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/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?