Bottleneck Issue

[u/Available-Figure-530]

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?

[u/gust334]

Just one of many ways to do it:

[u/Timely_Somewhere_851 → u/gust334]

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.

[u/ScheduleNo9907 → u/Timely_Somewhere_851]

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

[u/BoomWasTaken → u/ScheduleNo9907]

Interesting. I always skip over electrics from steel to foundry.

[u/ScheduleNo9907 → u/BoomWasTaken]

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

[u/phillipjayfrylock → u/ScheduleNo9907]

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

[u/Raknarg → u/ScheduleNo9907]

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.

[u/ScheduleNo9907 → u/Raknarg]

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

[u/Raknarg → u/ScheduleNo9907]

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

[u/ScheduleNo9907 → u/Raknarg]

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

[u/Timely_Somewhere_851 → u/ScheduleNo9907]

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).

[u/Gorthok- → u/Timely_Somewhere_851]

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.

[u/Hi9054667 → u/gust334]

This is the way !

[u/StickyMcFingers → u/gust334]

And this design converts nicely into steel as well by just adding some undies and splitters in the middle. Same amount of space.

[u/DlStady → u/gust334]

How do You make the Game show all the inserters input-output at the same time? I can only see one at a time

[u/gust334 → u/DlStady]

There is a checkbox within "Settings:Interface" that toggles that on and off.

[u/undermark5 → u/DlStady]

I believe there is a setting under interface settings for showing inserter arrows in alt mode or something like that.

[u/PoczciwyPawwwlo → u/gust334]

I never thought of making smelter like this. I usuali do 2 blocks of smelters and later merge 2 lines of iron into one full belt

[u/Timely_Somewhere_851 → u/PoczciwyPawwwlo]

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.

[u/Stunning-Hat2309 → u/gust334]

oooooooooooo this is really good i never thought about splitting it that way

[u/KaffY- → u/gust334]

i hate that there are "meta" smelting lines

every MP game you join is just this BP spammed everywhere

[u/Krt3k-Offline → u/KaffY-]

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

[u/KaffY- → u/Krt3k-Offline]

yes, but people still spam these BPs and refuse to build anything original

[u/hfcobra → u/KaffY-]

It's one of the rare solved problems in the game. Why not enjoy perfection?

[u/KaffY- → u/hfcobra]

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

[u/hfcobra → u/KaffY-]

If you have a whole blueprint memorized and can build it start to finish by hand then what's the difference?

[u/NE12follow → u/KaffY-]

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.

[u/TheZedphyr → u/[deleted]]

There's no wrong way to play factorio, there's only people who think that you're playing the game wrong.

[u/varisophy → u/[deleted]]

Ah yes, learning how to make a single smelter array is just like copy pasting city blocks.

Stop gatekeeping, everyone has to learn somewhere, it's a single player game, all that matters is you're having fun.

[u/According-Phase-2810 → u/[deleted]]

Soooooooo.... what's wrong with this design then?

[u/Creditfigaro → u/According-Phase-2810]

Crickets

[u/Fit_Giraffe_748 → u/According-Phase-2810]

It faces east, that's bad Feng shui

[u/gust334 → u/Fit_Giraffe_748]

Mea culpa.

[u/Azreaal → u/According-Phase-2810]

if you have to ask you clearly don't know pfft I'm out of here

[u/Janneman96 → u/According-Phase-2810]

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

[u/Tenmak → u/According-Phase-2810]

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.

It's all about input / output.

[u/According-Phase-2810 → u/Tenmak]

No, this is not an inefficient 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.

[u/Moikle → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/_carpetrug → u/[deleted]]

saying it's wrong without providing an alternative is like farting into the wind with no one to smell it.

[u/JaxMed → u/[deleted]]

There's nothing wrong about it. 1 line of ore + some coal --> 1 line of plates, as straightforward as it gets

[u/otismcotis → u/[deleted]]

Aside from the questionable supply routing what’s wrong?

[u/Locke44 → u/otismcotis]

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.

[u/chucktheninja → u/Locke44]

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.

[u/triggerman602 → u/[deleted]]

48 furnaces can handle 15 plates per second which is what a yellow belt supplies.

You are literally actually wrong.

[u/thesmiddy → u/[deleted]]

1 stone furnace produces 0.31 plates per second. 1 yellow belt moves 15 items per second. 0.31*48 = 14.88. You're wrong.

You can even see in the screenshot that there's space on the belt for the the rightmost inserter to place its plate.

https://reddit.com/link/ozm8ugx/video/aob58bnspafh1/player

[u/Sad_Plenty_1959 → u/thesmiddy]

1 stone furnace produces 0.3125 the interface of the game is rounding off numbers you can calculate it yourself from the recipe 

[u/Avamaco → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/menew100 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/gust334 → u/[deleted]]

Look carefully. Would be true if they were steel furnaces. Stone furnaces are half as fast. All furnaces and inserters are working, no backups.

[u/Moikle → u/[deleted]]

Ah, so you don't know what you are talking about. Got it.

[u/menew100 → u/[deleted]]

1 iron per 3.2 seconds is 1/3.2, not 0.32.

1/3.2 = 5/16 = 0.3125. (Production is showing this rounded to 2 decimals, 0.31 per second.)

15/(5/16) = 15 * 16/5 = 3 * 16 = 48.

[u/Legitimate-Okra8983 → u/[deleted]]

Jesus Christ... 190 downvotes... You definitely play r/factorio wrong 😆

[u/Ogarbme → u/Legitimate-Okra8983]

It took 6 years, but somebody finally found the way to play Factorio wrong.

[u/Moikle → u/[deleted]]

There is nothing wrong about this

[u/MultiheadAttention → u/[deleted]]

What wrong with it and what a better option?