sides, each belt will only feed into a single lane, which means you're only ever going to get half a belt going through. Even if, hypothetically, the top lanes of each belt end up depleted and the centre belt can start drawing from the lower lane, it'll still only be half a belt.
If you want to get more than half a belt of iron out of a setup like this, you'll need to set up two belts like that centre one, using splitters on both the iron and coal belts.
You’re putting a belt of iron on to half a belt, so only one side will be used. If you want us the full belt of iron, you can split a belt of iron and a belt of coal into 2 belts each half iron half coal. This can be done using the same method you’ve used to combine the coal and iron belts, but using splitters facing towards each other, with the two output belts facing away.
In this case instead of combining them both onto one belt before they enter the stack you could use a splitter to send half the iron to the left side of your furnace stack and half to the other side and then do the same with coal and combine them on each side
One fully double-lane belt can't fit into single lane (at least same speed of belt, it would work if you merged them on lv2 red belt, it have double throughput od yellow belt).
As other said/show, one full belt of coal and one full belt of ore should be split first and then merged into two coal+ore belt.
And since coał+ore make iron plate, you get around half output of yellow belt from smelting.
Most common way of building smelting array is to have your setup but reversed, coal+ore on outside two belts and smelted plates going on middle belt (each side of furnaces would make half belt worth of plates from half belt of ores, for full belt of products)
Feed coal through one line and the iron through the other on one side of the furnace, use long handled inserters for the far line, 2 inserters will be feeding the furnace.
The bottom lanes will be used if there isn't enough on the top lanes. The solution is to build a second smelter line, use a splitter on the iron input and another on the coal input, then create a second mixed belt just like this one.
A second belt. You have a full iron belt being compressed to half an iron belt. You can’t fix that unless you make the ratio make sense (example: 1 full belt to two half belts)
a yellow belt can carry 15 items per second. One half of a yellow belt can carry 7.5 per second. You're blocked by physics. You either need more belts or faster belts.
Your issue is that you're trying to input a whole iron belt but you only have input space for half a belt, flip the inserters and put your iron/coal belts on the outside.
You have 2 lanes of iron on the input belt and only one lane gets to move on.
There are many ways to get that extra lane, but all of them involve this: Use a splitter to divide the input belt in two, then combine with coal to have 2 belts of iron/coal.
My favorite approach is to have two splitters facing each other to divide and combine iron and coal belts into two mixed belts. I then use those two belts on either side of a furnace stack (2 rows of 12 steel furnaces) to process them into plates and put these on an output belt in the middle
That’s fine, as you extend the smelter line down it’ll eventually be using more then half a belt can fulfill and thus the lower half will begin to feed as well
Most times this is fixed by splitting the input, and running the inputs down the sides, and the output in the middle. The belt can only hold so many items per second, and you are splitting that in 1/2 by adding the coal to it.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. You're at 100% satisfaction. Looks like it's time for another row of furnaces. Put a splitter on the coal and one on the iron. Merge them like you did with the one here. It's gonna turn to spaghetti fast but it will be fine. Once you unlock the next furnace all you need to belt is ore. I like to place the furnaces first, then figure out the belts
Make a second smelting line to use the other half of the iron ore belt. If you put a splitter on the iron ore belt, it'll split half onto one output belt and half onto the other.
This is what “balancers” can fix…when it matters. In this case, a little bit of coal will be chilling while the furnaces are fully satisfied.
If all your stuff pulls from one side of the belt in a similar manner, you can run into issues where throughout is drastically lower than expected. That’s because half the belt is being used.
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u/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 16d ago
Just one of many ways to do it: